Material UI, Base UI vs. MUI X?

What’s the difference?

Missions

• The mission of MUI Core
• The mission of MUI X

The problem solved by each

• MUI Core focuses on empowering the creation of great design systems with React, it comes with two “themes” (Material Design and Joy Design). It’s about solving design problems. Technically, these two themes are implemented by creating dedicated React components on top of Base UI, they are not built with the React theme context.
• MUI X focuses on making building dynamic, data-intensive apps a breeze. It’s mostly designed agnostic. The components can be used with third-party React component libraries that implement different designs

Use cases

• MUI Core is meant to be used for landing pages and simple dashboards, like internal tools.
• MUI X is meant to be used for enterprise applications.

Key migration sources

• MUI Core's most significant source of migration is Bootstrap.
• MUI X's most significant source of migration is individual generic npm packages (and some of Kendo UI, AG Grid, Highcharts, Recharts, etc.).

Why separate Material UI, Base UI and MUI X?

Material UI, Base UI and MUI X have been developed as two different products to optimize for their 5 years of success.

The advantages:

1. From our observations in the market, Material UI doesn't need a lot more components to be successful. By not including them we force the team to focus on their go-to-market: look & feel and developer experience for the most common components. They are free of distractions, which leads to move-focused teams.
2. We hedge design tastes. MUI X doesn't need to be strongly associated with Material Design or Joy Design to be successful. It's actually harmful for MUI X to be strongly associated with a design system to deliver more value than its alternatives. MUI X could have a native Tailwind UI or React Bootstrap integration.