MUI adoption guide: Overview, examples, and alternatives

Written by Nefe Emadamerho-Atori✏️

MUI, or Material UI, is one of the largest and best-known UI component libraries in the web development space. It was launched in 2014 and has since become widely adopted for building websites and applications.

This comprehensive guide will cover everything you need to know about MUI. You will learn what it is, its benefits and features, why you should consider using it, and how it compares to other popular UI libraries. By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped to make an informed decision about adopting MUI into your project.

Let’s get started.

What is MUI?

MUI is an open source React component library built on the UI/UX design principles of Google’s Material Design: Keep in mind that while Material UI is built on Material Design’s principles, they’re not synonymous. In fact, the MUI team specifically updated their branding to try to reduce confusion around the names and break the strong association with Google.

MUI started as the React implementation of the Material Design guidelines in 2014. It was created to help React developers build websites and applications that adhered to the guidelines.

After quickly gaining popularity, Material UI has become one of the most widely used UI component libraries today. Companies like Auth0, Codementor, Medium, Nhnost, and Shutterstock use MUI to build UIs and components for their websites and applications.

You can use MUI to build various projects, like dashboards, landing pages, portfolio websites, ecommerce stores, chat apps, and social networks — there’s no limit to what you can do with it. As of this writing, the latest MUI version is the v7 pre-release and the recommended stable version is v5.16.4.

While Material UI is the core component library in the MUI ecosystem, other available solutions include:

• Joy UI — An alternative to MUI built on the Joy Design guidelines instead of the Material Design guidelines
• Base UI — Unlike MUI and Joy UI, Base UI follows the headless approach, meaning that none of its UI components come shipped with styles. It gives you greater control over the CSS and styling of the components
• MUI X — A collection of advanced React components for building complex, data-rich applications. It includes components like date and time pickers, data grids, and charts

Further reading:

Why use MUI

Let’s discuss some reasons why you should consider MUI as your go-to React component library.

Speeds up development

MUI provides over 50 components that you can plug into your project. This eliminates having to build components from scratch, write tests for those components, and maintain their individual codebase. Instead, you can integrate these ready-to-use components to quickly assemble complex layouts and interfaces.

Promotes brand consistency

MUI is built on the Material Design guidelines, a set of design principles and best practices developed by Google to help brands create user-friendly experiences and promote consistency. Using MUI allows you to build a visually pleasing interface across your applications.

Enforces web accessibility

MUI components comply fully with the WCAG accessibility standards:

• Users can navigate through them with a keyboard
• MUI components apply appropriate ARIA attributes to improve screen reader compatibility
• The default MUI theme is designed with sufficient color contrast to meet accessibility guidelines
• It provides components like VisuallyHidden, which allows you to hide elements visually while making them available for assistive technology

Building accessible websites and apps is a must, but it can be challenging to ensure you’re meeting the standards. Leveraging MUI components gives you a head start at making your project accessible for all users.

Battle-tested and widely adopted

MUI has been around since 2014, making it one of the older and more established UI libraries. This means that over the years, it has gone through many iterations where its bugs and edge cases have been addressed, making it more stable.

Since MUI is widely used in production by companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500s, it’s also proven to be reliable at scale.

Has a large and active community and ecosystem

MUI has a large developer community comprising almost three thousand open source contributors and 92.2k GitHub stars. The community’s size means you can easily find beginner tutorials and other learning resources, free and paid starter templates, and more.

Another benefit is that you can find several real-world examples and implementations of MUI. Whether you’re building a complex dashboard, a multi-step form, or a responsive layout, chances are someone has already created something similar with MUI.

If you can find an existing project containing components you want to use, then instead of building from scratch, you can clone the code for that project — presuming it’s open sourced — and make adjustments to suit your needs.

Boasts a large collection of themes and templates

MUI provides several official templates for common application types, like admin dashboards, sign-in pages, and landing pages. The community also offers other free and paid templates. Using the MUI templates can help you save time and go to market faster.

Supports several frameworks

You can integrate MUI with various frameworks, like React Native, Next.js, Vue, and more. Its compatibility with different tools makes it a top choice for developers.

Further reading:

Why not to use MUI

While MUI is a robust and widely adopted component library, it has its disadvantages and isn’t the best fit for every scenario. Let’s discuss some reasons why you shouldn’t use it.

