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Ionic vs Material Design for Bootstrap: What are the differences?
Developers describe Ionic as "A beautiful front-end framework for developing cross-platform apps with web technologies like Angular and React". Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript. On the other hand, Material Design for Bootstrap is detailed as "Material Design for Bootstrap". This Bootstrap theme is an easy way to use the new Material Design guidelines by Google in your Bootstrap 3 based application. Just include the theme right after the Bootstrap CSS and include the javascript at the end of your document, everything will be converted to Material Design (paper) style.
Ionic belongs to "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category of the tech stack, while Material Design for Bootstrap can be primarily classified under "Front-End Frameworks".
Some of the features offered by Ionic are:
- Performance obsessed
- Utilizes Angular and React
- Native focused
On the other hand, Material Design for Bootstrap provides the following key features:
- Input fields (text, numeric, email, etc)
- Textarea
- Buttons (ripple effect working)
"Allows for rapid prototyping" is the primary reason why developers consider Ionic over the competitors, whereas "Bootstrap" was stated as the key factor in picking Material Design for Bootstrap.
Ionic and Material Design for Bootstrap are both open source tools. It seems that Ionic with 38.4K GitHub stars and 13.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Material Design for Bootstrap with 19.9K GitHub stars and 3.31K GitHub forks.
Sellsuki, Edify, and eTobb are some of the popular companies that use Ionic, whereas Material Design for Bootstrap is used by MXD3D, Itbid, and TypeLead. Ionic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 392 company stacks & 350 developers stacks; compared to Material Design for Bootstrap, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
- Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
- Easy to learn & deployed production
- Fast development
- Strong community
- Completed Documents
- Native performance with lower RAM used.
- Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
- Powered by Facebook.
While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.
Pros of Ionic
- Allows for rapid prototyping245
- Hybrid mobile225
- It's angularjs208
- Free183
- It's javascript, html, and css178
- Ui and theming107
- Great designs76
- Mv* pattern74
- Reuse frontend devs on mobile70
- Extensibility64
- Great community31
- Open source28
- Responsive design22
- Good cli20
- Angularjs-based13
- Beautifully designed13
- So easy to use13
- Widgets12
- Allows for rapid prototyping, hybrid mobile11
- Typescript11
- Quick prototyping, amazing community10
- Easy setup10
- Angular2 support8
- Fast, easy, free7
- Because of the productivity and easy for development7
- So much thought behind what developers actually need7
- Base on angular7
- Super fast, their dev team is amazingly passionate6
- Easy to use6
- It's Angular6
- UI is awesome4
- Hot deploy4
- Material design support using theme3
- Amazing support3
- It's the future3
- Angular3
- Allow for rapid prototyping3
- Easy setup, development and testing3
- Ionic creator3
- User Friendly2
- It's angular js2
- Complete package2
- Simple & Fast2
- Fastest growing mobile app framework2
- Best Support and Community2
- Material Design By Default2
- Cross platform2
- Documentation2
- Because I can use my existing web devloper skills2
- Removes 300ms delay in mobile browsers2
- 11
- Native access1
- Typescript support1
- Ionic conect codeigniter1
- Fast Prototyping1
- All Trending Stack1
Pros of Material Design for Bootstrap
- Bootstrap16
- Awesome and simple to use6
- Light weight6
- Modern Looks4
- Responsive4
- Google Material Design4
- Great angular compatibility3
- Open Source3
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Cons of Ionic
- Not suitable for high performance or UI intensive apps20
- Not meant for game development15
- Not a native app1
Cons of Material Design for Bootstrap
- Not free for premo stuff1