Introducing Material UI: Exploring 5+ MUI Dashboard Templates

Material UI is a design system based on Google’s Material Design language, introduced in 2014, and works with various JavaScript frameworks apart from React, such as Angular.js, Next.js, and Vue.js. Material UI, later rebranded as MUI, is a design system that helps ensure consistent visual language throughout your websites and web apps. Necessarily, MUI dashboard templates are a collection of fully built, out-of-the-box React components for your application that have been developed to ensure quality. They provide many pre-designed built-in UIs, designed following Google’s guidelines and principles to build components.

We’ll try to explore the basic and advanced features of MUI briefly with the 5 most popular MUI dashboard templates. These pre-built MUI website templates help maintain a consistent visual language throughout your website or application with a modern and user-friendly look, simultaneously ensuring flawless response and intuitive user interaction across pages.

Let’s get into the details!

A Short Glimpse at Material UI

Material UI, an open-source framework, was introduced in 2014 to empower React developers with more engaging and fascinating user interfaces. It was developed implementing Google’s Material Design Guidelines. To reduce confusion regarding the brand identity, the framework was rebranded into MUI, which is shorter, familiar, resembles the organization’s focus, and works properly.

MUI is not directly linked to material design. It is more than material UI and covers a broader area. Material is the foundation or base of MUI. MUI’s component architecture and API design prioritize React-specific patterns and best practices, following this Material Design by Google. MUI also integrates a different design philosophy that evolves around new web technologies and trends, ensuring compatibility with modern React practices and optimizing performance for real-world applications. MUI templates make it easy for developers, designers, and clients to achieve this.

Basic Features of MUI Website Templates

MUI was introduced to enhance the user interface(UI) to empower React developers, but later, the focus shifted to intensify the design and developer experience (DX). Additionally, MUI templates made it more accessible to the mass community so that they could utilize its useful features.  Some of the basic features that MUI templates offer are:

• Component Library: The MUI system provides a set of CSS utilities with prebuilt components and unique feature lists. It also offers a set of flexible generic wrapper components, like Box or Container, that let you design directly without wasting much time in coding.
• Theming & Customization: MUI templates offer powerful theming capabilities and customization options to reflect your brand. With the versatile customization of the pre-built components, MUI allows you to create a custom theme. By defining a custom theme and using it consistently across your application, you can also reduce redundancy and optimize the CSS output in the bundle.
• Accessibility: MUI templates are ARIA-compliant with their pre-built and ready-to-use components, which include an out-of-the-box keyboard. The components allow users to navigate in a simple but easy way, so developers can effortlessly make the site accessible to more people. 
• Design System: The root or foundation of the MUI template is the Material Design system created by Google. MUI empowered React developers to build effective Material Design, implementing Google’s Material Design guidelines to build customer-facing applications, internal tools, and mobile-hybrid apps. But now, it is responsible for a whole suite of products they can design themselves. The in-house styling solutions allow designers to create a design, maintain its consistency with the codebase, and make the website flawless.

Advanced Features of MUI Website Templates

MUI was introduced to match the growing necessities of the Material UI Design community, but now it offers far beyond that. It offers an advanced set of tools that provides fast delivery of new features. Let’s get into the details:

1. Responsiveness: MUI templates use grids that make layout creation flexible and straightforward, and enable the creation of complex layouts with ease. On the other hand, it integrates form APIs like React Hook Form, validation libraries such as ZOD, Formik, Yup, many authentication functions, typescripts, etc. that help to collaborate designers with backend developers without barriers and provide an extensive developer experience.
2. Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Server-side rendering (SSR) of Material UI involves rendering Material UI components on the server side before sending the HTML to the client. It offers many benefits, such as improved performance, SEO optimization, and better initial loading times for users, etc. MUI templates integrate well with Server-Side Rendering (SSR) frameworks. For example, Next.js for React, Nuxt.js for Vue.js, Angular Universal for Angular, etc. This framework support of MUI helps to implement material UI components on the server naturally, maintaining flexibility and complexity.
3. Integration: MUI works with other JavaScript frameworks such as – Angular.js, Next.js, jQuery, Vite.js, and Vue.js, enabling developers to leverage its components and styling capabilities across different tech stacks. Some key aspects of advanced integration are:
   
   • Styling: MUI uses a CSS-in-JS approach (via JSS – JavaScript Style Sheets) for styling, which offers scoped styles and dynamic theming capabilities. It also uses the <ThemeProvider> component to apply custom themes across your entire application or specific parts. 
   • Interaction: MUI utilizes advanced routing techniques with frameworks like React Router or Next.js for seamless navigation within your Material UI application. Furthermore, MUI offers a responsive grid system (<Grid> Component) for complex layouts that adapt to different screen sizes.
   • Internationalization: MUI supports internationalization and localization through libraries like <@mui/material/locale> and integration with i18n libraries such as react-intl or i18next.
     
