Top 5 Angular UI kits and frameworks
Angular keeps growing in adoption and keeps becoming every day more popular among Frontend implementations.
In this brief guide, we will have a look around some of the greatest and most popular UI kits and frameworks, trying to understand which one of those could be the right choice for your next project.
Angular Material
Angular Material is considered today one of the most popular UI kit for Angular, probably the most one, despite its root feature that makes it anchored to the material design style, which could be not good for everyone. With more than 22k stars on GitHub, this kit is proving its so much beloved by developers and guarantees good community support that keeps posting and discussing bugs, features to integrate, eventually performances issues, and more.
Pic courtesy: betterprogramming.pub
Pros
- Very popular
- Represent the base on which other UI kits lean
- A decent number of components
- Integrates the Material Design
- Multiple modules, not monolithic
- Integrates a good CDK
- Provides some accessibility features
- Still supporting IE 11
Cons
- Hard to customize: working with this kit will make you suffer against weird DOM structures, ghosted tags, and hard-to-code CSS styles, which in some cases required the notorious (and bad) approach of ::ng-deep rules
- Strictly bound to the Material design style
- Documentation is not much exhaustive, will lead you to StackOverflow searches. Also missing a good search engine in docs pages.
Verdict
Good to develop a CRM or an admin software, very bad for general-purpose Front end needings. Still missing good documentation and the material look-and-feel could not be good for everyone. Found it very stable: use it and don’t pretend to customize it a lot, because despite the CDK it will drive you mad as hell.
Ng-bootstrap
Defined as “Bootstrap widgets — The angular way” by its authors, the Ng-bootstrap UI kit has been popular for a lot and was one of the first kits available around.
The anthem has been “let’s replicate Bootstrap features and make them all available to Angular”. The result is a good basic UI kit without complaints, but really essential. Some components are a bit inadequate compared to the original ones and the documentation is very concise. A good choice if you need the “basic bootstrap”, but not much more.
Pic courtesy: betterprogramming.pub
Pros
- Essential, which could be an advantage
- Easy to use
- Very close to the original one in terms of look and feel
- Easy to customize
- Multiple modules, not monolithic
- It’s legacy
Cons
- Essentially… you probably won’t be ok with just this one and will lead the developer to integrate features with other stuff
- Not so much popular nowadays could miss support for specific issues
Verdict
Ng-bootstrap is a good kit if you need plain Bootstrap features, not useful if you need more. Today it’s suffering the Ngx library as a rival, but Ngx is more complete, newer, and even more professional in some cases, so let’s choose this if you don’t need much.
Ngx-bootstrap
This recent UI kit designed by Valor Software is becoming rapidly popular and lives on the “Develop faster and better” motto. Could sound like an Ng-bootstrap clone and it could be considered something similar, but the truth is that this one is completely redesigned and provides better features and advanced components.
Supports Bootstrap 3, 4, and even the 5th version proving that this library provides a good supporting community and that is often updated.
Pic courtesy: betterprogramming.pub
Pros
- It’s bootstrap-like but more advanced
- Very good documentation
- Multiple modules, not monolithic
- Got specific components out of Bootstrap, like “Rating”
- Very stable, even on advanced components
Cons
- The look-and-feel is essential, requires custom CSS rules
- Sometimes it’s hard to understand what’s real Ngx and what’s not, because the term Ngx is today adopted by many other libraries and components
Verdict
To me, Ngx is the best Bootstrap-based UI Kit. Very solid, very comprehensive documentation, and never had issues. Consider this one to be the basic standard for modern web apps. If you miss something, just integrate. This is a real bootstrap to me.
MDBootstrap
Yet another Bootstrap-based UI kit, MDBootstrap is a HUGE kit and is almost the quintessential of UI components for Angular, providing really everything for any need.
It’s the only one that comes with a CLI, premium support, and which looks like a “professional” tool. But other than that the result is not much satisfying. I found it really messy, really heavy, and hard to set up.
Pic courtesy: betterprogramming.pub
Pros
- Probably the biggest one in terms of the number of components
- Good esthetic feel, way better than the basic bootstrap
- Looks good if you need a premium UI Kit
- Provides external services: hosting and a tool for building
- MDB Pro version available (required in some cases)
- Multiple modules, not monolithic… but in this case not much effective in terms of performances
- Available also for Vue.js and React
Cons
- Looks “heavy”
- Hard to understand because of its complexity, need some time be mastered
- Looks like a commercial product
Verdict
I’ve had a brief experience with this and it just didn’t fit my needings. Could be a good choice if you want to invest some time to really understand it and to adopt it as a “company standard” development process, not really suited for spare developers or Open source projects. Too complex and too less immediate, it feels like working with a “big Java framework” more than a UI Kit for angular.
Carbon Components for Angular
The IBM’s solution for Front end needings: this UI kit looks enterprise, professional, and even beautiful. Carbon didn’t become a real breakthrough in the UI kits panorama and competition, but it’s worth trying.
The documentation is superb, covering really a lot of aspects about components implementations.
Pic courtesy: betterprogramming.pub
Pros
- Professional tool, supported by IBM
- Exhaustive documentation with live examples
- Multiple modules, not monolithic
- Built-in Design patterns and approaches
Cons
- Too much professionalism for some B2C needings
- Not much popular… will you solve your issues?
- Requires good skills
Verdict
The Carbon IBM’s solution looks very fascinating and charming but must be considered an advanced tool which could not suit your needings. There are many projects where you really don’t need that much technique and its complexity will force you to spend some hours to really understand approaches and mechanisms. Give it a try if you need an enterprise tool.
For more information and to develop web applications using Angular, Hire Angular Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
To develop your custom web app using Angular, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- betterprogramming.pub
Prototyping with Angular
There are many prototyping tools in the marketplace today, and Angular isn’t one that usually comes to mind. We chose Angular for a few reasons:
- Reusable code
Greentea CRM was built with Angular as its underlying framework. Using Angular to prototype meant our engineers could reuse code in the production app. - Mature component library
With Angular Material, We were able to use pre-built UI components like this autocomplete form control without having to write one from scratch. - Supportive community
We’ve learned a lot from the Angular community by attending local meetups and reading blog posts from developer experts.
Faking search with real data
A Search prototype that didn’t serve up real results wouldn’t be very convincing to the user. However, we didn’t have time to write a functional search API or connect to one either. Instead, we went with a useful trick learned.
Use Google Sheets as a backend database
We created a spreadsheet and filled it with rows of search results. A benefit of using Sheets was that it provided a user-friendly interface for populating data. Then, with some custom Apps Script, We pushed all edits to a Firebase Realtime Database (step-by-step guide here). Finally, we wired up the Material autocomplete component to read from the database with AngularFire.
pic courtesy: blog.angular.io
A hosted prototype for user testing
We used Firebase Hosting to deploy the prototype to a publicly accessible URL. Once uploaded, we used that link to run remote user testing sessions over a video conference call. One of the benefits of a hosted prototype is that you can let your users interact with the prototype on their own while you observe their screen.
pic courtesy: blog.angular.io
Measuring engagement
With Google Analytics, We were able to add custom events tracking to see how users were interacting with prototype. This allowed us to see what users were searching for in real time. With this data, we were able to iterate Our category structure and test whether that had an impact on our click-through rates.
pic courtesy: blog.angular.io
Hire Angular Developer from us, as we give you high quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft“.
To develop the custom web app using Angular, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- blog.angular.io
