Materialize vs Webix
When comparing Materialize vs Webix, the Slant community recommends Materialize for most people. In the question“What are the best open source JavaScript GUI/widget frameworks? ” Materialize is ranked 2nd while Webix is ranked 6th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great-looking demo
Pro Device agnostic
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.
Pro Large selection of components
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.
Pro Responsive
Pro Mobile navigation
Pro Nice showcase of sites built with Materialize
Pro Customizable
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.
Pro 12-Column Grid System
Pro Included icon font
Pro Meteor.js integration by developers
Pro Opinionated
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.
Pro A lot of widgets
Webix is one of the most extensive UI component libraries, second only to Sencha ExtJS. Not only considering the number of widgets, but also the API methods for manipulating these widgets.
Pro Views can be constructed using JavaScript without HTML
The most common way of working with webix is to create a JSON configuration of your view in JavaScript. When you use TypeScript, you get complete typechecking and intellisense in your IDE.
Pro Seems to be quite stable
Even the most complicated GUIs are bug-free most of the time.
Pro Webix Jet
The webix Jet library adds all the required features for SPA development (routing, template loading, ...)
Pro Extremely simple to implement.
To get started is extremely simple. It has a low learning curve.
Pro Mature project
Regular updates and releases.
Pro Great support from the webix team
The company behind webix is really quick in answering any questions you have on their forum or via email.
Pro Awesome responsive material skins
Great design and icons pack.
Cons
Con Refuses to use the flexbox model
Even though Materialize states that it only supports IE10+, which supports flexbox quite well, with prefixes, Materialize has refused to use Flexbox.
Con Not maintained anymore
Con Large / heavy
267 kilobytes, minified, for the CSS and JS.
Con Deprecated
No longer supported by their maintainers.
Con Commercial license
It's not free for commercial applications.
Con Not very popular
Not really a reason to not recommend it. But it has still a small user base. It deserves a lot more attention.
Con Not modular
The library is not modular (except for some additional more complex widgets). If you only need a few widgets, you still need to include the entire library.