‘Materials UI’ or ‘Chakra UI’ what is better for React?

Introduction:
Now a days in IT, React JS framework is the most favorite framework for developing the Single Page Applications. React is an open-source JavaScript library that helps you to build top interface for both the Web as well as Mobile apps. Along with React Library, it is equally important to choose the UI library for react, which will provide the number of prebuild controls like buttons, list, grids etc. with great styling features and control properties which can be easily configured.

In this blog we will compare two React UI component libraries ‘Material UI’ and ‘Chakra UI’, which comes under top 10 React JS supporting UI libraries and we will see what is the better to use among them. We will mainly compare them based on three factors ‘Ease of Modification’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Reliability’ and also few others.

Analysis:
First of let’s talk about ‘Ease of Modification’ with these two UI libraries, the Chakra UI is having clean class names structure. Now what does that mean, for example if you see the HTML source code build in both libraries, you will see the material UI adds so many classes to each HTML tags created for material component, where Chakra UI adds comparatively less classes. Also, Chakra UI provides easy manual manipulation in CSS classes, where Material UI has way more options to do it for way more components than Chakra UI. In additions, Material UI components has more feature and properties which make them more Flexible.

Then let’s talk about second point of comparison, which is ‘Ease of Use’. Since Material UI is having lot more controls and their too many numbers of properties, this will naturally lead to more time to understand them and decide which component to use in some scenarios. Since Chakra UI is newer, it is currently easier to pick up controls from it. In terms of documentation, both options have good documentation but I think material UI will win in it, but it takes more time to go through. So, both libraries are easy to use but Chakra is easier than Material UI.

Now the last point ‘Reliability’, here in terms of reliability and active community, there is no competition and Material Ui is the definite winner here. Material UI has 70.9K starts as of now on GitHub and strong community makes it most popular UI framework. The Chakra UI is created only 2 years back and currently having over 20.6K stars as of now on GitHub, but during this short period of time Chakra UI has earned a lot of positive comments from top React developers as it is very extensible and customizable.

Along with the three criteria’s (‘Ease of Modification’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Reliability’), for Responsiveness, with Material UI we need to add sperate code to make the controls responsive, where the Chakra UI provides a built-in support with very few code changes. Also, Chakra UI provides some built -in themes like Night Mode which makes applications night vision compatible and saves more energy when user use these kinds of themes in compare with bright themes.

Below are some top clients of Material and Chakra UI,

• Material UI
  1. Spotify
  2. Amazon
  3. NASA
  4. Netflix
  5. Unity
  6. ShutterStock
• Chakra UI
  1. Bonton
  2. LUGGit
  3. Development
  4. Webridge
  5. Vytruve Web Platform
  6. Orbital Chat
  7. PLUGIN Corp.
  8. You Got Bud
  9. Write0

Conclusion:
So, after this analysis, which one should you choose? Basically, if your app is smaller or medium size, and if you want something quicker, the Chakra UI would be the definite choice for you. Because it is easy to learn and lightweight. Material UI has long term reliability and if you want you create larger applications you can go with Material UI as it has scalability and grate active community.

Happy Reading!!