Complete Guide to Types of Tiles | GL Stone Expo

Step into a tile showroom, and all six of these words – ceramic, porcelain, vitrified, mosaic, terrazzo and natural stone – will flit around you as if they were exactly the same; they are not. Each word answers a question about the tile in your hand, and when this actually dawns upon you, all that bewildering wall of alternatives will finally fall into place. 

Porcelain and ceramic is discussing the clay. ‘Vitrified’ is explaining about what happened to that clay after it was fired by the kiln. It’s a totally different story. Mosaic doesn’t even bother to ask about the fabric; it is just the size that it brings up. Separate those three questions in your mind’s eye, and a salesperson begins to make a lot of sense.

So this guide skips the usual five-bullet cheat sheet. Past the ten major categories, we’re digging into the subtypes and the regional names too—the ones that show up on a spec sheet or a showroom label and leave you nodding along while quietly Googling under the table.

Why Tile Names Don’t All Mean the Same Thing

Here’s the part nobody explains up front: tiles aren’t sorted by one rulebook.

It is only when we come to describe individual tiles that we reach an astonishing number of possible classifications—tiles can be categorised by their substance (such as clay, glass, cement, or stone), by the method by which the body is vitrified (or made dense by the heat in firing), by their shape, and finally by their surface (glossy, matte, or textured). 

None of these labelling systems compete with each other—they’re just answering different questions about the same object. Which is exactly why one tile can honestly be called “porcelain”, “vitrified”, and “polished” all at once, with zero contradiction.

Ceramic Tiles

Ceramic tile is where it all grows from. It is clay that is fired in an oven, and it is all topped off by colour and design applied to a glazed surface. When someone just says “tile” without any other label, this is usually what they picture—a little softer, a little more porous than the categories further down this list.

• Made from natural clay, fired in a kiln
• Usually finished with a glazed top layer
• Softer and more porous than porcelain or vitrified

Glazed Ceramic Tiles

A ceramic material with a liquid-glass type of glaze fused to its surface. The glaze performs two functions here:

Colour and design are embedded in this glaze, while the pores on the underside of the tile are filled/sealed by the glaze, making it so the tiles do not absorb anything; they have a tendency to get dirty and are wipeable with a cloth.

Unglazed Ceramic Tiles

Same clay body, no glass coating. What you’re looking at is the raw colour of the clay itself, which gives unglazed ceramic that earthy, uniform look — and it wears differently too, since there’s no glaze sitting on top to eventually scratch through.

Decorative and Handmade Ceramic Tiles

Some ceramics get shaped or finished by hand rather than machine-pressed—usually for trim, borders, or accent walls. If the sizing or the glaze looks a touch uneven here, that’s not a defect. That’s the whole appeal.

Porcelain Tiles

Don’t let the separate name fool you—porcelain is technically still ceramic. What does change is the quality of clay and how high it’s fired. Porcelain involves finer, purer clay and higher firing temperatures; this bakes out additional water and creates a more compact and robust material. Same family, tighter process, harder result.

• Made from finer, more refined clay than standard ceramic
• Fired at a higher temperature
• Denser body with lower water absorption

Vitrified Tiles

This is where it loses most people, largely due to the fact that “vitrified” doesn’t name a material but rather describes how it became. Keep a fireclay hot for long enough and the entire body turns to a glassy, dense matrix. That transformation is called vitrification, and a tile that’s been through it earns the label “vitrified”. So a tile can absolutely be porcelain and vitrified at the same time—one word describes the clay, and the other describes what the heat did to it.

Full-Body Vitrified Tiles

The colour and material run consistently all the way through the tile, not just on the surface. Chip one, and the layer underneath looks exactly like the top, which is really the entire point of this category.

Double-Charge Vitrified Tiles

Two layers of pigment get pressed on before firing instead of just one. That extra layer gives the pattern more depth than a standard printed design, and it holds up longer under everyday wear.

Glazed Vitrified Tiles (GVT)

A vitrified body with a glaze layer added on top — the same basic idea as glazed ceramic, just built on a denser base. This is the version most often digitally printed to imitate marble, wood, or natural stone.

Polished Glazed Vitrified Tiles (PGVT)

Take a GVT tile, mechanically polish the face post-firing, and what do we get? PGVT, the same tile that looks like the GVT one but is buffed till it is much shinier.

Soluble Salt Vitrified Tiles

A less common variant, and a clever one: soluble salts get applied before firing and react with the surface during the process itself. The result is colour and pattern that sit closer to the surface than full-body vitrified, without being a separately applied glaze either.

Mosaic Tiles

Here’s the twist—mosaic isn’t a material at all. It’s a size. Any tile, whether it’s ceramic, glass, or stone, cut small and mounted together on a mesh sheet earns the mosaic label. Scale is the whole story here, not what it’s made of.

