Angular Material is built to be used with the entire suite of AngularJS and Angular.js, which means it can be leveraged to create fully functional web and mobile applications using the latest versions of JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.

Bootstrap 4 provides a more flexible grid system with larger sizes than Bootstrap 3. It also provides additional customization options through variables, mixins, and custom CSS stylesheets.

Bootstrap and Angular Material are both open-source projects that have become the de facto standard for front-end web development. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but which is the right choice for your project? 

To answer this question, we are going to compare both Bootstrap vs Angular Material in this article, and then you can decide for yourself which one is more suitable for your project. But first things first, allow me to introduce who our contenders are. 

What is Bootstrap?

Bootstrap was developed by Twitter as a way to make creating websites easier and more accessible, without sacrificing any of the functionality that users expect. The goal was to create a framework that could be used across a wide range of environments, from mobile devices to desktop computers and tablets.

What is Angular Material?

Angular Material is an open-source project from Google that’s similar to Bootstrap in many ways. However, it also offers several features that are unique to its ecosystem. In addition to providing components that can be customized or extended, it provides services like data binding and routing through Angular core APIs.

Comparing Bootstrap and Angular Material

Basic comparison 

Bootstrap and Angular Material are two of the most popular front-end frameworks for building apps. Here’s how they compare:

Bootstrap is a responsive, mobile-first framework that includes a CSS grid system, a custom typography system, and numerous other tools for creating beautiful websites. Angular Material is the official UI component library from Google that includes many components built on top of Angular’s template language.

Bootstrap uses HTML5 markup, CSS3 styling, and JavaScript for its codebase. It also supports IE6+ and all modern browsers. Angular Material is written in TypeScript which compiles to JavaScript. It supports IE8+, Safari 5+, Chrome 25+, and Opera 12+.

Bootstrap has a large community of developers around the world who have contributed ideas, issues, and pull requests to Bootstrap since version 1.0 was released in 2011. Angular Material has an active developer community behind it and it’s used by more than 11 million developers worldwide through its GitHub repository and npm package manager installable via the command line or NPM registry (npm install angular-material).

Now, let’s get a real comparison between Bootstrap and Angular Material contenders against some basic needs of your projects and see how well they perform in each arena. 

Unique components

Bootstrap is based around 12 unique modules, while Angular Material has multiple components with similar functionality.

Bootstrap includes a foundation, grid, button, alert, form, and tooltip components. There’s also a nav component for navigation menus. The material team has built up an extensive list of official material components. These include workhorse component types like card, dialog, and dropdown.

Card

Bootstrap has a card component similar to the angular material card. The difference between the two components is that bootstrap uses several classes, while angular material uses a single class.

The card component is a custom component that has been made to work with the Bootstrap 4 library. It is not part of the Angular Material framework but it was designed to work with the Bootstrap stylesheet. This means that you can use the card component with other CSS frameworks without any issues.

The card component comes in two flavors: flat and flexed. The flat version has a fixed width, while the flexed version has a variable width and height based on its content.

Dialog or Modal

The biggest difference between Angular Material and Bootstrap is the dialog or modal feature. A modal is a window that covers the entire screen, blocking all other windows and elements on your site.

In Bootstrap, you can use modals to display pop-up windows for forms or content, even when someone scrolls down or out of your site. These full-screen windows can be used in a variety of ways, including to show workflows that might not fit into an existing page layout if they’re launched from your homepage.

Angular Material doesn’t have a built-in modal component, but you can use Angular’s Dialog service to create one using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Menu or Navbar

Navbars are often used for a menu and can be used to display navigation links or any other content that needs to be shown in a consistent location.

Bootstrap has a built-in navbar that can be added to your site by adding the <nav> element and the class .navbar. This will add a header and footer to your site’s header along with the navbar itself. It also provides some extra functionality that allows you to use icons as well as add dropdowns and buttons inside the navbar.

Angular Material provides this functionality as well with its material design navbar. However, they’ve done it in a different way than Bootstrap by using cards instead of just using <div> elements as would be found in Bootstrap. This means that instead of having one container element, you have two: one with an icon and another with content inside.

Expansion panel

The expansion panel is a component that allows you to show and hide content based on the state of an element. It has been modeled after the Bootstrap Collapse component, but with a few tweaks.

The expansion panel is used in conjunction with the $modal variable to determine when the modal should be shown or hidden. The modal variable can be used as a Boolean value, or it can be set to true/false depending on whether or not you want your modal to be shown/hidden. The expansion panel is available on both Bootstrap 4 and Angular Material apps.

Bootstrap has a panel in the top right corner called the expansion panel that allows you to add or remove components such as buttons, links, inputs, etc., by clicking on them. The expansion panel can be customized through CSS so you can customize it according to your needs. In contrast, in Angular Material, there are no such features that can be customized as per your requirement.

Application Architecture

Angular Material offers a different architecture compared with Bootstrap. It is based on components that can be used in any project and do not require additional code from external libraries such as jQuery or ReactJS.

Responsive-oriented approach

Bootstrap and Angular Material are both responsive-oriented frameworks. They’re designed to help you build a responsive site that looks good on all devices, but they’re different in a few important ways.

Bootstrap’s approach to responsiveness is built around media queries — HTML elements that allow you to target specific screens according to their size and resolution. The framework includes predefined styles for different display sizes, which can help your design adapt as the browser window changes size.

Angular Material also uses media queries, but it also provides many features to help you build responsive sites. For instance, the framework offers tooling that tracks viewport size automatically and adjusts elements accordingly. It also provides directives (called pipes) that let you define variables that are used throughout your app’s code base to easily customize specific components based on device-specific information like orientation or screen size.

Forms & Input

Angular Material has a number of improvements for forms and inputs. They are now better at maintaining the data entered in the form, so you can update the values of your form fields without having to submit them over again. Forms also have improved validation, with more types and fields than before.

Bootstrap 4 has a built-in form builder where you can easily create forms that conform to a specific design or UI pattern. 

Buttons & Button group

Bootstrap and Angular Material have identical button styles. Bootstrap has a few extra buttons, but it is mostly the same.

Angular Material has slightly different styles for all of its buttons. They are all more rounded instead of square like Bootstrap’s.

Both give you the option to style your button with a background color, text color and border radius.

UI and UX

The biggest difference between Bootstrap vs Angular Material is how they handle the UI/UX side of things. Bootstrap is built on the idea of style over functionality and focuses on making the codebase easy to maintain by making it as modular as possible. Angular Material works more like a standard UI library in that it uses HTML and CSS instead of JavaScript or NativeScript.

Final words

I hope this article has been helpful to you in deciding which technology to pick for your next project. As I have mentioned before, the decision will be solely based on what your requirements are and which framework is capable enough to fulfill them. Now, both our contenders of today’s battle Bootstrap vs Angular Material have their strengths and weaknesses, and frankly, there isn’t any framework yet made that could be hailed as a one-size-fits-all kind of solution. So, now the ball is in your court, what will you do?