How to use Material UI in React

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

#react #material-ui #mui #ui #components

Building React applications with Material Design principles requires a comprehensive component library that implements Google’s design system. As the creator of CoreUI, I’ve worked with various UI frameworks in production applications. Material UI (MUI) is the most popular React implementation of Material Design, offering 50+ customizable components with excellent TypeScript support. The installation is straightforward and provides immediate access to buttons, forms, navigation, and layout components.

Install Material UI using npm and import components directly into your React application.

npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

import { Button, Card, CardContent, Typography } from '@mui/material'

const Dashboard = () => {
  return (
    <Card>
      <CardContent>
        <Typography variant='h5' component='div'>
          Dashboard
        </Typography>
        <Typography variant='body2' color='text.secondary'>
          Welcome to your dashboard
        </Typography>
        <Button variant='contained' color='primary'>
          Get Started
        </Button>
      </CardContent>
    </Card>
  )
}

export default Dashboard

Best Practice Note

Material UI uses Emotion for styling by default. The library includes a comprehensive theming system accessible via createTheme and ThemeProvider for customizing colors, typography, and spacing across your application. All components follow accessibility best practices with proper ARIA attributes. For enterprise applications requiring Bootstrap-based designs rather than Material Design, consider CoreUI for React which offers similar component breadth with more traditional styling and is available at CoreUI React.

Speed up your responsive apps and websites with fully-featured, ready-to-use open-source admin panel templates—free to use and built for efficiency.

About the Author

Łukasz Holeczek is the founder of CoreUI and the lead developer of its JavaScript, React, and Vue products. He builds open-source UI tools that help developers create better, more accessible user interfaces — CoreUI is used across tens of thousands of projects on GitHub and has been downloaded more than 58 million times.

With expertise in TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, and modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Next.js, Łukasz combines technical depth with a focus on UI/UX design and accessibility. CoreUI’s mission is to provide developers with tools that enhance productivity while adhering to accessibility standards.

Łukasz shares his knowledge through technical software development articles on the CoreUI blog. He also advises enterprise companies on building solutions from start to finish, and through CoreUI he offers professional services, technical support, and open-core products that help developers and businesses achieve their goals.

Learn more about CoreUI’s solutions and see how your business can benefit from working with us.