Head-to-Head: Material Components for the web vs Material Design Lite Analysis
material-components-web
v14.0.0(about 2 years ago)
Material Components for the Web is a collection of modular and customizable UI components based on Google's Material Design guidelines. It provides a set of ready-to-use components like buttons, cards, dialogs, and more, with consistent styling and behavior across different platforms and devices. Material Components for the Web offers a seamless integration with popular front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue, making it easy to create visually appealing and user-friendly interfaces.
Material Design Lite (MDL) is a front-end framework developed by Google that allows developers to easily implement Google's Material Design principles in web projects. It provides a set of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript components for creating modern and responsive user interfaces with a clean and consistent design. MDL offers components like buttons, cards, menus, and sliders, following the Material Design guidelines for layout, color, and typography.
Material Components Web (MDC-Web) is the successor to Material Design Lite (MDL) and has gained more popularity in recent years. MDC-Web is actively maintained by the Material Design team at Google and has a larger community following.
Size
Material Components Web offers a more modular approach, allowing developers to import only the components they need. This results in a smaller overall bundle size. Material Design Lite, on the other hand, includes a full set of pre-styled components, making it larger in size.
Design and Customization
Both packages follow the Material Design principles, but Material Components Web provides a more modern and flexible design system. It also offers more customization options, allowing developers to easily change themes, styles, and behaviors of the components.
Functionality
Material Components Web provides a richer set of components and features compared to Material Design Lite. It includes components such as dialogs, snackbar, tabs, and more out-of-the-box. Material Design Lite, although it provides a basic set of components, may require additional external libraries or custom implementations for more complex functionality.
Integration and Compatibility
Material Components Web is designed to be easily integrated with popular frontend frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js. It provides official packages and documentation for seamless integration. Material Design Lite is more focused on vanilla JavaScript and may require additional work for integration with modern frontend frameworks.
Maintenance
Material Components Web is actively maintained and updated by the Material Design team at Google, ensuring ongoing support and bug fixes. Material Design Lite, on the other hand, is no longer actively maintained since the development focus has shifted to Material Components Web. It may still receive community contributions but may lack official updates and bug fixes.
