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Add to SafariWhen comparing Materialize vs mini.css, the Slant community recommends mini.css for most people. In the question“What is the best CSS framework?” mini.css is ranked 4th while Materialize is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose mini.css is:
The whole framework is built on flexbox and works really well on most platforms.
Question 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 Flexbox-based
The whole framework is built on flexbox and works really well on most platforms.
Pro Active developer
The developer is actively maintaining the project and responding to any issues and questions.
Pro Minimal
The framework is really tiny, under 7KB gzipped.
This is what makes mini.css stand out, because it looks like a pretty powerful library and it still is under 10KB.
Pro Responsive
It works great on all devices, mobile websites are really easy to develop and view.
Pro Style-agnostic
Few flavours so far, but there is a lot of space for customization.
Pro Great documentation
From basic syntax, templates, examples, customization to-dos and don'ts. The documentation is pretty great.
Pro Supports CSS custom properties (var)
No other framework supports CSS variables right now (as of November 2017). The latest alpha of mini.css supports this feature, making customization even easier.
Pro Accessible
ARIA rules are a priority and it works very well for all users.
Works really well with screenreaders.
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 Archived
Git repo has been archived so it's pretty unlikely to receive bug fixes or new features.
Con Not widely used
A large community is always an advantage especially for open source projects. It means better documentation, continued development, and lowers the possibility for the project to be abandoned in the future since the probability for someone from the community to keep maintaining it is larger if the community is larger.
Con Single developer
There is no team developing this framework, except one guy.
