5 Reasons People Dislike MUI & Better Alternatives 2025

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The Elephant in the Room: Why So Many Developers Have a Love-Hate Relationship with MUI

Walk into any discussion about React UI libraries, and it won't be long before you hear its name: MUI. Formerly known as Material-UI, it's one of the most popular, comprehensive, and widely-used component libraries in the React ecosystem. For years, it has been the go-to choice for developers looking to build user interfaces quickly. It provides a vast suite of pre-built, well-tested components that follow Google's Material Design principles, enabling teams to spin up complex admin panels, dashboards, and applications in record time.

MUI's popularity is well-earned. It offers excellent documentation, strong TypeScript support, and a component for nearly every conceivable use case. From simple buttons and inputs to complex data grids and date pickers, MUI has you covered. It's a powerhouse of productivity, a testament to the power of a mature, open-source project.

And yet... a growing undercurrent of discontent has become impossible to ignore. For every developer who sings its praises, there seems to be another who groans at the mere mention of it. On platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and dev forums, you'll find countless threads debating its merits and, more often, its frustrations. The sentiment is clear: while MUI is powerful, it comes with a significant set of trade-offs that are pushing many developers to look for alternatives.

This post isn't a hit piece. The goal is not to bash MUI but to have an honest conversation. We'll dive deep into the five most common reasons why developers are growing weary of MUI. We'll explore the technical and philosophical pain points, providing concrete examples along the way. Most importantly, we'll look ahead to 2025 and beyond, highlighting a new generation of powerful, flexible, and developer-friendly alternatives that might be a better fit for your next project. Whether you're a seasoned MUI user feeling the friction or a new developer trying to choose a stack, this guide will help you understand the landscape and make an informed decision.

Reason 1: The Golden Cage of Opinionated Design

The Problem: Customization Can Be a Battle

MUI's greatest strength is also its most significant weakness: it is inextricably linked to Material Design. This is a fantastic advantage if your project's design brief is "make it look like a Google product." You get a cohesive, professional-looking UI straight out of the box. The problem arises the moment your designer hands you a mockup that deviates from these well-trodden principles.

Trying to bend MUI components to fit a unique, non-Material brand identity can feel like swimming upstream. The library is highly opinionated about how things should look and behave. Overriding default styles often requires a deep dive into the component's DOM structure, targeting specific, cryptically named CSS classes, and fighting specificity wars. What should be a simple CSS change can quickly devolve into a messy pile of overrides that are difficult to maintain.

This has led to the infamous "MUI look." You can often spot an MUI application from a mile away. While consistency is good, it can also lead to a sea of homogenous-looking websites that lack a distinct brand personality. The effort required to break free from this mold is often so high that many teams simply don't bother, settling for "good enough" instead of "just right." The core issue is that you're not just using components; you're adopting an entire design system, whether you want to or not.

Example: The "Simple" Button Restyle

Let's say a designer wants a button with a thick bottom border that creates a 3D, pushable effect. It should have a specific font, color, and no uppercase text transform. In standard CSS, this is trivial. With MUI, it's a bit more involved.

You might start with the `sx` prop, but for more complex overrides, especially on pseudo-classes like `:active`, you might need to use the `styled` utility.

import { styled } from '@mui/material/styles';
import Button from '@mui/material/Button';

const Custom3DButton = styled(Button)(({ theme }) => ({
  // Resetting MUI's defaults
  textTransform: 'none',
  fontWeight: 'bold',
  fontFamily: '"Comic Sans MS", "Chalkboard SE", "cursive"', // Forgive me
  
  // Custom styles
  backgroundColor: '#5DADE2',
  color: 'white',
  border: 'none',
  borderBottom: '4px solid #1B4F72',
  borderRadius: '8px',
  padding: '10px 20px',

  '&:hover': {
    backgroundColor: '#85C1E9',
  },

  '&:active': {
    // Simulate the button being pushed down
    transform: 'translateY(2px)',
    borderBottom: '2px solid #1B4F72',
  },
}));

// Usage:
// <Custom3DButton>Push Me!</Custom3DButton>

While the `styled` API is powerful, notice how much boilerplate is needed just to create one custom button. You have to know which properties to reset (`textTransform`) and how to properly structure the theme function. For a large application with dozens of custom component variants, this approach can lead to a lot of abstraction and code that lives far away from where the component is actually used.

