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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Advice on Material-UI and Semantic UI
Needs advice
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI
and
reactstrapreactstrap

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?

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Replies (8)

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

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Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

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.

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Robert Smith
Tech Delivery Manager at self · | 2 upvotes · 31.3K views
Recommends

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.

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Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

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

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Flavio Ribeiro
REACT DEVELOPER at Beblue · | 1 upvotes · 31.3K views
Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

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.

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Recommends

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.

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Malik Bagwala
Front-end Developer at Vesatogo Innovations · | 1 upvotes · 31.5K views
Recommends
on
Chakra UIChakra UI

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.

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Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

Material-UI looks great and is easy to use. Highly recommended, my favourite UI framework for React.

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Decisions about Material-UI and Semantic 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.

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Kexin Lin
at University of Toronto · | 8 upvotes · 262.1K 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 · 335.5K 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-UI
Pros of Semantic UI
  • 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
  • 157
    Easy to use and looks elegant
  • 92
    Variety of components
  • 64
    Themes
  • 61
    Has out-of-the-box widgets i would actually use
  • 57
    Semantic, duh
  • 44
    Its the future
  • 42
    Open source
  • 37
    Very active development
  • 31
    Far less complicated structure
  • 28
    Gulp
  • 9
    Already has more features than bootstrap
  • 8
    Just compare it to Bootstrap and you'll be hooked
  • 7
    Clean and consistent markup model
  • 7
    UI components
  • 6
    Responsiveness
  • 4
    Because it is semantic :-D
  • 4
    Elegant. clean. readable. maintainable
  • 4
    Good-Looking
  • 2
    Is big and look really great, nothing like this
  • 2
    Consistent
  • 2
    Great docs
  • 2
    Modular and scalable
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Blends with reactjs
  • 1
    Jquery

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Cons of Material-UI
Cons of Semantic UI
  • 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
  • 5
    Outdated build tool (gulp 3))
  • 3
    Poor accessibility support
  • 3
    HTML is not semantic (see list component)
  • 2
    Javascript is tied to jquery

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What is Material-UI?

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

What is Semantic UI?

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

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What companies use Semantic UI?
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What tools integrate with Semantic UI?

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What are some alternatives to Material-UI and Semantic UI?
Kendo UI
Fast, light, complete: 70+ jQuery-based UI widgets in one powerful toolset. AngularJS integration, Bootstrap support, mobile controls, offline data solution.
Flat UI
Flat UI is a beautiful theme for Bootstrap. We have redesigned many of its components to look flat in every pixel.
Ant Design
An enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation. Graceful UI components out of the box, base on React Component. A npm + webpack + babel + dora + dva development framework.
react-md
React MD is Google's Material Design specifications implemented with Sass and React. The goal of the project is to create components that adhere to the Material Design specifications.
Angular Material
Sprint from Zero to App. Hit the ground running with comprehensive, modern UI components that work across the web, mobile and desktop. It allows to create material styled angular apps fast and easy.
See all alternatives