Today, we are going to compare the components in Angular Material and Bootstrap Framework. This comparison is meant to help you decide on whether to go with bootstrap or angular material for your application. Bootstrap provides a nice looking, simple, clean user interface while Angular material looks to provide an enhanced user experience. While this comparison might be useful to most people, to others it might be a matter of preference. Let’s get started:

Common Components

First, we will look at common components between Angular Material and Bootstrap. By comparing the common components, we get to see which is better or more suitable for your project.

Buttons & Button group

Both Angular Material and Bootstrap implement this feature quite similarly. Angular provides less color options for button – Basic, Primary, Accent, Warn, Disabled and Link. On the other hand, Bootstrap provides about 9 color options: Primary, Secondary, Success, Danger, Info, Dark, Warning and Link. Angular material takes this further by providing different types of button: Fab Buttons, Icon Buttons, Raised and Basic (not raised – link like) Buttons. The icon buttons and Fab Buttons are good for small screen devices.

Card

I don’t have much to say about cards in both Angular material and Bootstrap. I could not find much difference and I found it straight forward to use either. That said, bootstrap provides more color options as compared to the plain card provided by Angular Material. Maybe it’s because I haven’t dug dipper into the card API in Angular Material, but I would say bootstrap has small advantage here. You can easily fix this issue with CSS.

Collapse or Expansion Panel?

While both Bootstrap and Angular Material might be using different names for these components, I did not find any significant difference between them. You can choose either and you will not be disappointed. May be the collapse from bootstrap looks a bit dated but that could be easily taken care by some CSS Styling.

Forms & Input

These is a group of components for forms found in both Angular Material and Bootstrap. These are the controls you would require for your forms such as text input, checkbox, radio button, text area etc. In this case, Angular has more controls out of the box as compare to Bootstrap. This includes a Date Picker, a Slider, a Slider Toggle and AutoComplete field – Searchable select control. So, in this case Angular Material is much preferable as compared to bootstrap.

This a case of naming difference for the same component. Having used both, I would be hard pressed to say which one is better. But if you were just interested with a modal window only, then go with angular material as you can import that component only. The same applies to all angular material components.

Both Angular Material and Bootstrap have menus components but with different implementation. Angular Material has a toolbar which is equivalent to Bootstraps own navbar component. Angular has a unique sidebar component which has no equivalent in Bootstrap. Bootstrap provides an easy way to create a responsive navbar as compared to Angular Material. In angular you have to rely on Angular Flex Layout for a responsive toolbar which can be difficult. Both Angular Material and Bootstrap provide components for normal menu and drop-down menu.

Lists Components

The angular material list component is much better compared to the bootstrap list group component. The bootstrap component has more color alternative as compare to Angular material but that can be solved by some CSS styling. Other Components

  1. Pagination
  2. Progress
  3. Tooltips

Bootstrap Unique Components

Just like they have some common components, this two have their differences. There are some components found on Bootstrap but not found in Angular Material. It is important to note these components can still be added to Angular Material or vice versa on a latter release. These is a list of components that are currently found Bootstrap but not Angular Material.

  1. Alerts
  2. Breadcrumb
  3. Carousel
  4. Collapse
  5. Jumbotron
  6. Popovers
  7. Scrollspy

Angular Material Unique Components

Here is a list of components currently found in Angular Material but not in Bootstrap:

  1. Date picker
  2. Slider
  3. Slide toggle
  4. Toolbar
  5. Grid list
  6. Stepper
  7. Chips
  8. Icon
  9. Progress spinner
  10. Snackbar
  11. Sort header

Conclusion

Both Angular Material and Bootstrap have lots of amazing components. While in the case of bootstrap there is more than just component, it has utilities and a lot of helper classes and responsive grid design all rolled up in one. On the other hand, Angular material does have some helper classes and better integration with Material Icons. On its own, it doesn’t provide responsive web design but can be used together with Angular Flex Layout to achieve that. If you decide to go with Angular material, you might want to have a look at Angular Flex for responsive design. In case you decide to go with Bootstrap, here is a guide to assist you get started with bootstrap in your Angular project.