4. Ecosystem & Extensions: MUI was introduced to match the growing necessities of the Material UI Design community, but now it offers far beyond that. They offer an advanced set of tools that quickly ship new features. The service is divided into 2 product lines. They are MUI Core, the foundational Material Design, and MUI X, which offers advanced components such as data grids, date and time pickers, tree view, charts, etc.  These components feature advanced functionality for data-rich applications and other use cases. Moreover, MUI X works seamlessly with MUI Core and extends the functionality of its UIs while standing on their own.
5. Performance:  MUI templates offer intuitive performance by reducing bundle size. The strategies MUI applies are:
   • Tree-shaking: Tree-shaking is one of the significant strategies for reducing bundle size. MUI uses ES6 module syntax that is compatible with tree shaking and allows unused code to be eliminated during the bundling process. But, for that, the bundle should support tree shaking.
   • Component Importing:  MUI imports only the components needed for a particular design rather than the entire library, which reduces bundle size by excluding unused components. A sample code is given below:
     import Button from '@mui/material/Button';
import TextField from '@mui/material/TextField';
     

In addition, using a bundle analyzer, optimizing production builds, and compressing JavaScript and CSS files effectively reduces the bundle size in MUI and enhances performance.

Check Out Our Latest Free MUI Dashboard Templates Here:

Motiv., designed by Rushit Dhameliya for the Figma Design Community, is a free MUI dashboard template built using the Material UI framework.

Dashdark X, designed by Malik Ali for the Figma Design Community, is an admin dashboard template built using the Material-UI framework.

Modernize is an admin dashboard template designed by Seju for the Figma Design Community. It is built using the Material-UI framework.

Elegent is an admin dashboard template designed by Malik Ali for the Figma Design Community. It is built using the Material-UI framework by ThemeWagon.

Ideal Usages of MUI Website Templates

MUI provides a massive UI component library for open-source projects. Let’s dive into the versatile usability and contributions to efficient UI design and development provided by MUI:

Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications require complex and scalable UIs and custom styling and theming to match the corporate branding. MUI offers a highly customizable and easy-to-integrate component library. Its modular and scalable architecture supports the development of complex UIs for large-scale applications and provides layout utilities, error handling, validation support, etc. These theming styles and consistent design approaches make it well-suited for enterprise applications.

eCommerce Platforms

MUI has an exclusive ability to boost engagement and empower users, which is highly beneficial for e-commerce platforms. Its grid, card, form validation libraries, and other components can be used to make an intuitive display of products, shopping carts, checkouts, product search, and order options. Moreover, MUI’s grid system ensures great responsiveness and a better website outlook regardless of screen size. Additionally, these interactive features ensure better product marketing.

Prototyping and Design Consistency

App prototyping is a crucial point and the first step before development. Sticking to a clear design plan is important to maintain consistency and a similar outlook in the prototype. One of the significant popularity of MUI is design consistency, which resonates well with prototyping tactics for the developer. Since MUI maintains a consistent design with standard elements throughout the web pages, it makes product updates and design changes simple while maintaining the same approach for developers.

In-depth Look into 5+ Official MUI Dashboard Templates

Let’s explore the features and functionalities of Material UI discussed above using the 5 most efficient and official MUI Dashboard Templates.

Minimal

Minimal, client, and admin dashboard is a fully functional MUI template with 1000+ features. This is a premium MUI template powered by Material UI. The template has rich code quality, and the intuitive design ensures a sleek user experience with modern technical proficiency.  It covers the following categories you may consider before implementing minimal to your project.

Remarks

Minimal effortlessly accomplishes the needs of developers and users. The meticulous design and intuitive features are made to streamline the workflow of any business. It will effortlessly accommodate your needs with intuitive features that simplify the workflow.

