Why So Many Devs Dislike MUI: 7 Frustrations in 2025

The Love-Hate Relationship with MUI

Material-UI, now simply MUI, has been a titan in the React ecosystem for years. It promises a vast library of pre-built, accessible, and themeable components that can get a project off the ground in record time. For countless internal tools, dashboards, and admin panels, it remains a go-to choice. Yet, if you browse developer forums, social media, or listen in on team discussions, a growing undercurrent of frustration is undeniable. By 2025, this sentiment has solidified from scattered complaints into a widely recognized set of grievances.

So, why do so many developers, even those who use it daily, express a strong dislike for MUI? It's not about a lack of power; it's about the trade-offs. This post dives into the seven core frustrations that define the modern developer's complex relationship with this ubiquitous UI library.

1. The Unavoidable Bundle Size Bloat

Performance is no longer a luxury; it's a baseline expectation. This is where the first major crack in MUI's armor appears. Despite significant improvements in tree-shaking, MUI carries a substantial weight. Even a simple application importing a few components like a Button, TextField, and AppBar can see its bundle size increase noticeably.

The core issue is the all-in-one nature of the library. It ships with a comprehensive theming system, a CSS-in-JS runtime (Emotion by default), and complex logic for accessibility and state management baked into each component. For a large-scale, public-facing application where every kilobyte counts towards user experience and SEO rankings, this initial weight is a significant, often non-negotiable, drawback.

2. The Labyrinth of Customization

MUI's sales pitch includes easy customization, but the reality is often a frustrating journey through multiple APIs. Want to change a button's background color? You have several paths, each with its own context and specificity:

• The sx prop: Quick and dirty, great for one-off overrides, but mixes styling logic directly into your JSX, which many find messy.
• The styled() API: The "official" way to create reusable, custom-styled components. It's powerful but adds another layer of abstraction and boilerplate.
• Theme Overrides: The "global" approach. You can override component styles directly in your theme object. This is ideal for system-wide changes but can be hard to debug when a specific component isn't behaving as expected.

This multi-pronged approach often leads to a battle with CSS specificity. Developers find themselves wrestling with styles, wondering why their sx prop is being ignored, only to discover a more specific rule lurking in the theme overrides. This complexity stands in stark contrast to the straightforward nature of utility-class frameworks.

3. The "MUI Look" and Design Homogeneity

An MUI app often looks like an MUI app. Its roots in Google's Material Design are so deep that escaping its aesthetic requires a monumental effort. The spacing, typography, elevation (shadows), and interaction feedback (like the ripple effect on buttons) are all hallmarks of a distinct design philosophy.

While this is a blessing for internal tools where a consistent, professional look is needed quickly, it's a curse for consumer-facing products that require a unique brand identity. Teams can spend more time "un-designing" MUI components than it would have taken to build them from scratch with a more flexible tool like Tailwind CSS. In 2025, where brand differentiation is key, being locked into a single, recognizable design system feels increasingly restrictive.

4. Verbosity and Boilerplate Overload

Creating seemingly simple layouts in MUI can lead to a surprising amount of code. The component-based approach, while great for encapsulation, often requires nesting multiple components to achieve a desired result. A classic example is the Card component:

To build a simple card with an image, title, text, and an action button, you'll likely import and nest Card, CardMedia, CardContent, Typography, CardActions, and Button. This creates a deep JSX tree that can be difficult to read and maintain. This "wrapper hell" makes the component tree less scannable and adds cognitive overhead for developers trying to understand the structure of a page.

5. The Hidden Cost of Runtime CSS-in-JS

MUI Core relies on a CSS-in-JS solution—Emotion by default. This means that your component styles are processed and injected into the DOM by JavaScript at runtime (in the user's browser). While this enables powerful dynamic styling based on props and state, it comes with a performance penalty.

The browser's main thread has to do extra work parsing and serializing these styles, which can contribute to slower First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI) metrics. This is especially noticeable on lower-end devices. The industry trend is shifting towards zero-runtime or build-time CSS solutions (like Tailwind CSS, CSS Modules, or vanilla-extract) which do all the processing during the build step, shipping only static CSS files to the browser. MUI's reliance on a runtime engine feels increasingly dated in a performance-first world.

6. Migration Nightmares and Breaking Changes

Long-term MUI users still have scars from the migration from v4 to v5. It was a massive undertaking that required significant code refactoring due to the switch from JSS to Emotion and a complete overhaul of the styling system. While such major changes are sometimes necessary for the health of a library, they impose a huge cost on development teams.

This history has created a sense of apprehension. Teams are wary of adopting a library that might require a costly migration every few years. The fear of future breaking changes can be a deciding factor for new projects, pushing them towards libraries with a stronger focus on long-term stability and backward compatibility.

7. Documentation Overwhelm: A Sea of Props

Ironically, one of MUI's strengths—its comprehensive documentation—is also a source of frustration. The docs are vast and detailed, but this can make finding a simple answer a challenge. When you just want to know how to override the color of a Switch's track, you might find yourself navigating through dozens of props, API pages, and customization guides.

The component API pages are dense, often listing over 50 props for a single component. Discerning which prop does what you need, and how it interacts with the sx prop or theme, can feel like a research project. Newer libraries like Shadcn/ui have shown that a different approach—providing clear, copy-pasteable code examples for specific use cases—can be far more developer-friendly.

MUI vs. The World: A 2025 Comparison

Conclusion: Is MUI Still Worth It in 2025?

Despite these frustrations, declaring MUI obsolete would be a mistake. Its strength remains undeniable for specific use cases. If you need to build a feature-rich, good-looking internal admin panel yesterday, MUI is still one of the best tools for the job. The speed of development it offers by providing ready-made, accessible components is a powerful advantage.

However, the developer community's preferences are shifting. The trend is toward libraries that offer more control, better performance, and less opinionated design. Solutions like Tailwind CSS and Shadcn/ui empower developers to build truly custom UIs without fighting a framework. They trade some of MUI's initial development speed for long-term maintainability, performance, and design freedom. The dislike for MUI isn't about it being a bad library; it's about the growing awareness that its trade-offs are becoming harder to justify for an increasing number of projects in 2025.