Learning curve

MUI’s learning curve can be steep, especially for advanced use cases and developers new to React or component-based development. It may take some time and effort to familiarize yourself with MUI’s concepts, API, and best practices.

Thankfully, MUI provides comprehensive documentation with detailed explanations and examples to streamline the development process.

Bundle size

MUI’s extensive collection of components and styles can result in a larger bundle size, which may impact the initial load time of your application. If you’re working on a performance-critical project, MUI may not be the best choice.

Opinionated design and custom needs

MUI’s opinionated design is a double-edged sword. Although it encourages building accessible, consistent, and visually appealing interfaces, its design may not align with all project design requirements.

While you can customize MUI’s default theme and deviate from Material Design principles, this can be challenging and time-consuming, especially because there are so many customization options to sort through. We’ll discuss customizing MUI in more detail below.

Features of MUI

Let’s explore some of the features MUI offers.

Predefined components

MUI offers various prebuilt components that cover almost every aspect of a modern user interface. These components include buttons, inputs, sliders, forms, sidebars, tables, tooltips, and more.

Here’s a sample of the Button component in action:

import Button from '@mui/material/Button';

export default function BasicButtons() {
  return (
    <>
    <Button variant="text">Text</Button>
    <Button variant="contained">Contained</Button>
    <Button variant="outlined">Outlined</Button>
    </>
  );
}

Further reading:

Supports customizations

MUI allows you to control the appearance of your components. You can customize properties like the color palette, typography, font, spacing, and breakpoints to match your brand’s requirements. MUI provides a ThemeProvider component and a createTheme method that you can use to create a custom theme.

Here’s how you can create a custom theme. First, define the custom theme object with createTheme:

import { createTheme } from '@mui/material/styles';

const theme = createTheme({
  palette: {
    primary: {
      main: "#3f51b5", // Change the primary color
    },
    secondary: {
      main: "#f50057", // Change the secondary color
    },
  },
  typography: {
    fontFamily: '"Roboto", "Helvetica", "Arial", sans-serif', // Change the font family
    fontSize: 14, // Change the base font size
  },
  // Add more customizations as needed
});

Next, wrap your React application with the ThemeProvider component and pass in the custom theme:

import { createTheme, ThemeProvider } from '@mui/material/styles';

const theme = createTheme({
  // Your custom theme configuration
});

function App() {
  return (
    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
      {/* app content */}
      {/* MUI components will use the custom theme */}
    </ThemeProvider>
  );
}

Further reading:

Responsive design

MUI offers different features that help you build responsive layouts that adjust to various screen sizes. These include:

• The grid system, which is built on CSS Flexbox, follows a 12-column layout, and provides a flexible way to arrange content
• The Container component that allows you to wrap and center content on a screen
• Five predefined breakpoints:
  • xs (extra-small): 0px to 600px
  • sm (small): 600px to 899px
  • md (medium): 900px to 1199px
  • lg (large): 1200px to 1535px
  • xl (extra-large): 1536px and up
• The useMediaQuery Hook, which allows you to apply styles or render components conditionally based on the current viewport size

The below snippet shows the different components of MUI’s responsive design capabilities:

import Grid from "@mui/material/Grid";
import Container from '@mui/material/Container';
import { useMediaQuery } from '@mui/material/useMediaQuery';

//grid system with beakpoints applied
export default function BasicGrid() {
  return (
    <Grid container spacing={2}>
      <Grid xs={6} sm={6} md={3} >{/* app content */}</Grid>
      <Grid xs={4}>{/* app content */}</Grid>
      <Grid xs={4}>{/* app content */}</Grid>
    </Grid>
  );
}

//Container component
export default function SimpleContainer() {
  return <Container maxWidth="sm">{/* app content */} </Container>;
}

//useMediaQuery hook
export default function MyComponent() {
  const isSmallScreen = useMediaQuery('(max-width:600px)');

  return (
    <div>
      {isSmallScreen ? 'Small screen' : 'Large screen'}
    </div>
  );
}

Further reading:

Compatible with different styling solutions

MUI is compatible with various styling solutions. You can integrate it with CSS preprocessors like Sass, CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS libraries like Emotion and styled-components, and more. MUI also recently launched Pigment CSS, its in-house CSS-in-JS stool.

Let’s explore how to integrate MUI with some of these styling solutions.

