Polymer or MaterializeCSS

Hi everyone!

Which package would be recommended if I just want material design for my webapp? I actually quite like Polymer. What advantages does Polymer paper elements have over MaterializeCSS?

Webcomponents are not standard yet => shady DOM if you want to be polyfilled => no shadow hidden DOM and polymer move elements inside HTML => kickboxing MMA championship between Blaze and Polymer as each expect things to be on the other position

I’ve been working with Materialize recently - very nice framework to use, quick to get into and does much of what I want it to do with decent community support from packages that have been adapted to use Materialize (such as useraccounts:materialize)

Limitation being that I have been unable to get the SASS version working - the official version is css - there is another package that brings the sass version to Meteor, but I have yet to get it all working properly, which could be my limitation not theirs - but without it branding your app becomes much more of a hassle.

Another problem is with drop downs sitting within containing elements - for instance if you have a collection and place a secondary item that has a drop down within a collection item part of it that drop down will be obscured within the collection container. Know bug and I hope it is sorted soon.

I still give a big thumbs up to MaterializeCSS

I came from Polymer-dart - got very excited and am now working with Meteor - and don’t feel inclined to try out Polymer within Meteor.

I am using Materialize and I love the looks of my interfaces. Especially when you are also the designer, you can do a lot by adopting the concepts described in the material design specification by google (http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html#). If you like the looks of inbox by google, certainly you will love to work with materialize.

Just the main drawback for me has been selection box. If your options are pulled dynamically from DB, then the material design selection box doesn’t work that easily. At least I haven’t figured a way to get it to work.

That said, I still believe web components (and polymer) is the future and as soon as MDG provide support in the framework that will be a better option to go with. For now, materialize provides the nice paper design which gets most of us attracted to polymer. And it would be good to give it a try if you are starting a new project.

Thank you guys for your great responses. I think I will go with Polymer for now.

If you are going to use shadow DOM (just in Chrome atm) than OK, but I would not go for Shady DOM universal app. You will see why when you try to insert some template or whatever inside polymer element and it will not react at all, or break layout. Even every input is disassembled into few html child tags and Blaze dont like it :smiley:
Have fun