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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Content Source:

1. betterprogramming.pub