The success of the project depends on the technology used for the development process. This is the era of the latest and advanced technologies where everyone is in the race of achieving better business prospects by maintaining the huge client base. Bootstrap vs Material Design Lite is the hottest topic in the internet among web developers

Today, customers are more conscious about their brand reputation, which can only be established when they use the high-tech development platforms to deliver unbeatable business solutions. It has been analyzed that business enterprises using traditional development platforms are getting less business in comparison to the businesses using the latest technologies.

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It is so, because, people have become smarter and want to have a website that has been designed with robust structure and advanced functionality.

Nowadays, Bootstrap and Google’s Material Design Lite are considered the best & reliable website and web app development platforms that provide out of the box development facility to the developers.

Check out my famous artcile on Free Bootstrap Modal Forms

Let’s discuss both one by one:

Contents

What is Material Design?

Material Design Lite is a designing language invented by the talented team of Google. It is an advanced designing platform which enables you to add material design look & feel to your proposed websites. With this platform, you will find many elements that are included in the Material Design Lite (MDL) library to develop data-driven and highly interactive applications & websites. To be specific, it can be stated that this platform does not rely on any JavaScript frameworks and always promotes website design optimization on multi-browser compatibility. One of the best part of it is that it is a bunch of Vanilla JavaScript and CSS which never aim towards dependencies and make it awesome for website development.

Read my latest tutorial on Gmail Style Login Form with Google Material Design & jQuery

Earlier mentioned that Bootstrap entirely depends on the JavaScript frameworks. But, in the case of MDL (Material Design Lite), you don’t need any JavaScript frameworks and libraries to design and draft the websites. Rather, this designing platform provides a material design framework that helps to create various innovative components such as cards and badges. Further, in terms of appealing templates and color-correction, Material Design Lite is admired for its customization as many designers have started creating their customized components to take the project beyond the expectations.

Twitter’s Bootstrap

Introduced by Twitter, Bootstrap is a Java, HTML and CSS framework admired for designing the front-end websites and web applications. It is a free open source web framework which supports easier and faster web development. It uses CSS and HTML based templates in order to design the components with typography, buttons, forms and navigation. It is also open for supporting optional JavaScript extensions. Additionally, Bootstrap gives you the facility to build responsive layouts by utilizing fewer efforts.

At present, Bootstrap denominates itself as one of the most popular CSS, HTML and JavaScript frameworks accredited for developing the responsive and mobile first projects for the quality conscious clients. It includes the documentation for HTML, CSS, advanced grid system and jQuery which help users in recognizing each fact related to development. Due to the perfect coding documentation, it has become one of the sought-after options that many companies have adopted it to design & facilitate their CMS themes.

Comparison between Bootstrap vs Material Design framework:

