Head-to-Head: Material Design Lite vs MaterializeCSS Analysis
material-design-lite
v1.3.0(over 8 years ago)
Material Design Lite (MDL) is a front-end framework developed by Google that allows developers to easily incorporate Google's Material Design principles into their web projects. It provides a set of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript components that follow the Material Design guidelines, offering a clean and modern look for web applications. MDL includes components like buttons, cards, menus, and sliders, making it simple to create responsive and visually appealing interfaces.
Materialize CSS is a modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design principles. It provides a clean and intuitive user interface with ready-to-use components like buttons, forms, cards, and navigation elements. Materialize CSS offers a grid system for easy layout structuring and supports customization through Sass variables and mixins.
Materialize CSS is more popular and widely used compared to Material Design Lite. Materialize CSS has a larger community and more resources available, including community-driven plugins and themes.
Size
Material Design Lite is relatively smaller in size compared to Materialize CSS. Material Design Lite follows a more minimalist approach and offers a lighter footprint, making it suitable for projects with stricter performance requirements.
Flexibility
Materialize CSS provides a more comprehensive set of components, utilities, and features out of the box. It offers a wider range of customization options and gives developers more flexibility in terms of design and interactions. Material Design Lite, while lighter, is more opinionated and may require additional custom code for specific use cases.
Browser Support
Both libraries support modern browsers, but Material Design Lite explicitly focuses on supporting older browsers, including Internet Explorer 10 and 11, while Materialize CSS primarily targets newer browser versions. If cross-browser compatibility is a priority, Material Design Lite might be a better choice.
Documentation and Community Support
Materialize CSS has more extensive documentation with detailed examples and a larger community support base. It also provides official themes, guides, and community-driven resources like plugins and extensions. Material Design Lite documentation, while sufficient, is not as extensive or actively maintained.
Customizability
Both libraries offer CSS customization options, but Materialize CSS provides a more straightforward and user-friendly way to customize the design. It offers Sass support, a wide range of prebuilt themes, and customization options through CSS variables. Material Design Lite, on the other hand, requires more manual customization and less tooling support.
