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Material UI vs Semantic UI: What are the differences?
Introduction
Material UI and Semantic UI are both popular front-end development libraries that provide pre-built components for creating user interfaces. While both libraries have similar goals of making it easier to build attractive and user-friendly UIs, there are some key differences between them.
Design Philosophy: Material UI, as its name suggests, follows the principles of Material Design, a design language developed by Google. It focuses on creating interfaces that resemble physical materials and provide a consistent look and feel across different platforms. On the other hand, Semantic UI places a strong emphasis on using natural language principles to create intuitive and readable code, with the goal of making it easier to understand and maintain.
Component Styles: Material UI offers a wide range of pre-built components with a distinct visual style that closely matches the Material Design guidelines. These components have consistent colors, shadows, and shapes, creating a cohesive look throughout the application. Semantic UI, on the other hand, provides more visually expressive components with unique designs and styles. It allows for more customization options, but the resulting UI may not be as consistent across different sections of the application.
Customization Flexibility: Material UI provides a theming system that allows developers to customize the appearance of components, such as changing colors, typography, and spacing. It also supports overriding individual components' styles. Semantic UI, on the other hand, offers a variety of preset themes that can be easily applied to the entire application, but customization options for individual components may be more limited.
Community and Ecosystem: Material UI has a large and active community as it is widely used in the React ecosystem. This means there are many resources, tutorials, and community-driven libraries and tools available to help developers. Semantic UI also has a decent community but may not be as widely adopted as Material UI, so the available resources and community support may be comparatively smaller.
Documentation: Material UI has comprehensive and well-organized documentation, providing detailed information about each component along with examples and usage guidelines. It also includes guidance on implementing Material Design principles effectively. Semantic UI's documentation is also extensive, but it may not be as structured or comprehensive as Material UI's documentation.
Integration with Frameworks: Material UI is primarily designed for use with React, and it integrates seamlessly with React applications. It provides React-specific features like hooks and context, making it convenient for React developers. Semantic UI, on the other hand, supports multiple frameworks, including React, Angular, and Vue. This flexibility allows developers to use Semantic UI regardless of their preferred framework.
In summary, Material UI follows the principles of Material Design, providing consistent and visually appealing components, while Semantic UI focuses on using natural language principles to create intuitive code. Material UI has a larger community and extensive documentation, while Semantic UI offers more customization options and supports multiple frameworks.
My React website is a simple 5-pager that attaches to a database to store and display registrations and other data. The user (small user base) can change any form elements, but I don't need theme-ing, though that would be fun for the user. reactstrap/react-bootstrap built on Bootstrap 4 sounds dated. I am familiar with reactstrap, but a friend said to try Material-UI. The thought of learning it is interesting, but somehow I think it might be overkill. So... reactstrap, react-bootstrap, or Material UI, which should I use?
MaterialUI may be overkill for such a simple project, you're right. So I'm recommending both tools in this StackShare form.
But if it's planned to increase the project, consider migrating it to MUI in advance. Among its pros I can name: - brilliant TS support - all popular use cases covered - well documented - backed by sponsors == will live and be maintained
I recommend Material-UI for a couple reasons. 1. It’s very easy to throw MUI into React. You can essentially just import the components you need in place of yours. Effectively, for a button, for example, you can swap out <button for MUI’s <Button and you can be done if that’s all you want. Looks great, no hassle, and they have simple guides to help you make good UI decisions on top of that. 2. It’s pretty up-to-date, and it has great docs. I use MUI all the time, and if I were doing a simple, small user-base app, I would definitely use it for the sake of convenience and speed of development.
I've used material UI and had great success with it on React projects. Semantic UI is also another great option https://semantic-ui.com/.
When you say its "overkill", I would think long term. I do a lot of small projects not only for the purpose of the project, but also for learning, future projects and to use professionaly. It's a long-term investment.
Material-UI looks great and is easy to use. Highly recommended, my favourite UI framework for React.
Much more modern in terms on support for css in js. But go for v5 not v4 as material-ui is going through a transition in term of its own implementation
Material-UI is the good choice for a small project. It's fast for development, maintenance, and is ready to use. It HaveMaterial-UI is the good choice for a small project. It's fast for development, maintenance, and is ready to use. Has an excellent documentation with pratic examples.
Chakra UI seems like the perfect fit in my opinion. It has a much powerful design system, all the necessary components and it is dead simple to learn. And pretty easy to customize too.
It's totally the design decision if you like to follow bootstrap design then you should go for reactstrap. But if you want to follow google material design then you should go for material ui.
Bootstrap is useful for rapid prototyping using an existing design system. Since the design system can be used in standard HTML + Javascript and can be imported for free into a Figma project, it lowers the complexity of our mock-up creation and frontend styling, all while promoting consistency. We did not choose Material UI, because it does not have a free design system to import into Figma.
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.
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.
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
Pros of Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component26
- Looks great15
- Responsive13
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Flexible6
- Code examples6
- JSS5
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Interface3
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Accessibility1
- Easy to work with1
- Css1
Pros of Semantic UI
- Easy to use and looks elegant157
- Variety of components92
- Themes64
- Has out-of-the-box widgets i would actually use61
- Semantic, duh57
- Its the future44
- Open source42
- Very active development37
- Far less complicated structure31
- Gulp28
- Already has more features than bootstrap9
- Just compare it to Bootstrap and you'll be hooked8
- Clean and consistent markup model7
- UI components7
- Responsiveness6
- Because it is semantic :-D4
- Elegant. clean. readable. maintainable4
- Good-Looking4
- Is big and look really great, nothing like this2
- Consistent2
- Great docs2
- Modular and scalable2
- Easy to use1
- Blends with reactjs1
- Jquery1
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Cons of Material-UI
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation36
- Hard to customize29
- Hard to understand Docs22
- Bad performance9
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
Cons of Semantic UI
- Outdated build tool (gulp 3))5
- Poor accessibility support3
- HTML is not semantic (see list component)3
- Javascript is tied to jquery2