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Material Kit vs Material UI: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare the key differences between Material Kit and Material-UI, two popular front-end frameworks based on Google's Material Design principles.

  1. Component Library: Material Kit is a free UI kit available as a set of pre-built components for HTML and CSS. It provides a wide range of ready-to-use elements such as buttons, cards, forms, and navigation bars, allowing developers to quickly build user interfaces. On the other hand, Material-UI is a comprehensive React component library that implements Material Design components in React. It offers a rich collection of customizable components that can be easily integrated into React applications.

  2. Design Philosophy: Material Kit is focused on providing a clean and minimalistic design, emphasizing simplicity and ease of use. It follows the material design guidelines closely, ensuring consistency and familiarity to users. Material-UI, on the other hand, not only adheres to the material design principles but also adds some additional features and improvements to enhance the user experience. It offers more customization options and flexibility in terms of design.

  3. Dependencies: Material Kit is a standalone HTML and CSS framework, and it does not have any dependencies on other libraries or frameworks. This makes it easy to integrate with any existing project. Material-UI, on the other hand, is built on top of React, which means it requires React as a dependency. This makes it more suitable for developers who are already using or planning to use React.

  4. Community and Support: Material Kit has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and provide support through forums, documentation, and online resources. Material-UI also has a strong community and is backed by the official Material-UI team. It has extensive documentation, examples, and a dedicated support channel, making it easy for developers to get help and guidance when needed.

  5. Integration with React Ecosystem: As mentioned earlier, Material-UI is built specifically for React, which means it integrates seamlessly with other React libraries, tools, and ecosystems. It follows the React component lifecycle and provides hooks and utilities that are specific to React development. Material Kit, being a standalone HTML and CSS framework, does not provide this level of integration with the React ecosystem.

  6. Customization and Theming: Material Kit provides a limited amount of customization options, mainly through CSS classes and variables. It allows developers to change colors, fonts, and some other visual aspects to match their branding and design requirements. Material-UI, on the other hand, offers extensive customization and theming capabilities. It provides a theming system that allows developers to create and apply custom themes throughout their applications, making it easier to maintain a consistent look and feel.

In Summary, Material Kit is a standalone HTML and CSS framework focused on simplicity and ease of use, while Material-UI is a comprehensive React component library that offers more customization options, integration with the React ecosystem, and extensive theming capabilities.

Decisions about Material Kit and Material-UI
Kexin Lin
at University of Toronto · | 8 upvotes · 262.3K views

I replaced Bootstrap with Material-UI during the front-end UI development, because Material-UI adopts a component-based importing style, making it suit well in a "React programming style". This makes me comfortable when programming because I can treat importing UI components as other React components I define.

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Xinyi Liu
Software Developer at BigClarity · | 6 upvotes · 335.7K views

As our team will be building a web application, HTML5 and CSS3 are one of the standardized combinations to implement the structure and the styling of a webpage. Material-UI comes with all sorts of predesigned web components such as buttons and dropdowns that will save us tons of development time. Since it is a component library designed for React, it suits our needs. However, we do acknowledge that predesigned components may sometimes cause pains especially when it comes to custom styling. To make our life even easier, we also adopted Tailwind CSS. It is a CSS framework providing low-level utility classes that will act as building blocks when we create custom designs.

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Fonts and typography are fun. Material Design is a framework (developed by Google) that basically geeks out on how to assemble your typographical elements together into a design language. If you're into fonts and typography, it's fantastic. It provides a theming engine, reusable components, and can pull different user interfaces together under a common design paradigm. I'd highly recommend looking into Borries Schwesinger's book "The Form Book" if you're going to be working with Material UI or are otherwise new to component design.

https://www.amazon.com/Form-Book-Creating-Printed-Online/dp/0500515085

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Pros of Material Kit
Pros of Material-UI
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 141
      React
    • 82
      Material Design
    • 60
      Ui components
    • 30
      CSS framework
    • 25
      Component
    • 14
      Looks great
    • 12
      Responsive
    • 12
      Good documentation
    • 9
      LESS
    • 8
      Ui component
    • 7
      Open source
    • 6
      Code examples
    • 6
      Flexible
    • 5
      JSS
    • 3
      Angular
    • 3
      Very accessible
    • 3
      Fun
    • 3
      Supports old browsers out of the box
    • 2
      Typescript support
    • 2
      # of components
    • 2
      Interface
    • 2
      Designed for Server Side Rendering
    • 1
      Support for multiple styling systems
    • 1
      Css
    • 1
      Easy to work with
    • 1
      Accessibility

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    Cons of Material Kit
    Cons of Material-UI
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 34
        Hard to learn. Bad documentation
      • 27
        Hard to customize
      • 20
        Hard to understand Docs
      • 7
        Bad performance
      • 6
        Extra library needed for date/time pickers
      • 6
        For editable table component need to use material-table
      • 1
        Typescript Support
      • 0
        # of components

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      What is Material Kit?

      Material Kit is a Free Bootstrap UI Kit with a fresh, new design inspired by Google's material design. You asked for it, so we built it. It's a great pleasure to introduce to you the material concepts in an easy to use and beautiful set of components. Along with the restyling of the Bootstrap elements, you will find three fully-coded example pages, to help you design your next project.

      What is Material-UI?

      Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

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      What companies use Material Kit?
      What companies use Material-UI?
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        What tools integrate with Material Kit?
        What tools integrate with Material-UI?

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        What are some alternatives to Material Kit and Material-UI?
        Bootstrap
        Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
        Material Design for Angular
        Material Design is a specification for a unified system of visual, motion, and interaction design that adapts across different devices. Our goal is to deliver a lean, lightweight set of AngularJS-native UI elements that implement the material design system for use in Angular SPAs.
        Animate.css
        It is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness.
        Tailwind CSS
        Tailwind is different from frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, or Bulma in that it's not a UI kit. It doesn't have a default theme, and there are no build-in UI components. It comes with a menu of predesigned widgets to build your site with, but doesn't impose design decisions that are difficult to undo.
        Nuxt.js
        Nuxt.js presets all the configuration needed to make your development of a Vue.js application enjoyable. You can use Nuxt.js for SSR, SPA, Static Generated, PWA and more.
        See all alternatives