To integrate MUI with Sass:

//styles.scss
@import '~@mui/material/Button/Button.css';

//Override the button color
.MuiButton-root {
  color: red;
}

//Import the Sass file in your Button component file
import Button from '@mui/material/Button';
import './styles.scss';

export default function MyComponent() {
  return <Button variant="contained">Styled with Sass</Button>;
}

To integrate MUI with CSS Modules:

//MyComponent.module.css
.customButton {
  color: green;
}

//apply module style
import styles from './MyComponent.module.css';

export default function MyComponent() {
  return (
    <Button variant="contained" className={styles.customButton}>
      Styled with CSS Modules
    </Button>
  );
}

To integrate MUI with Emotion:

import Button from '@mui/material/Button';
import { css } from '@emotion/css';

const customButtonStyles = css`
  background-color: purple;
  color: white;
`;

export default function MyComponent() {
  return (
    <Button variant="contained" className={customButtonStyles}>
      Styled with Emotion
    </Button>
  );
}

To integrate MUI with styled-components:

import styled from 'styled-components';

const CustomButton = styled(Button)`
  background-color: orange;
  color: white;
`;

export default function MyComponent() {
  return <CustomButton variant="contained">Styled with styled-components</CustomButton>;
}

To integrate MUI with inline styles:

    export default function MyComponent() {
      return (
        <Button
          variant="contained"
          style={{
            backgroundColor: 'blue',
            color: 'white',
          }}
        >
          Styled with inline styles
        </Button>
      );
    }

Further reading:

Getting started with MUI

Follow this quickstart guide to get started with MUI. First, start a new React application. Then, install MUI and the required dependencies using the command below:

npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled @fontsource/roboto @mui/icons-material

or
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled @fontsource/roboto @mui/icons-material

Finally, start using the components. Here’s a sample of the Card, CardContent, and Typography components:

import { Card, CardContent, Typography } from '@mui/material';

<Card>
  <CardContent>
    <Typography variant="h5" component="div">
      Card Title
    </Typography>
    <Typography variant="body2">
      This is the content of the card.
    </Typography>
  </CardContent>
</Card>

That’s it! From here, you can play around with MUI as much as you want to reach a design you’re satisfied with.

MUI vs. other UI component libraries

While MUI is a popular React component library, it’s not the only option available in the ecosystem. Let’s explore how it compares with alternative UI libraries like Chakra UI, Shadcn UI, Radix UI, and Ant Design.

Templates and themes

MUI provides several official templates for various purposes, including admin dashboards, landing pages, and ecommerce sites. These templates serve as an excellent starting point for developers. Meanwhile:

• The Chakra UI community has created various templates and theme examples, though not as extensively as MUI. There is also Chakra UI Pro, a paid collection of components for building e-commerce apps, marketing websites, and web apps
• Shadcn UI does not have official starter templates and themes. However, it provides blocks and example interfaces for dashboards, cards, authentication flows, and more
• Radix UI does not have any templates or themes
• Ant Design offers several official templates for dashboards, landing pages, and other common enterprise app layouts. In addition to the code-based templates, it also offers Figma templates for various project types

Maturity and adoption

MUI was released in 2014 and has been a top choice for building UI interfaces. It’s used by companies like Auth0, Codementor, Medium, Nhnost, and Shutterstock. It has a large and active community that continually supports its growth with learning materials, themes, and templates.

In comparison:

• Chakra UI was released in 2020 and is used by companies like Udacity, Ethereum, Solidity, and Suno
• Shadcn UI was released in 2023 and is used by companies like Vercel, Flatiron Health, and Codedamn. While it’s relatively new compared to their libraries, its unique approach of providing direct access to a copy component’s source code, combined with the fact that it is built on Shadcn UI and Tailwind CSS, has made it a fan favorite
• Radix UI was released in 2020 and is used by companies like Codesandbox, Vercel, Liveblocks, Supabase, Linear, and Open AI. It enjoys widespread adoption and is commonly used to build internal design systems and other component libraries
• Ant Design was released in 2017 and is used by companies like Xiaomi, Snapchat, and Shopify

The table below compares some additional stats about each library:

Further reading:

Conclusion

MUI stands out as a powerful and versatile UI component library for React development. Its comprehensive set of features make it a compelling choice for building visually appealing and accessible user interfaces.

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