Best Material UI Alternatives Components

Ever since its invention, Material Design has been a great asset for web application development. It aims to overcome the flaws of its predecessor flat design, helping designers deliver a high-quality and rich digital experience. Material UI is the React-based implementation of Material Design. It is a component library that includes a bunch of customizable and accessible React components. Currently, Material UI is highly popular among web developers as a robust front-end framework. However, did you know that there are several excellent Material UI alternatives?

In this article, we will discover some top alternatives to Material UI that can empower your UI design process.

What Is Material Design?

Google created material design in 2014 to standardize the design of web pages and apps. Its purpose is to replace traditional, chaotic, and non-user-friendly design patterns with a more consistent, user-friendly design style. The invention of material design has made significant changes in web application development. It has resulted in cleaner, simpler, and more predictable websites, offering a unified user experience across a wide range of devices and platforms. The material design specifies guidelines for many aspects of the design, such as typography, spacing, scale, colors and grids, and images. It allows designers to make meaningful and hierarchical designs, focusing on the end result. However, there are other great material UI alternatives, such as Tailwind CSS, that you should know about. 

Use Cases For Material Design?

Like any other standard design system, the material design also offers great advantages for designers that make it worth considering for their projects. It has guidelines for any design use case, and the design elements are optimized to offer an excellent user experience. Rather than just providing a set of guidelines, material design also acts as a complete design ecosystem. It defines rules for handling specific design situations, including complex use cases. 

As the creator of material design, Google maintains comprehensive documentation on how to implement and utilize material design. At the same time, it offers a great deal of flexibility to designers when it comes to implementing the designs. Apart from the above pros, material design also offers more solid advantages such as subtle skeuomorphism, making it more intuitive for designers. Furthermore, it comes with more user-friendly features like subtle animations and haptic feedback.

Methods For Replacing Material UI Styles

Material design offers four ways to override its styling. You can choose the best method depending on your context. The following are the four methods which utilize pre-built components and hooks.

• StylesProvider
• ThemeProvider
• withStyles
• useStyles

Now let’s dig a bit deeper into each method to get a clearer understanding of them.

StylesProvider

You can use the StylesProvider component to change the way of applying styles to child components. You will find all the available options in every child element of the StylesProvider. The injectFirst boolean rob used in the following code allows you to define styles to override the default material UI styles. Here, we have referenced the styles for overriding through an external CSS file.

import React from "react";

import { StylesProvider } from "@material-ui/core/styles";

import Button from "@material-ui/core/Button";

import "./styles.css";

export default function App() {

  return (

    <StylesProvider injectFirst>

      <div className="App">

        <Button>Hook</Button>

      </div>

    </StylesProvider>

  );

}

ThemeProvider

This is another component that allows developers to override the built-in styles of material UI. In this method, we apply a defined set of styles called a theme. The advantage of using this method is the ability to style multiple components in a consistent manner. We can also use the themes provided by Material UI and customize them as per our needs.

withStyles

We can use the withStyles component to style the components with our own CSS. The withStyles component retrieves the styles object, which will create another higher component. That newly created component will apply styles to the necessary components.

This method is more flexible than the other two methods, as it allows users to apply any style easily.

useStyles

This method is based on the useStyles hook. That hook allows us to apply styles we create using the makeStyles function. The following code block shows how to use the useStyes hook for overriding material UI styles.

import React from "react";

import { withStyles, makeStyles } from "@material-ui/core/styles";

import Button from "@material-ui/core/Button";

const useStyles = makeStyles({

  root: {

    background: "linear-gradient(45deg, green 30%, orange 90%)",

    border: 0,

    borderRadius: 3,

    boxShadow: "0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3)",

    color: "white",

    height: 48,

    padding: "0 30px"

  }

});

export default function App() {

  const classes = useStyles();

  return <Button className={classes.root}>Hook</Button>;

}

Design Principles for Material UI

In addition to the basic design principles, material design has its own set of principles. The following are some core principles of material UI design.

Become Familiar With the Key Resource

The official resource released by Google is the best place to learn material design. It is regularly updated and includes comprehensive details on how to create designs using material UI principles. This resource covers all the aspects of material design related to mobile, as well as web-based projects.

Utilize a Primary and an Accent Color

The careful selection of colors is essential for offering a great user experience. You should pick three hues from the primary color palette along with an accent color from the secondary color palette. The accent color should have a good contrast to the primary hues.

You can use the primary color for the key elements in the design, such as backgrounds, fonts, fields, and boxes. Accent color is helpful for displaying the main elements on the screen.

