Materialize vs React with pre-made components

Since Materialize follows Google's guidelines for Material design, which in theory is device agnostic, Materialize itself is device agnostic too. It's designed to look good on every device.

CSS components: Badges, buttons, cards, collections, footer, forms, icons, navbar, pagination, preloader.

JavaScript components: Collapsible, Dialogs, Dropdown, Media, Modals, Parallax, Pushpin, ScrollFire, Scrollspy, SideNav, Tabs, Transitions, Waves.

Mobile-specific: slide-out drawer menu, toasts.

While the default style is not bad at all, Materialize also gives developers the ability to customize it and fit their own style, while still keeping in line with the Material Design philosophy.

Along with the CSS files, designers can also download the SASS files which can be edited and compiled.

Material design is very opinionated on how design elements should behave and look. The basics of which revolve around certain visual elements (physics, space, momentum and light) which are used to create specific UX elements.

This is very helpful because it creates a consistent feel without making every design look the same. This can be seen in Materialize too, where each element may be customized but still it keeps the consistent look of the material design.

Since every single UI component is created independently in JavaScript, it becomes very easy to reuse them throughout your app without having to re-write them.

React is built by Facebook engineers initially to be used only for their inner projects especially to solve the problem of building large complex applications with constantly changing data.

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language.

One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly.

With React this is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided.

Instead of relying on the DOM, React implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself.

Since React's virtual DOM system is implemented completely in JavaScript, it's very easy to write UI test cases.

React is used on one of the most visited websites on the planet, Facebook. With stellar results and with million of people experiencing it every day.

ReactJS can be used independently as the only library for building the front-end, or it can be used alongside JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, or even Angular.

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized.

Since React v0.15, SVG is fully supported. React supports all SVG attributes that are recognized by today's browsers.

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory.

React has an official Chrome Extension which is used as a developing and debugging tool. It can be used to quickly and painlessly debug your application or view the whole application structure as it's rendered.

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser.

This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines.