When comparing Ionic Framework vs Angular Material, the Slant community recommends Ionic Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best Angular component libraries for desktop and mobile?” Ionic Framework is ranked 1st while Angular Material is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Ionic Framework is:
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Cordova plugins
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Pro Large, friendly and active community
Ionic Framework is currently one of the most popular frameworks for hybrid mobile app development. This has resulted in a very large community of active users who contribute to the community by writing tutorials and answering questions.
Pro Free and open source
Ionic is free to use and open source, resulting in an active and helpful community of users and contributors.
Pro Components designed with accessibility in mind
Stemming from the Material Design guidelines on accessibility, Angular Material components are designed with many aspects of accessibility in mind. These include screen reader support and labelling, minimum contrast, focus traversal, consistent visual cues, visually guiding animations, touch target sizing considerations, minimum spacing, clear fonts, and more. All this can be a challenge when rolling your own components.
Pro Framework integrated components
Because the components are designed with Angular in mind, they are simpler to use and more powerful than a framework agnostic component library.
Cons
Con Can be buggy
Ionic is still a young framework (version 1.0 was released in May 2015). There are still some quirks and bugs in the framework to work out, which you can see a list of on their Github.
However Ionic is under active development and bugs are generally addressed quickly.