Serial No.	Features	Material Design	Twitter’s Bootstrap
1	Introduction:	Invented by the Google Team.	Introduced by Twitter.
2	Purpose:	Helps to add material design look & feel to the websites.	Used for designing front-end websites and web applications.
3	Designing Techniques	Material Design Lite strictly follows the defined pattern of Material Design Concept which consists of plenty of information regarding breakpoints, metrics, typography, animations and the other codeable values.	It is an open source web framework which supports easier and faster web development.
4	Customization	No doubt, you can customize the MDL, but, it may result in losing the concept of Material Design throughout the project.	Bootstrap works like a base language that can be easily customized as per the project requirements.
5	Dependency	Applications based on MDL run on npm and bower package managers. And, it runs independently.	It has the jQuery dependency.
6	Frameworks	It supports the JS frameworks of Angular Material and React Material User Interface.	Always supports JS frameworks such as React Bootstrap and Angular UI Bootstrap.
7	Supportive Languages	It is built using the SCSS preprocessor.	It also uses LESS (a dynamic style sheet language) & SAAS (syntactically awesome style sheets) version to build websites.
8	Components Availability	MDL has no external dependencies as it always requires the plain Vanilla JavaScript.	For Bootstrap, various third-party widgets and extensions are available. It is just because of its stability and dominance across the market.
9	Design Process	It requires Gulp to build all the design processes.	Uses Grunt to build and run processes.
10	Components Support	MDL is supported by a number of components such as mega footer, cards, toggle switches and slider inputs that are not applicable for Bootstrap.	Bootstrap supports components such as popover, panel, thumbnails, breadcrumb, wells and inline alerts that are not available for the Google’s Material Design Lite.
11	Extensions	As Google recently introduced MDL, so, it has less number of extensions in comparison to Bootstrap. But, its community is growing rapidly, so users can expect more extensions in the future.	Apart from the bower and npm package managers, Bootstrap is also available on composer manager.
12	Browser Compatibility	MDL is fully supported on all the major browsers such as Chrome, IE 10+, Firefox, Chrome for Android, Opera and Safari Mobile.	When it comes to the browser support, it ensures compatibility with all the major browsers. It has also maintained a backward compatibility up to Internet Explorer 8.
13	Base Font	Applications built on MDL uses the base font Roboto.	Solutions based on Bootstrap usually have the base font named Helvetica Neue.
14	Color Variations	With this development platform, developers can have the color variations usually in two color shades.	Users can also visualize color variations in the Bootstrap websites as these are built using context based colors such as info, primary, warning and danger.
15	File Size Support	The file size of Material Design Lite applications is ~27KB that is pretty neat and has the latest MDL version (v1.0.0).	The file size of a Bootstrap application depends on its jQuery that can be built (v3.3.5) version up to the gzip file size of ~64KB i.e., including jQuery and ~31KB i.e., excluding the jQuery.
16	Layout	Material Design has fewer components than Bootstrap. The difference is that they are focused on building applications having modern material designs. These components come with beautiful default styles and amazing animations.	Bootstrap has the advanced grid system which includes column wrapping, offsets, reordering and hiding of columns.
17	Community	However, Material Design has recently been introduced in the market, but it has already become popular in the industry.	It’s been years Bootstrap has introduced. Due to its early introduction, it has gained an enormous community where N numbers of plugins, themes and blog posts have been produced.

Business entrepreneurs, who are looking for the website development and heavy customization, they can go with the Bootstrap.

And the people who are looking forward to getting their applications designed with attractive look and feel, they can prefer Material Design Lite.

4 thoughts on “Bootstrap vs Material Design – Which one is Better?”

Patrick
October 3, 2017 at 10:42 am
It’s been 6 months since the last comment. My newer experience is this:
I have been steadily using material design for angular for the last 6 months. I previously solely used bootstrap, and I will say bootstrap is great. With that said, material for me is cleaner and simpler. My code is much cleaner to work with as the syntax requires a lot less of me than bootstraps does.
They both offer nice looking components, both offer customization. I don’t think I would migrate a bootstrap project to material because that seems like a pain in the butt. I would however choose material in any new project and have found my revamps to old projects to be simpler just to stick in material/angular. You can develop with material alongside bootstrap in the same project, they do not conflict. I haven’t found anything to be lacking with materialI had with bootstrap.
Ankur Bhatt
April 2, 2017 at 6:11 pm
I think bootstrap is better for as a designer.
Andri Krishna
March 31, 2017 at 1:55 pm
bs is better for me
Kim Freesland
March 31, 2017 at 1:54 pm
I’ve been using bootstrap for years now and just recently had a project with Material Design lite. Even though MDL has some beautiful utility to it, we had some trouble in the migration process while using angular js. The columns and flex layout became a problem and we ended up going back to bootstrap and pulling some design Css properties from MDL stylesheets and pretty much used it’s styling and painted over the current angular/bootstrap environment.
For migration purposes it’s definitely a hairy situation and has more work involved, and wouldn’t recommend it in a migration project, MDL is something that needs to be started on a new fresh project and using it’s easy components.
Thanks!
–Kim