Bundle Size Analysis: Comparing React MUI, Angular Material, and IK UI

The text compares the production build sizes of three UI frameworks: React + MUI, Angular + Material, and IK UI. The primary focus is on the "dead weight" or baseline cost of each framework, measured by the size of the JavaScript and CSS bundles. The author used a simple button component within a clean Vite project to establish a consistent testing environment for each framework. Build outputs of each framework, including JavaScript (raw and gzipped) and CSS, are presented in a comparative table. React MUI produces the largest total asset size, followed closely by Angular Material, while IK UI has the smallest. This difference in size significantly impacts performance, especially in high-latency environments. IK UI demonstrated a significant reduction in file size compared to React MUI, by roughly 54%. A smaller bundle size generally leads to a faster First Contentful Paint (FCP) for the application. The choice of UI kit can therefore act as a bottleneck for speed in performance-sensitive applications. The analysis highlights the importance of tree-shaking and runtime overhead in modern UI frameworks. This overhead is particularly crucial when developers are building lightweight versions of platforms. Choosing a smaller framework can lead to significant improvements in perceived application performance. Therefore, developers building performant tools should carefully consider the production footprint of their chosen UI kit.