Millennials today spend only a few seconds gazing at a webpage. If they didn’t find it impressive, they lose focus immediately and move on to surfing the internet. Thus, brands these days have roughly 10-15 seconds to attract their audience in this fast-paced world.
That clearly depicts the need for interactive and intuitive web designs for modern businesses. With a few seconds to make a great impression and deliver value to the users, developers need to do their fair share of work. So, how to design high-quality websites with interactive UI, responsive design, and deliver an excellent user experience?
Bootstrap and Material UI are well-known and reliable web app development frameworks. While Bootstrap offers a consistent user experience, full-proof documentation, and high-speed development, Material UI is known for its aesthetics, enabling developers to create stylish and trendy-looking apps.
As a front-end developer, you may wonder which is the ideal design tool for your web design. Though both Twitter’s Bootstrap and Google’s Material UI are known for crafting high-quality and functional websites, they have their own pros and cons.
We are here to give you a quick tour of the two frameworks and help you understand their pros, cons, and differences. Hence, you can choose the most suitable framework for your upcoming project.
What is Bootstrap?
Bootstrap is a versatile CSS, HTML, and JS framework that helps you craft responsive web applications. It is an ideal framework for both mobile and desktop applications. The original name is Twitter Blueprint, as Twitter developed Bootstrap as an internal framework. It is launched as an open-source project, and its primary goal is to enhance the developer’s work and encourage consistency across internal tools. Giants like Airbnb, Dropbox, Apple Music, Twitter, Coursera, and Bloomberg use Bootstrap.
Pros of Bootstrap
1) High Development Speed
Bootstrap comes in handy if you have limited time for your website or app development. As it offers ready-made code blocks, you don’t have to start coding from scratch.
Moreover, Bootstrap also offers ready-to-use themes, templates, and other tools that you can download and customize as per your project specifications. Thus, building a unique and robust website is made easy with Bootstrap.
2) Mobile-Friendly
With millions of users worldwide accessing the internet through their smartphones, having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory these days. Google also considers mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor for websites. Bootstrap can help you craft responsive sites as it has an excellent fluid grid system and responsive utility classes that make the website compatible with the device’s screen size.
3) Community Support
Bootstrap has a wide range of tools available on its official site and has a strong developer community. Thus, developers can resolve their problems quickly with community support.
Mark Otto, the current principal design and brand architect at GitHub, is developing and maintaining Bootstrap with approximately 19,000 commits and 1087 contributors. The team publishes updates regularly, addressing any new problems and boosting the framework’s efficacy.
Cons of Bootstrap
1) All Bootstrap Sites Look Similar
The Twitter team came with Bootstrap intending to help developers have a standardized interface to create websites soon. However, one of the drawbacks of the framework is that all websites created using Bootstrap look similar. For instance, Open Airbnb, Twitter, Apple Music, or Lyft look the same with bold headlines, rounded sans-serif fonts, and lots of space.
2) Bootstrap Websites are Heavy
Bootstrap adds unnecessary bloat to websites as the files sizes are larger. Thus, it may lead to longer loading time and battery draining issues.
Also, if you delete them manually, it defeats the purpose of using the framework. Hence, if you leverage Bootstrap in your project, make sure you keep an eye on page weight and page speed.
3) Bootstrap is not Suitable for Simple Websites
As Bootstrap’s theme packages are pretty heavy with battery-draining scripts, it may not be the suitable front-end framework for all websites. Specifically, it is not ideal for websites that don’t need a full-fledged framework.
What is Material UI?
Material UI is a React UI framework that abides by Material Design concepts. It is built on Facebook’s React framework and includes components that adhere to Material guidelines. Google came up with Material Design in 2014, whereas a small and dedicated team developed Material UI in 2017.
Both Material UI and Material Design are interlinked, but they are not the same. Material UI is a mere react component library without Material Design. Google uses Material Design in all its products, whereas giants like Nasa, Amazon, Unity, JPMorgan, etc use Material UI.
Pros of Material UI
1) Provides Several Components
It includes several components like base design, instructions, and templates. Developers can build a relevant website or application for their business, leveraging those beneficial components.
The Material Design framework provides know-how instructions to use each part. Furthermore, Material Design Lite is known for its customization. Developers can create customized components depending on their project needs using Material Design Lite.
2) Compatible with Several Browsers
Material Design and Bootstrap have good browser compatibility as they are compatible across most browsers. Material Design supports Angular Material and React Material User Interface. It also uses the SASS preprocessor.
3) Not Dependent on Javascript Frameworks
Bootstrap entirely depends on JavaScript frameworks. However, Material Design does not need any JavaScript frameworks or libraries to design websites or apps. Moreover, the platform offers a material design framework that enables developers to create innovative components like cards and badges.
Cons of Material UI
1) Animations Can make be Distracting
Material Design uses animated transitions, vibrant colors, and images to enhance the interface. However, these animations can distract the ability of the human brain to gather information.
2) Google Affiliation
As Material Design is from Google, Android is its prominent adopter. So, developers looking to create apps on a platform-independent UX will find it challenging to work with Material Design.
3) Performance Overhead
Material Design uses animations that carry a lot of overhead. For example, effects like drop shadow, color fill, and transform transitions are jerky and unpleasant for regular users.