Use Shadows to Reflect the Hierarchies

The previous flat design didn’t incorporate shadows, which led to some usability issues. In contrast, material design emphasizes surfaces, edges, and natural shadows to highlight the properties of real-world objects. 

Additionally, shadows are a great means of defining hierarchies of different elements in a design. Designers can represent a visual hierarchy of elements and the layers they belong to by showing which object casts a shadow on which.

Utilize Bold Colors

Material design is highly influenced by print design methods. Thus, it uses graphics and bold color pallets to grab the attention of users. These bold colors offer an exciting user experience, while adding more depth and contrast to the UI.

Use White Space Effectively

White space plays a key role in material design. It is useful for enhancing the text layout and typography. Furthermore, they help to grab the attention of users and focus attention on a specific element. So don’t hesitate to use plenty of whitespace in your overall design.

Adapt to the Latest Trend of Edge-To-Edge Images

In material design, images are added in an edge-to-edge fashion. For instance, there won’t be any margins or gaps between the edge of the images and the screen/window. This method offers a fantastic user experience when utilized properly.

Include Motion

Motion is a key component of material design that adds meaning to the design. Integrating motion helps us to get a better understanding of the functionality of various elements in a design. It’s an excellent way to interact with users and improve the usability of the design.

Use Authentic Motion

Instead of just moving things around the screen, material design instructs on making those movements more natural in a way that real objects interact with each other. These motions should be real and comply with the laws of physics.

Since this authentic motion mimics the behavior of real-world objects, it complements the design and makes it easily understandable to the users.

Top Best Material UI Alternatives

Material UI is not always the best solution for every use case. So, let’s see some top alternatives to Material UI.

Materialize

Materialize is a modern and responsive CSS framework that follows Material Design. This framework adheres to the principles of Material Design and offers UI components and animations to offer an enhanced user experience. Materialize contains a responsive underlying system that works perfectly on a wide range of platforms. Furthermore, it comes with comprehensive documentation and code examples to help novice users get started with the framework easily.

Material Design for Bootstrap

This is the best alternative to Material UI. It comes with many high-quality components and templates built on the Bootstrap framework to speed up UI development. This framework has a simple installation process and offers convenient theming and customization options. It comes with good documentation and includes all the necessary components for any project. MDB is trusted by a large community of designers and developers due to its flexibility and high reliability.

Material UI For REACT

MUI is a React based implementation of Google’s material design. It is also one of the best React frameworks available these days. It includes a wide range of high-quality react components created based on the material design. This framework also offers ready-made templates which you can utilize to build React apps faster.

MUI also comes with a package called MUI X, which includes advanced React components such as charts, data grids, and trees. They are useful for building advanced, data-intensive apps easily.

Angular Material

Angular Material implements Google’s material design in AngularJS. Google developed it in 2014. This framework offers a bunch of well-tested, accessible and reusable UI components built according to the specifications of Google Material Design. These Angular Material UI Components save developers a lot of time by allowing them to create sophisticated layouts in less time.

Angular Material also offers tools for developers to create their own custom components. They can also customize the existing components within the limits of the material design specification.

Ant Design

Ant Design, also known as AntD, is a popular React UI library for developing enterprise-level applications. It comes with an extensive toolkit and a set of out-of-the-box UI components. Ant design is a very user-friendly system that simplifies the development of interactive UIs. It is also much easier to integrate than other frameworks. It is one of the best solutions for developing web applications with React.

Apart from the above frameworks, semantic UI and Tailwind CSS are some other popular options for developing stunning and responsive UIs easily. Semantic UI is one of the popular UI component libraries built on top of natural language specifications. On the other hand, Tailwind CSS is a framework consisting of utility classes, which can be directly used in your markup. 

Material Components for the Web

Material Design components for the web allow developers to integrate material design into their websites and web apps. An in-house team of developers at Google created it to provide a solid web development workflow. Apart from incorporating material design specifications, MDC Web offers flexible theme customization capabilities. Moreover, it is designed to be compatible with many major web frameworks.

MDC Web features a component library to maintain consistency across various websites and apps. These MDC web components reside inside their own node modules. Thus, developers can easily update them as the material UI system evolves. It ensures consistency and adherence with Google’s UI development standards. 

Why use Sencha for UI Design?

Sencha EXT JS is one of the best alternatives to material UI. It offers an excellent material theme based on Google’s material design. It is popular among many developers as a robust design foundation. This theme offers high customizability while adopting the standards of material design.

Furthermore, this Ext JS Material Design Theme has many impressive features to improve the look and feel of your application. You can use the pre-built UI components of Sencha Ext JS along with this material theme to build fully functional, fascinating apps rapidly.

Do you want try Sencha Ext JS? A free trial is available. Get it today!