Devias Kit

DeviasKit, client, and admin dashboard is another fully functional MUI template by Material UI. It is also a premium template with rich code quality. This is a professional Next.js and Vite.js template with 85 individual components, including a toaster, 5 authentication systems, animation, a text editor, and many more. This MUI template’s flexibility and feature availability help developers find the best one according to different requirements.

Remarks

DeviasKit has a very clean and organized codebase with great examples. It keeps updating design trends to Next.js and other libraries. Its easy customization seamlessly integrates with your business, so you can focus on your business coding.

Mantis

Mantis is another MUI dashboard template with continuous updates. The React Material UI template has great customizability and design quality.  This is also a premium template with a rich code quality. This is a professional Next.js and Vite.js template with 80 individual component packages, 5 conceptual Apps like E-commerce, Chat, User Management, Social Profile and Calendar, and many more. The responsive template offers a retina-ready display regardless of screen size.

Remarks

Mantis is easy for newbies to start, and the design looks very clean. It is a well-suited template for enterprise applications with great responsiveness. It is compatible with Chrome, Mozilla, Edge, Safari (macOS), and Opera browsers.

Berry

Berry is a beautiful React Admin Template with many ready-to-use blended Material UI components. The template helps you create your backend application even faster than before. The React v18 supported template is suitable for building the User Management app, Chat app, Customer-centric app, SaaS-based interface, and many more with high-performance code & fully responsive designs.

Remarks

Berry is a page-speed-optimized template using Google Page Speed and GTMetrix tools. Additionally, it is compatible with browsers such as – Chrome, Mozilla, Edge, Safari (macOS), and Opera. The template effortlessly accomplishes the needs of developers and users.

Mira Pro

Mira is another professional React Dashboard Template with plenty of ready-to-use Material UI components and features. The template has SaaS-based interfaces that provide the best outcome for E-Commerce and analytics application websites. Moreover, the clean codebase and extensive design quality help your team move faster and save on development costs.

Remarks

The quality of the Mira Pro template’s codebase is top-tier. End product quality is also top-tier. Documentation is quality.

Honorary Mention

In addition to the templates explored above, we have Uifort, a MUI dashboard template that’s popular among most MUI users. Hence, we’re adding it to the existing list of official store templates as an honorary mention.

Uifort

Uifort is a simple but exclusive React Dashboard template for the admin and client of your website. The intuitive design empowers developers and designers, simplifying their jobs. This professional template was built with modern technologies and tailored for Next.js and Vite.js.

Remarks

The template’s simple design offers great flexibility and easy customization. It is suitable for enterprise-level user interfaces.

Pros & Cons of Using MUI Dashboard Templates

As we can see, MUI offers many benefits, such as large community support, extensive documentation, theming, backend development support, and so on. But it also has some drawbacks. The benefits and drawbacks of using MUI are discussed below:

Benefits of Using MUI Dashboard Template

Many developers are switching to MUI because of the large component library. It also offers many proficiencies, such as: 

• MUI templates ensure a consistent and polished outlook across the website.
• They offer plenty of pre-built components, saving development time and effort.
• Generally, MUI templates are built to be responsive out of the box. 
• Material UI has a large community of developers, so getting community support with necessary resources, tutorials, and community-generated components to enhance your project is much easier.
• MUI offers cross-team collaboration that streamlines the workflow and boosts consistency between designers and developers.
• The codes are easier to maintain, and debugging is easier.

Drawbacks of Using MUI Dashboard Template

MUI provides a powerful component library for creating amazing user interfaces, although it may not facilitate all projects. Some factors to consider while working with MUI are as follows:

• Most of the MUI templates now have licensing restrictions. Before using them in commercial projects, you must check the licensing terms.
• MUI templates save time in customizing, but understanding effective customization and integrating them into your specific project may require some learning, especially for developers new to Material UI.
• Depending on the implementation, there could be performance implications, and customizations overloaded with unnecessary components or styles could impact loading times.
• MUI templates are often built with specific frameworks like React, Angular, etc. If you’re not using one of these frameworks, integration might require additional effort or customization.

Trusted by thousands of organizations, MUI maintains a cohesive visual style and facilitates rapid prototyping and iteration. MUI templates save you time and money and make your brand look better. They are built to simplify your workflow and boost consistency between designers and developers. 

By leveraging the aforementioned official MUI dashboard templates and customizing them according to your brand’s personality, you can create an extraordinary design for your branding that resonates with your audience.

Enjoy creating!