ExpressJS vs Material Design Lite

ExpressJS vs Material Design Lite: What are the differences?

Developers describe ExpressJS as "Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple". Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications. On the other hand, Material Design Lite is detailed 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.

ExpressJS belongs to "Microframeworks (Backend)" category of the tech stack, while Material Design Lite can be primarily classified under "Front-End Frameworks".

Some of the features offered by ExpressJS are:

• Robust routing
• HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc)
• View system supporting 14+ template engines

On the other hand, Material Design Lite provides the following key features:

• Blog Template
• Dashboard Template
• Text Heavy Webpage Template

"Simple" is the top reason why over 321 developers like ExpressJS, while over 23 developers mention "Material Design straight from the original creators" as the leading cause for choosing Material Design Lite.

ExpressJS and Material Design Lite are both open source tools. It seems that ExpressJS with 44.6K GitHub stars and 7.48K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.31K GitHub forks.

Twitter, Intuit, and OpenGov are some of the popular companies that use ExpressJS, whereas Material Design Lite is used by Google, Troopers, and Boxme. ExpressJS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 854 company stacks & 790 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.