Bootstrap vs Material: A Detailed Comparison
1) Grid System
Bootstrap
It is a mobile-first grid program that uses containers, rows, and columns to enable the app to conform to any device. Rows and columns are merged to form one or more containers. A bootstrap grid system is a 12 column system with a set of rules to obey. For instance, using rows only to construct columns, there must be no content inside the row; only columns can be immediate children of rows and others.
Material Design
Its responsive UI contains twelve columns grid layout. Column width is flexible, while gutter widths that form the space between content are fixed values in the range between 0 and 10px. The grid system adopts when the screen size reaches some predetermined values called breakpoints. When it reaches that value, the layout adjusts to the screen and changes the number of columns, allowing users with a fully responsive UI.
2) Information Layout
Bootstrap
It is a system to present organized information. Apps that use Bootstrap like Twitter, Coursera, Apple Music are predominantly used for informative purposes more than entertainment. These apps are with minimalist designs, soft colors, bold headlines with little to no animation. People visit these websites to access information quickly. Bootstrap offers a readable UI for users that is clutter-free with no distractions.
Material Design
Material Design is ideal for mobile. As mobiles have smaller screens and lesser space to place elements and information, Material UI came with precise solutions. Its animation, layers, sliders, and pop-ups work wonders on mobile phones. Also, as mobile doesn’t have a pointer, users may not understand where they touch on a touch screen. Thus, Material UI comes with animation that makes the user experience better. However, too much animation can make the app overwhelming and often distract the users.
3) Dependencies
Bootstrap
Bootstrap contains extensive features, massive scripts, a large number of CSS classes, and jQuery dependency. In short, it is not a simple framework. That may lead to issues like slow performance, huge app size, battery draining, and page speed.
However, you can avoid all those drawbacks by carefully getting rid of components that are not in use. Thus, you will get a lightweight app. Moreover, the Bootstrap team of developers is working towards removing jQuery from Bootstrap 5. Though it is happy news for developers, it will take a long time to accomplish such a big task.
Material UI
Material UI is a set of React-based components that you can use independently. Material UI is pure CSS and does not demand any library to work. You will get only what you need for your app.
4) Customization
Bootstrap
Bootstrap can provide consistency in experience for both developers and users. For instance, if you observe all of the apps built on Bootstrap, you will see the same things in the same place with mild differences. Thus, Bootstrap ensures a consistent user experience.
Material UI
Material UI works on Material guidelines. Those guidelines are rules and principles for motion, interaction, animation, building navigation, typography, shapes, colors, etc. However, you need not follow them all and pick the one that suits your app the best. Unlike Bootstrap, Material UI doesn’t provide a consistent user experience, but there is a space for creativity.
5) Development Speed
Bootstrap
Bootstrap comes with many UI components like typography, tables, buttons, navigation, labels, alerts, tabs, and more. Developers can leverage those elements readily for their projects. Thus, they can construct an appealing website effortlessly. With Bootstrap, developers will get time to focus on the functionality of the app as it automatically takes care of the design. Furthermore, you can download a lot of themes and templates on the web, which further results in high development speed.
Material UI
Material UI, on the other hand, offers developers material-based UI components. Using those components, developers can reduce their design and development time drastically. However, since Material UI is a set of UI components, it does not speed up the development process like Bootstrap. You can use material templates if you want to improve the development speed.
A quick Comparison of the above-seen details:
| Bootstrap | Material UI | |
|---|---|---|
| What is it? | CSS, HTML, JS framework to develop interactive websites. | React UI framework that obeys Material Design protocols. |
| Developed by | Material Design: Google Material UI: Unkown Team |
|
| Used by | Airbnb, Dropbox, Apple Music, Twitter, Coursera, and more. | Nasa, Amazon, Unity, Google and all its products, and JPMorgan. |
| Grid System | 12 column grid system, that enables a fully responsive design. | 12 column grid system, that enables a fully responsive design. |
| Information Layout | The grid system is for both mobile and desktop with readable UI for all platforms. | Mobile-first and user-friendly. However, UI can be distracting with animations for the desktop. |
| Dependencies | The apps are pretty heavy and slow, requiring you to get rid of unnecessary components and JS scripts. | Material UI is React-based. Material design in CSS without any third-party libraries. |
| Development Speed | High development speed due to reusable code. | Lower development speed than the Bootstrap. However, you can increase the speed by using templates. |
| Customization | Offers consistent user experience and familiar interface for all. Average feasibility to customization. | Not so consistent in user experience as designers create various UI. Provides unique and easily customizable design. |
Summing Up
Hopefully, this blog should have brought some profound insights into the two popular frameworks that are in use today. To cut a long story short, Bootstrap is ideal for responsive, simple, and professional websites.
With Bootstrap, you can enjoy immense support and documentation, making it easy for developers. Thus, if you have limited time, opt for Bootstrap. You can create responsive, high-quality, and highly functional websites and apps in a relatively short time.
Material Design is perfect for building websites that focus on looks, innovative designs, and animations. The framework is detailed and straightforward to use and allows you to create websites with special effects. Customized themes, pop-ups, sliders, and animations are a few things you can enjoy with Material UI.
We have cleared the air for you, but if you still have any queries regarding technologies, frameworks, languages, and more, Cypherox Technologies has got you covered. Feel free to reach us. Our technical team will be happy to assist you.