The Tip: Embrace `styled()` or Know When to Fold

If you're committed to MUI but need heavy customization, the best practice is to fully embrace the `styled()` utility from `@mui/material/styles`. Create your own library of custom-styled components (e.g., `MyProjectButton`, `MyProjectCard`). This encapsulates the styling logic, makes it reusable, and keeps your application code clean. It's more work upfront but pays dividends in maintainability.

However, the most crucial tip is to evaluate this during the planning phase. If your project's design is fundamentally different from Material Design, MUI might be the wrong tool for the job from the very beginning. Choosing a less opinionated library from the start will save you countless hours of fighting the framework.

Reason 2: The Weight of a Giant - Performance & Bundle Size

The Problem: A Heavy Footprint

MUI is a behemoth. It's a comprehensive library with a solution for everything, and that comprehensiveness comes at a cost: bundle size. While modern bundlers and tree-shaking do an excellent job of removing unused code, the core runtime and the components you *do* use can still add a significant amount of JavaScript and CSS to your application's initial load.

On a site like Bundlephobia, you can see that `@mui/material` itself is quite large, and it has dependencies like `@mui/system` and `@emotion/react`. For a simple landing page or a marketing site, pulling in MUI for just a button and a modal can be overkill, negatively impacting your Core Web Vitals and user experience, especially on slower mobile connections.

Beyond bundle size, there's the issue of runtime performance. MUI components, by default, use Emotion, a CSS-in-JS library. This means that styles are processed and injected into the DOM at runtime. While incredibly flexible for dynamic styling, this adds a non-zero overhead to every component render. Furthermore, MUI components often have a deep and complex DOM structure to achieve their stylistic and accessibility goals. A simple-looking `TextField` can render a surprising number of nested `div` elements. For applications with thousands of rendered components, like a complex data table, this can lead to slower re-renders and a less snappy user experience.

Example: The Cost of Convenience

Imagine you're building a simple blog. The main page displays a list of articles. Each article "card" has a title, a short excerpt, and a "Read More" button. You decide to use MUI's `Card`, `CardContent`, `Typography`, and `Button` components.

For this relatively simple UI, you've now introduced the entire MUI styling engine and the code for these four components (and their dependencies) into your bundle. If a user is visiting your blog on a 3G connection, the time it takes to download, parse, and execute that extra JavaScript could be the difference between them staying to read an article or bouncing in frustration.

Contrast this with an approach using a utility-first library like Tailwind CSS. The HTML would be styled with classes, but there would be no component library runtime. The final CSS file would be tiny, containing only the utility classes you actually used in your project. The performance difference, especially on initial load, can be substantial.

The Tip: Be a Ruthless Importer & Consider the Base

First and foremost, always follow MUI's own performance guidance. Use path imports to ensure tree-shaking works effectively:

// Good: Ensures only the button code is bundled
import Button from '@mui/material/Button';

// Bad: Pulls in the entire library, hindering tree-shaking
import { Button } from '@mui/material';

For performance-critical applications, take a serious look at MUI Base (`@mui/base`). This is a separate package that provides the "headless" versions of MUI components. You get all the logic, state management, and accessibility features, but with zero built-in styles. You are then free to style them using any method you prefer—plain CSS, CSS Modules, Tailwind CSS, etc. This gives you the best of both worlds: the robust functionality of MUI's components without the performance overhead of its styling engine.

Reason 3: The Labyrinthine API & Learning Curve

The Problem: Drowning in Props

Open the documentation for any moderately complex MUI component, like the `Autocomplete` or `DataGrid`, and you'll be greeted by a list of props that seems to scroll on for eternity. This exhaustive API is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it provides granular control over every conceivable aspect of the component. On the other, it creates a steep learning curve and can be overwhelming for developers, especially those new to the library.

Simply figuring out *which* prop to use can become a frustrating exercise in trial and error and documentation spelunking. Do you need to change the input's style? You might think to look for a prop on the `TextField` component, but the correct prop, `InputProps`, is actually a way to pass props down to the underlying `Input` component. Need to add an icon? That's another nested prop called `startAdornment` inside an `InputAdornment` component. This "Russian doll" approach to component composition, while powerful, is not immediately intuitive.

This complexity can slow down development as engineers spend more time reading docs than writing code. It also increases the cognitive load required to work with the library effectively.

