Material Design Lite vs NativeScript: What are the differences?

Developers describe Material Design Lite as "Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS". Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go. On the other hand, NativeScript is detailed as "Build truly native apps with JavaScript". NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Material Design Lite belongs to "Front-End Frameworks" category of the tech stack, while NativeScript can be primarily classified under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".

Some of the features offered by Material Design Lite are:

• Blog Template
• Dashboard Template
• Text Heavy Webpage Template

On the other hand, NativeScript provides the following key features:

• 100% Access to Native Platform API
• NativeScript is free of charge as an open source project
• Code with JavaScript. Style with CSS

"Material Design straight from the original creators" is the primary reason why developers consider Material Design Lite over the competitors, whereas "Access to the entire native api" was stated as the key factor in picking NativeScript.

Material Design Lite and NativeScript are both open source tools. It seems that Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than NativeScript with 17.2K GitHub stars and 1.28K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, NativeScript has a broader approval, being mentioned in 9 company stacks & 26 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.