Material Design Lite vs Polymer: What are the differences?

What is Material Design Lite? 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.

What is Polymer? A new library built on top of Web Components, designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers. Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.

Material Design Lite and Polymer can be primarily classified as "Front-End Frameworks" tools.

"Material Design straight from the original creators" is the top reason why over 23 developers like Material Design Lite, while over 49 developers mention "Web components" as the leading cause for choosing Polymer.

Material Design Lite and Polymer are both open source tools. Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.32K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Polymer with 21.1K GitHub stars and 2K GitHub forks.

AX Semantics, USERcycle, and Telemetry are some of the popular companies that use Polymer, whereas Material Design Lite is used by Google, Troopers, and Boxme. Polymer has a broader approval, being mentioned in 42 company stacks & 32 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.