Example: The Overly-Configured TextField

Let's create a "password" field with a visibility toggle icon. This is a very common UI pattern.

import { useState } from 'react';
import TextField from '@mui/material/TextField';
import InputAdornment from '@mui/material/InputAdornment';
import IconButton from '@mui/material/IconButton';
import Visibility from '@mui/icons-material/Visibility';
import VisibilityOff from '@mui/icons-material/VisibilityOff';

function PasswordInput() {
  const [showPassword, setShowPassword] = useState(false);

  const handleClickShowPassword = () => setShowPassword((show) => !show);
  const handleMouseDownPassword = (event) => event.preventDefault();

  return (
    <TextField
      id="outlined-adornment-password"
      type={showPassword ? 'text' : 'password'}
      label="Password"
      variant="outlined"
      InputProps={{ // <-- Prop for the underlying Input component
        endAdornment: ( // <-- Prop to add something to the end
          <InputAdornment position="end">
            <IconButton
              aria-label="toggle password visibility"
              onClick={handleClickShowPassword}
              onMouseDown={handleMouseDownPassword}
              edge="end"
            >
              {showPassword ? <VisibilityOff /> : <Visibility />}
            </IconButton>
          </InputAdornment>
        ),
      }}
    />
  );
}

Look at the complexity here. To add a simple icon, you need to know about `InputProps`, `endAdornment`, `InputAdornment`, `IconButton`, and the various event handlers required to make it work correctly without losing focus. A developer new to MUI would likely spend a significant amount of time piecing this together from documentation examples. Contrast this with libraries that might offer a simpler, more direct API like ``.

The Tip: Lean on TypeScript and Build Abstractions

The single best way to navigate MUI's complex API is with TypeScript. MUI has first-class TypeScript support, and its types are incredibly detailed. When you're using a component in a TSX file, your editor's autocomplete will show you all the available props, what types they expect, and often provide documentation right in the tooltip. This turns the IDE into your co-pilot for exploring the API.

Secondly, once you've figured out a complex configuration like the password input above, don't repeat that code everywhere. Abstract it into your own reusable component (e.g., ``). Build your own internal component library on top of MUI that exposes a simpler, more domain-specific API to the rest of your application. This hides the complexity and enforces consistency.

Reason 4: The Contentious Pivot to CSS-in-JS

The Problem: Not Everyone Wants to Style in JavaScript

With the release of v5, MUI made a significant technical shift, moving from its previous JSS-based styling solution to Emotion. This firmly planted MUI in the CSS-in-JS camp, a paradigm that, while popular, is far from universally loved. This decision alienated a segment of the developer community that prefers other styling methodologies.

The debate around CSS-in-JS is multifaceted. Critics point to several potential downsides:

• Runtime Overhead: As mentioned earlier, processing styles in JavaScript at runtime adds a performance cost that doesn't exist with static CSS files.
• Increased Bundle Size: The CSS-in-JS library itself adds to the JavaScript bundle.
• Developer Experience: Many developers prefer the separation of concerns that comes with traditional CSS or SCSS files. They find the syntax of writing CSS as a template literal or a JavaScript object to be clunky and less ergonomic than a plain `.css` file with proper tooling and syntax highlighting.
• The Rise of Alternatives: The explosive popularity of utility-first CSS, particularly Tailwind CSS, has provided a compelling alternative that avoids runtime overhead and keeps styling declarative and co-located with the HTML.

By making Emotion the default and deeply integrated styling solution, MUI forces developers to adopt this paradigm. While it's technically possible to use MUI with other styling solutions, it often feels like you're working against the grain of the library.

The Tip: Co-existence is Possible (But Tricky)

If you love MUI's components but dislike its styling engine, you have a few options. The most common is to integrate it with a utility-first library like Tailwind CSS. There are official guides and community packages (like `tailwind-mui-theme`) that help resolve conflicts and make the two systems work together. This often involves configuring Tailwind to prefix its classes (to avoid collisions with MUI's classes) and using Tailwind's `@apply` directive or theme functions to style MUI components.

Another approach is to stick to global stylesheets or CSS Modules. You can inspect the DOM to find MUI's generated class names (e.g., `.MuiButton-root`, `.MuiButton-startIcon`) and target them directly in your CSS files. Be warned: this is a brittle approach. MUI does not guarantee that these class names will remain the same between minor or patch versions, so an update could break your styles.

Reason 5: The "Uncanny Valley" of Web Design

The Problem: Looks Like an App, Acts Like a Website

This is a more philosophical critique. Material Design was born from Google's need for a unified design language across its Android and web properties. It's heavily inspired by the physical world, with concepts of elevation, ink, and paper. The result is that MUI components often feel like they belong in a native mobile application.

