Material Design for Bootstrap is a free, MIT-licensed UI kit that applies Google Material Design styling to the Bootstrap 4 front-end framework, aimed at developers and designers building responsive, mobile-first websites and applications.

What it is

Material Design for Bootstrap is a JavaScript-based collection of free Bootstrap templates, themes, design tools and resources, published under the MIT licence and hosted on GitHub, where it has accumulated roughly 9,247 stars and 1,108 forks. The README describes it as a Bootstrap 4 UI kit offering 700+ components, alongside 500+ material UI elements, 600+ material icons, 77+ CSS animations, 9+ useful plugins, SASS files, templates and tutorials. Framework-specific editions are published for jQuery, Angular, React and Vue, and the repository sits in the Miscellaneous / Design & Prototyping category on this registry, carrying topics such as bootstrap-4, material-design, google-material, css and frontend.

The concrete problem it solves is the assembly work that would otherwise fall to a team adopting Material Design on top of Bootstrap 4: rather than hand-building Material-style components, icons and animations to sit over Bootstrap's grid and utility classes, a developer installs this kit and gets that layer pre-built, together with SASS sources and examples. It is the styling and component layer that replaces a bespoke Material implementation, and it is explicitly positioned by its own README as the previous Bootstrap 4 generation of the product, with a newer UI kit available for Bootstrap 5 and a recommendation to migrate.

Key capabilities

• A Bootstrap 4 UI kit shipping 700+ components under the MIT licence, free for both personal and commercial use.
• A library of 500+ material UI elements and 600+ material icons for building interfaces without designing each control from scratch.
• 77+ CSS animations and 9+ useful plugins bundled with the component set.
• SASS files, templates and tutorials distributed alongside the compiled styles, so the theme can be rebuilt from source.
• Parallel builds for jQuery, Angular, React and Vue, so the same Material styling can be applied across different front-end stacks.
• Three installation routes: a .zip download, an npm package, or a cdnjs CDN reference.
• An MDB CLI workflow, where mdb init scaffolds a new project, and MDBGO provides free hosting with WordPress support, custom domains, SSL, a free database, frontend and backend templates, a webpack starter, a git repository, plus FTP and Jenkins support.
• Support is routed through a dedicated support forum, where reports are treated as prior to GitHub issues, with contribution rules documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Who uses it and how

• Front-end developers and designers building responsive, mobile-first websites and applications on a Bootstrap 4 base, who need Material styling without writing the component layer themselves.
• Teams working in Angular, React or Vue, who can adopt the matching MDB Angular, MDB React or MDB Vue edition rather than the jQuery build.
• WordPress users, who can set up a site through MDBGO in a single click, including an e-commerce shop integration that allows a blog and a shop to be combined on one page.
• Deployment and CI setups that make use of MDBGO's git repository, FTP and Jenkins support, or that pull the kit from npm or cdnjs during a build.
• The README states the kit is trusted by 2,000,000+ developers and designers and used by companies and institutions, though the source material does not name them.

Getting started

Installation is deliberately short: the README points to a one-minute installation via .zip, npm or cdnjs, with a video and a written quick-start available, and MDB CLI users can create a project with mdb init. The canonical entry point for the current material is the MDBootstrap documentation site linked as the project homepage.

How it compares

The facts do not list paid products that this project replaces, and they name no competing open-source UI kits either. What they do name are the project's own sibling editions — MDB 5 for Bootstrap 5, plus MDB Angular, MDB React and MDB Vue — so within this registry the Bootstrap 4 kit stands alongside rather than against named alternatives, and it is the successor relationship to MDB 5, not a rivalry, that defines its position.

When to use it — and when not to

There is no server-side stack to operate here, since the kit is a distributable front-end asset set that can be served as static files or pulled from npm or cdnjs; the operational costs appear only if a team adopts MDBGO hosting. The clearest reason not to pick it is the one its own README gives: it is the Bootstrap 4 version, and projects already on or moving to Bootstrap 5 are directed to the newer kit instead. A second caution is that the README reads largely as a migration notice and a set of links to the vendor's documentation, forum and tutorials, and it routes support to that forum ahead of GitHub issues, so teams wanting changes to land through the public repository should expect the contribution rules in CONTRIBUTING.md to govern the process.