Material Design Lite

Material Design Lite

Material Design Lite (MDL) is an open-source HTML/CSS/JavaScript framework that implements Google's Material Design specifications. It provides responsive, customizable, cross-browser compatible components like buttons, cards, menus, and more out-of-the-box.
Material Design Lite image
material-design responsive-design web-components

Material Design Lite (MDL)

Material Design Lite (MDL) is an open-source HTML/CSS/JavaScript framework that implements Google's Material Design specifications. It provides responsive, customizable, cross-browser compatible components like buttons, cards, menus, and more out-of-the-box.

What is Material Design Lite?

Material Design Lite (MDL) is an open-source HTML/CSS/JavaScript framework that implements Google's Material Design specifications. It provides an assortment of reusable UI components modeled after Material Design. MDL components are responsive, customizable, cross-browser compatible, and easy to implement.

Some of the components included in MDL are:

  • Buttons
  • Cards
  • Chips
  • Data Tables
  • Dialogs
  • Menus
  • Progress indicators
  • Sliders
  • Snackbars
  • Tabs
  • Text Fields
  • Tooltips

MDL aims to provide components to build clean, modern web interfaces efficiently. The components render correctly on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers. It helps developers follow Material Design principles without having to do excessive CSS work. The framework uses Sass for efficient and modular CSS.

As an open-source library, MDL is free to use. It has a large community behind it maintaining and improving the project. Sites like YouTube, Medium, and Dropbox successfully use MDL. Overall, it serves as a lightweight yet fully-featured UI kit for creating aesthetically-pleasing, responsive sites and apps.

Material Design Lite Features

Features

  1. Responsive layout system
  2. Material Design compliant visual components
  3. Customizable themes
  4. Lightweight and modular code

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source and free to use

Good documentation and community support

Components work across modern browsers

Easy to customize and extend components

Cons

Less features than other Material frameworks

Not as flexible as pure CSS solutions

Relies on Sass/node for theming

Not actively maintained anymore


The Best Material Design Lite Alternatives

Top Development and Front-End Frameworks and other similar apps like Material Design Lite


Tailwind CSS icon

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework that takes a utility-first approach for building custom user interfaces. Instead of opinionated pre-designed components, Tailwind provides low-level utility classes for typical CSS properties like color, padding, font-size, etc. Developers can compose these atomic utility classes together to rapidly build out UI without...
Tailwind CSS image
Materialize icon

Materialize

Materialize is an open-source front-end framework that helps web developers build responsive and mobile-first websites quickly. It is based on Google's Material Design principles and provides many user interface components out of the box to construct web pages, including:ButtonsCardsChipsFormsNavbarsGrid systemTablesModalsToastsAnd more...Developers can simply include the Materialize CSS and JavaScript files...
Materialize image
Angular Material icon

Angular Material

Angular Material is an open-source component library for Angular web applications that implements Google's Material Design guidelines. It provides a collection of reusable UI components that help developers build high-quality, consistent user interfaces quickly.Some of the commonly used Angular Material components include:ButtonsCardsChipsListsMenusToolbarsSidenavGrid listsProgress indicatorsDialogsInput fieldsThese components come with various styles...
Angular Material image
Material UI icon

Material UI

Material UI is an open-source React component library that implements Google's Material Design guidelines. It provides developers with a collection of reusable UI components that can be used to quickly build high-quality, responsive web applications.Some key features of Material UI include:Over 60 ready-made components like buttons, cards, menus, lists, etc.Responsive...
Material UI image
UIkit icon

UIkit

UIkit is an open-source web framework for developing fast and powerful web interfaces. It provides a collection of reusable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components that can be used to build responsive, mobile-first websites and applications.Some key features of UIkit include:An extensive library of pre-built components like typography, forms, tables, tabs,...
UIkit image
Tailwind UI icon

Tailwind UI

Tailwind UI is an extensive, open-source component library for Tailwind CSS created by the developers of Tailwind CSS itself. It features over 100 responsive HTML and React components and pages that can be used to accelerate development of web applications built with Tailwind.Some of the key features and benefits of...
Tailwind UI image
Purecss icon

Purecss

Purecss is an open-source CSS framework designed for quickly building lightweight, responsive web interfaces. Here are some key details about Purecss:Created and maintained by Yahoo/Verizon Media.Very lightweight at 4.5KB minified and gzipped.Follows a modular approach, allowing developers to include only the CSS for components they need.Provides layout modules like grids,...
Purecss image
HTML5 Boilerplate icon

HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is an open source front-end web development framework launched in 2010 to help web developers quickly build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites.It provides a basic HTML structure with useful defaults and best practices baked in, such as:Normalize.css for cross-browser compatibility jQuery and Modernizr JavaScript librariesPlaceholder...
HTML5 Boilerplate image
Vue Material icon

Vue Material

Vue Material is an open-source MIT licensed framework that brings Google's Material Design to Vue.js applications. Built on top of Vuetify, it provides a collection of reusable components like buttons, cards, menus, etc. that adhere to the Material Design specifications.Some key highlights of Vue Material: Implements the Material Design guidelines...
Vue Material image
Polymer icon

Polymer

Polymer is an open-source JavaScript library created by Google developers and contributors for building web applications using Web Components. Web Components allow developers to create reusable custom elements that encapsulate functionality and styles. Polymer builds on top of the Web Components standards and provides a comprehensive polyfill suite that enables...
Polymer image
Semantic UI icon

Semantic UI

Semantic UI is an open-source front-end development framework that helps web developers build consistent, responsive web pages and web applications. It provides theming capabilities, templates, and reusable UI components to quickly build modern interfaces.Some key features of Semantic UI:Responsive grid system for building responsive layoutsprebuilt UI components like buttons, menus,...
Semantic UI image
Google Web Starter Kit icon

Google Web Starter Kit

Google Web Starter Kit is an open-source front-end framework developed by Google to help web developers quickly build high-quality, fast, modern web applications. Some key features include:Base template with HTML5 semantics, accessibility helpers, and progressive enhancementPerformance optimization - prefetching, compression, caching strategiesResponsive and adaptive layouts for desktop, tablet, and mobileComponents...
Google Web Starter Kit image
Fluent Kit icon

Fluent Kit

Fluent Kit is an open-source user interface kit that allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications with native look and feel. It is developed by Microsoft and designed based on Fluent Design System. Fluent Kit provides a collection of over 100 customizable UI controls and components that can be used...