This creates a subtle "uncanny valley" effect on the web. The UI looks and feels *almost* like a native app, but it's constrained by the browser. Scrolling physics, animations, and transitions don't behave exactly like their native counterparts. This can create a slight cognitive dissonance for the user, making the experience feel less authentic and more like a "clone."

Furthermore, by adopting Material Design wholesale, a product risks losing its own visual identity. It can end up looking like just another Google service, which may be undesirable for a company trying to build a strong, unique brand. The design system that powers Gmail and Google Drive may not be the best choice for a trendy e-commerce site or a creative portfolio.

The Tip: Use It as a Foundation, Not a Dogma

If you choose MUI, don't feel obligated to use Material Design in its purest form. Use the components as a high-quality, accessible foundation, but inject your own brand's personality. The `theme` provider is your best friend here. Go beyond just changing the primary and secondary colors. Define your own typography scale, adjust the default spacing units, modify the border-radius of all components, and change the default props for shadows and elevation.

By heavily customizing the theme, you can move away from the generic "MUI look" and create a design system that is uniquely yours, while still benefiting from the robustness of the underlying components.

Better Alternatives for 2025

The good news is that the React ecosystem is more vibrant than ever. If the reasons above resonate with you, here are some of the best alternatives to consider for your next project, each with a different philosophy.

Alternative 1: The Utility-First Powerhouse - Tailwind CSS

Philosophy: An unopinionated, utility-first CSS framework. It provides low-level utility classes (like `flex`, `pt-4`, `text-center`) that you compose directly in your HTML to build any design. It does not provide pre-built JavaScript components.

Pros:

• Maximum Flexibility: You have 100% control over the look and feel. No style overrides necessary.
• Tiny Production Bundle: Its JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler scans your files and generates a CSS file containing only the classes you actually use.
• Performance: No runtime CSS-in-JS overhead. It's just a static CSS file.
• Great Developer Experience: Co-locating styles in the JSX via `className` keeps you in one file and makes components highly portable.

Best for: Projects that demand a unique, bespoke design. Teams that want to build their own design system from the ground up and prioritize performance and customization above all else.

Alternative 2: The Headless UI Champions - Radix UI & Headless UI

Philosophy: These libraries provide unstyled, fully accessible, feature-rich component primitives. They handle all the complex logic, state management, accessibility (WAI-ARIA compliance, keyboard navigation, focus management), but leave the styling entirely up to you.

Pros:

• The Best of Both Worlds: You get the hard parts of component building solved for you, but retain complete visual control.
• Framework Agnostic Styling: They are designed to be styled with anything: Tailwind CSS, CSS Modules, Stitches, plain CSS, etc. The combination of Radix or Headless UI with Tailwind CSS is an incredibly popular and powerful stack.
• Accessibility First: Accessibility is not an afterthought; it's the core focus of these libraries.

Best for: The same audience as Tailwind CSS, but for those who don't want to re-implement the logic for a dropdown, dialog, or combobox from scratch. This is arguably the most modern and professional approach to building custom component libraries in 2025.

Alternative 3: The Elegant & Composable - Chakra UI

Philosophy: A component library that strikes a beautiful balance between out-of-the-box convenience and ease of customization. It provides a set of beautiful, accessible components that can be easily styled on the fly using props.

Pros:

• Incredible Developer Experience: Its style prop API is intuitive and powerful (e.g., ``).
• Highly Composable: Easy to build new components by composing its primitives.
• Accessibility: Follows WAI-ARIA standards out of the box.
• Easy Theming: Theming is straightforward and well-documented.

Cons: Like MUI, it uses CSS-in-JS (Emotion), so it shares some of the same potential runtime performance critiques.

Best for: Teams that want to move fast with pre-built components (like with MUI) but desire a much more intuitive and flexible customization experience. It's a fantastic choice for startups, rapid prototyping, and projects where developer velocity is key.

Alternative 4: The Enterprise-Grade Solution - Ant Design (AntD)

Philosophy: A comprehensive, enterprise-focused design system and React component library. It offers a massive suite of components designed for building rich, data-intensive internal applications.

Pros:

• Vast Component Library: Often has even more complex, enterprise-specific components than MUI (e.g., timelines, complex tables, tour guides).
• Polished & Consistent: Provides a very clean, professional, and consistent aesthetic across all its components.
• Internationalization Support: Excellent built-in support for multiple languages.

Cons: It's also highly opinionated (the "AntD look") and can be just as difficult to customize as MUI. It's also a very large library.

Best for: Internal tools, admin dashboards,