“The master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning.”

• Peter Abelard

Material UI is the latest addition to popular web design frameworks. Besides, developers often get confused while working with or introducing this framework into projects. Since the best way to learn something new is to seek answers to common questions and confusion, there must be a good resource to answer those questions. So, we’ve researched and gathered some of the top material UI FAQs explorers have been asking for and explored the answers in one place to ease your development process.

We tried to cover almost everything to relieve your confusion and smoothen your MUI development projects. Let’s get into it!

Enrich Your Concept with Material UI FAQs

Below is a list of some common FAQs and answers addressing core concepts, solutions, and valuable tips to help you with better insights into the Material UI framework.

01. Is Material UI open source?

Yes, Material UI is an open-source React component library that provides a comprehensive collection of pre-built user interfaces.

02. What is Material UI used for?

Material UI is used to create modern and visually appealing web applications with rapid prototyping. It also helps in web app development with consistent design.

03. Is Material UI a framework?

Material UI is a CSS framework that provides pre-styled components that implement Google’s Material Design.

04. Are Material UI and MUI Core the same?

Material UI and Material UI Core or MUI Core refer to the same library, but there is a slight difference in the npm package names of the versions. Material UI v1, v3, and v4 were available with the npm package under @material-ui/core. However, Material UI v4 isn’t used in active development, so this package is now deprecated.
The Material UI v5 and above versions are available on the npm package under @mui/material.
In other words, MUI core is the foundational product line of Material UI.

05. Who maintains Material UI?

MUI is maintained by a group of contributors, with massive support and involvement from the community. It has a core team guiding the project’s development and ecosystem and some community members who enriched it. Lastly, there is also a community emeritus that consists of former active core members who provide advice from time to time to improve the framework.

06. What is MUI Data Grid?

The MUI Data Grid is a feature-rich MUI X component built using React and Typescript. It is fast and extendable, and the components offer a powerhouse of data tables, providing a smooth UX for manipulating unlimited datasets.

07. Is the MUI Data Grid free?

MUI Data Grid has two versions available: MIT license and Commercial licenses. Between these two, the MIT-licensed version is free.
The MIT-licensed version is called the community version and is a strong alternative to plain data tables. To import this free version, use the code below:
import { DataGrid } from '@mui/x-data-grid'

08. What is the MUI Data Grid commercial version?

The MUI Data Grid commercial version includes two plans: Pro and Premium.
The Pro plan supports more complex use cases, such as adding features like advanced filtering, virtualization to handle bigger datasets, column, and row reordering, and support for free data.
import { DataGridPro } from '@mui/x-data-grid-pro';
The Premium plan has more advanced features than the Pro plan. It can group rows with functions like sum and average, and export to Excel files.
import { DataGridPremium } from '@mui/x-data-grid-premium';

09. Is Material UI SEO-friendly?

Material UI is an SEO-friendly library. There is not too much to worry about regarding the search engine compatibility of Material UI, especially if you are working on a highly dynamic single-page app with different requests like fetching data, code splitting, etc. In addition, if you need to maximize the SEO value of your markup, one of the best ways is to ensure the proper hierarchy of the code lines.

10. What is MDBootstrap?

MDBootstrap is a library that contains all the features of Bootstrap. It provides many extra advantages over Bootstrap, including better design, wider customization, theming and optimization options, integration with Material Design and Typescript, etc. It also allows you to integrate Bootstrap with Material UI.

11. Is MUI Core open source?

MUI core is an open-source React component library that implements Google’s Material Design.

12. What is ‘Stack’ in Material UI?

A Stack is like a flex container in the Material UI for arranging the elements vertically and horizontally. It manages the layout of its immediate children along the vertical and horizontal axis, using the prop to control the space between children, the prop to position items horizontally in a row, and the prop to insert an element between each child.

13. What is the difference between Box and Stack in MUI?

The ‘Box’ component is a wrapper for most CSS utility needs. By default, it renders a

const MyComponent = () => (
<Box
width={300}
height={300}
bgcolor="primary.main"
sx={{
'&:hover': {
backgroundColor: 'primary.dark',
opacity: [0.9, 0.8, 0.7],
},
}}
>
// ...
</Box>
);

A stack is a flexible container component for arranging elements horizontally and vertically. It is ideal for one-dimensional layouts, so you can use it to arrange elements in a column or a row.

import { Stack } from '@mui/material';
const Items = () => (
<Stack spacing={2}>
<Item>Item 1</Item>
<Item>Item 2</Item>
<Item>Item 3</Item>
</Stack>
);

14. Why use Material UI?

Material UI features packages with default-styled components that facilitate design consistency across different apps, websites, and platforms. It also includes extensive documentation, developer support for Typescript, performance improvements, and integration that improves mobile-first design and developer experiences.

15. What are the advantages of Material UI?

Material UI has an extensive component library. It incorporates great theming, accessibility, design resources, design consistency, and responsiveness.

16. Where is Material UI used?

Material UI is used in admin panels and dashboards, e-commerce sites, mobile web apps, content management tools, finance and analytical tools, educational sites, healthcare applications, and different web applications.

17. Is Material UI easy to customize?

Developers can easily customize them to fit their specific needs. The components follow the guidelines of Material Design, which are intended to make app development easier, more intuitive, and more consistent.

18. Can I use MUI commercially?

Material UI is an easily customizable component library that empowers React developers to use Google’s Material Design guidelines. Developers can customize it to meet their unique requirements, which makes app development simpler, more logical, and more reliable.

19. Does Material UI use CSS?

Material UI is built on a CSS-in-JS approach. By default, it uses JSS (JavaScript Source) Files for styling. It also uses plain CSS, CSS modules, styled-components, global CSS, tailwind CSS, etc.

20. Is Material UI for React only?

Material UI is a comprehensive React component library invented to empower React developers to use Google’s Material Design to build exclusive UIs. So, React is a must when utilizing Material UI.

21. Can I use Tailwind CSS with Material UI?

Material UI offers to combine it with the utility approach of Tailwind CSS by combining Tailwind CSS’s utility-first approach with Material UI’s rich component library. It helps developers leverage the strengths of both frameworks to create visually stunning, highly customizable, and functional web applications.

22. Is Material UI good for big projects?

Material UI is a well-suited component library for large-scale applications. It provides a consistent design language and robust performance. This approach, combined with its strong community support, helps build large-scale enterprise-level websites and makes web app development hassle-free.

23. What are the disadvantages of Material UI?

Material UI has a large bundle size, larger than some other libraries due to the comprehensive nature of its component collection. Additionally, Material UI imposes certain design constraints that some developers may find unaligned with their design system sometimes.

24. Does Google own material UI?

Google does not own Material UI (MUI). It is an open-source project created by community developers and maintained by Material UI Inc.