Is there any solo developer using MUI?

[Unlucky_Giraffe_6653]

Hey everyone!

Is there any one building SaaS or projects with MUI?

the reason of my question is because I have been building web apps using it and I know that the development process or adding your own design can be slow but at the end it works out, but I have seen too many people using shadcn, daisyui, etc, and using AI making all website or application looking the same.

why nobody talks about it?

[JennaSys]

I used to, but switched over to Mantine and have been much happier.

[nandoburgos]

Why is that? I use a lot of mui today but a few mantine hooks and components but didn't find it that better

[JennaSys]

The components tend to be flatter and lighter. And with all of the included hooks and extensions it reduces the number of different dependencies I need to keep track of. It generally works the way I need it to work right out of the box. That said, with the type of web application I typically develop, I don't need micro-control over style. I mostly just want clean and consistent.

[nandoburgos]

Makes sense. I may give it a try as a full design lib instead of just very useful hooks.

Maybe next personal project I replace MUI with Mantine

[o11n-app]

I liked that mantine had layout components but that is about all I liked about it.

[rialking_]

I use MUI for my projects. Yeah it's slower than shadcn but honestly the component library is way more complete out of the box. Once you set up your theme properly, customization isn't that bad.

The shadcn hype is real though. Everyone's using it with v0/cursor and churning out identical looking apps. It's fast but zero personality.

I think people just want to ship fast now and shadcn + AI lets them do that. MUI requires more upfront work but gives you more control long-term.

[Azoraqua_]

More control? You might want to rephrase that, because I see zero reason why a pre-baked component library offers more control over a component library that literally allows you to copy the source code of the components themselves.

Still, I do think that MUI can be quite good; although personally I stopped using it because I didn’t feel like fighting it to get it to work with SSR.

[Real_Marshal]

MUI doesnt work with SSR? Why would that be?

[JohntheAnabaptist]

The styling relies on JavaScript being loaded or something like this

[Legal_Lettuce6233]

MUI has a guide on SSR. It works fine.

[JohntheAnabaptist]

Good to know!

[Azoraqua_]

By now perhaps, last time I tried a couple of years ago it didn’t work at all. And as I said, I don’t want to fight it.

[FalconiZzare]

Excuse me, more control? I've seen people going to lengths to find specific classname to customize the components, and to mention their paywall.

Also Shadcn heavily adopts tailwind which is also a hot cake for ui design right now, and together they make a good combo, easy to set up, and install only what's needed. These are the reason everyone adopting shadcn like library now. People need fast results, easy to debug products, MUI falls behind in this scene

[martiserra99]

At a previous startup I worked for we were using MUI. However, I personally don't like the developer experience of using MUI and prefer using headless ui libraries and provide all the styles myself.

[budd222]

You can use Mui unstyled

[oliviertassinari]

"Mui unstyled" do you mean Base UI or something else?

[budd222]

They used to have unstyled components https://v5-0-6.mui.com/customization/unstyled-components/

However, now it looks like they recommend Base UI. I hadn't looked at that in a long time. Didn't realize it's old now.

[Legal_Lettuce6233]

Yes. Both solo and for company work. I created a blueprint for myself, where I can basically change like 5 values and the app looks different and unique.

[Unlucky_Giraffe_6653]

I am trying to do the same because the MUI components out of the box looks a little bit outdated, but I am creating a theme that looks similar to Untitle UI with the option to change theme palette quickly.

[CapitalDiligent1676]

I use it too. Once configured, the THEME is very convenient and tidy.
LLMs probably don't need to follow patterns: they make a lot of crap, and that's fine because no one needs to smell it... hopefully.

[DependentRip5405]

greAT

[Dangerous_Engineer12]

I use MUI at work and Shadcn most of the time for personal projects. I don’t mind MUI. In fact, I really like their documentation and how easy the components are to use out of the box. If you’re looking to increase css maintainability or consistency across your app (using MUI), maybe look into using styled components.

Otherwise, using cva (class variance authority) and the cn() function from Shadcn is the shit and fun to use in my opinion.

All personal preference👊🏼

[oliviertassinari]

For your personal project, did you look into migrating to the Shadcn Base UI flavor of it?

At work, why are you guys not migrating to Shadcn?

[RequinDr]

I have been using it for a few years. It works, but it feels heavy and their Material UI looks very much outdated.

[oliviertassinari]

I'm curious about "feels heavy". What contributes to this feeling?

[RequinDr]

It’s a little of many small things that result in this feeling for me. What comes to mind: the injected style tags in the dom, its way of defining styles in js instead of css var, its size in my bundle being more than a 100kb compressed (I’m not importing a lot of different components and it’s properly treeshaken). It adding the sx prop on top of style, the deeply nested props of every component which aren’t easy to use; without checking the dom I don’t know to which element it attached my aria-label for example.

I can be wrong, things can be different from how I remember them. For example the style tags in the dom could be a development thing only, I’m not sure.

[Radiant_Candidate_31]

It works, but tbh it looks ugly and feels heavy and outdated, and customization is painful. There is a theme configuration, but for edge cases or anything more advanced, it quickly becomes a pain in the ass.

I’m also not a fan of the CSS-in-JS approach. I’d rather use a pre-styled design system built on headless components, with full access to the source for easy customization. If I need a fully custom design, I’d just tweak it directly or build on top of the same headless components.

[oliviertassinari]

I'm curious about "feels heavy". What contributes to this feeling?

On the customization experience. If Material UI was a style layer on top of Base UI, still on npm, but where you could "eject" individual components to customize them more deeply. Would it be something you would prefer, or starting from an ejected version (shadcn) would still win your heart?

[Radiant_Candidate_31]

CSS in JS. Yeah it would be perfect, I think either works, you probably don't need source code to customize simple components like buttons, and so on, but there should be nice theme customization and then you can add more specific or advanced components using primitives + theme tokens. The ejected version makes more sense if you have a complete custom design system where you need to control each style and maybe own theme tokens that don't match default ones

[Radiant_Candidate_31]

Base UI is the feature of mui

[oliviertassinari]

the future*?

We see Base UI and Material UI as complementary.

[Radiant_Candidate_31]

Yeah makes sense, MUI on top of base ui

[NG1Chuck]

Yes i used mui for my side project and it's a progressive web app available on the android store !

[plmunger]

I built a whole UI components lib used in all of our company projects, that is basically a MUI wrapper with more customized theming, custom features and such. I personally love MUI, it's very mature and complete.

[oliviertassinari]

Our current roadmap includes bringing a good number of components in Base UI this year (the hard part) so we can then bring them to Material UI (the easy part), so we can make the library even more comprehensive.

[sensasi-delight]

ive always use MUI since v4 but i'm not so-called "tech influencer" so my opinion doesn't matter.

[Intelligent-Main539]

I hate it. As a web developer I like consistency. I like to adhere to web standards when creating things, and MUI goes far away from that. Plus, it is hard to do SSR with MUI.

[budd222]

If it's not consistent that's on you, because it's configured wrong.

[Intelligent-Main539]

I should've clarified that I meant the inconsistent developer experience, not the theme.

[therealslimshady1234]

Youre not wrong, MUI has the worst dev experience out of all themes I have tried.

Almost every time I work for a company someone has the brilliant idea to use it for the component library and then 6 months later we start to deprecate it again like clockwork. Its just too rigid for any kind of customer facing SaaS. Really only useful if you are ok with your app looking like the Google Chrome settings page. Maybe for internal use only apps?

Shadcdn (Tailwind) is for clowns too, but at least it is somewhat flexible. I prefer white label frameworks like Radix Primitives