Glass Mosaic Tiles

Small glass pieces mounted together are typically the most reflective and colourful option in the lineup and a go-to wherever shine matters more than natural texture.

Ceramic Mosaic Tiles

Small ceramic pieces adhere to a mesh. Normally more flat than glass mosaic tiles and generally more inexpensive than the glass mosaic tiles.

Porcelain Mosaic Tiles

The same small-piece format is cut from porcelain instead of standard ceramic — which means it carries porcelain’s low water absorption into a mosaic layout.

Stone Mosaic Tiles

Small pieces of marble, granite, or another natural stone, mounted the same way but bringing all of real stone’s natural colour variation along with it.

Metal Mosaic Tiles

Small metal pieces, often stainless steel or aluminium, are used almost entirely as an accent detail rather than a full surface—metal simply doesn’t behave underfoot the way clay or stone does.

Terrazzo Mosaic Tiles

Small terrazzo pieces arranged in mosaic format—the speckled aggregate character of terrazzo, shrunk down to mosaic scale.

Glass Tiles

Made from actual glass, and it shows. Since glass doesn’t absorb water at all, these tiles behave completely differently from anything clay-based, carrying a reflective, slightly translucent look that clay simply can’t produce.

• Made from tempered or fused glass
• Doesn’t absorb water at all
• Reflective, slightly translucent surface

Cement Tiles

No kiln in sight here. Pigmented cement gets poured into a mould and left to cure, which is exactly why cement tile patterns tend to look bold and a little imperfect—closer to handmade craft than machine-printed precision.

• Cast from pigmented cement, not fired in a kiln
• Poured into a mold and left to cure
• Patterns tend to look bold and slightly irregular

Terracotta Tiles

Unglazed, fired clay with that warm orange-brown tone straight from the earth it came from — not from any coating. It’s less refined than ceramic or porcelain, and that’s exactly why no two terracotta tiles ever look quite alike.

• Unglazed, fired clay
• Color comes from the clay itself, not a coating
• Natural variation from tile to tile

Quarry Tiles

Also unglazed and also clay-based, but fired denser and more evenly than terracotta. Picture it as terracotta’s sturdier, more consistent sibling.

• Unglazed, made from clay or shale
• Fired denser and more evenly than terracotta
• More uniform in color than terracotta

Terrazzo Tiles

Chips of marble, granite, or glass get mixed into cement or resin, then the whole surface is ground flat and polished to a shine. That speckled, flecked look is terrazzo’s entire identity — defined by what’s embedded in it, not by any one single material.

• Chips of marble, granite, or glass set in cement or resin
• Surface ground flat and polished
• Speckled, flecked appearance

Natural Stone Tiles

No manufacturing involved at all — these are cut straight from the earth. Which means the “type” here is really just whatever stone it happened to come from.

Marble Tiles

Famous for its veining — those streaks of mineral colour running through an otherwise pale stone. No two slabs ever read exactly the same, which is a big part of why marble gets treated so differently from anything manufactured.

Granite Tiles

The toughest stone on this whole list, with a speckled, crystalline surface born from cooled magma deep underground. That hardness is exactly why granite tile has earned its reputation for shrugging off heavy wear.

Slate Tiles 

Slate is a natural mineral that breaks down into sheets of thin layers; that layered structure provides the characteristic undulating texture to slate tiles.

Travertine Tiles

Forms near mineral springs, and the small pits and holes across its surface come from gas bubbles trapped as the stone was taking shape. Some travertine gets filled to smooth things out; some is left open on purpose, pits and all.

Limestone Tiles

Softer and with a uniform hue throughout the slab in preference over the extreme veining and texture found in granite and slate.

Sandstone Tiles

Natural sandstone comprises a collection of highly compressed sand grains. Sandstone tile will thus have a subtle sandy and somewhat coarse texture and will be available in earth-tone hues, particularly in that warm, sun-baked category.

Onyx Tiles

A translucent stone, thin enough in tile form that light can actually pass through it — often used specifically where that glow can be seen, sometimes lit deliberately from behind.

Quartzite Tiles

It starts life as sandstone and then gets compressed under intense heat and pressure until it turns far harder and denser — closer in toughness to granite than to the sandstone it began as.

Other Tile Types Worth Knowing

A handful of names refuse to fit neatly into any category above — usually because they’re describing a regional style or a manufacturing method that stands entirely on its own.

Metal Tiles

Thin sheets of stainless steel, copper or aluminium stamped into a tile. Rarely used as anything but a decorative element, never typically used as an entire flooring treatment, as metal underfoot, well, it doesn’t behave like clay or stone.

Resin Tiles

Cast from synthetic resin, sometimes mixed with pigment or aggregate. Similar in spirit to cement tile but built on a different base material – which lets it take on shapes and textures clay or stone simply can’t replicate.

Saltillo Tiles 

This is a regional type of terracotta that is made exclusively in a city in Mexico that it’s named for. Saltillo isn’t dried in a kiln at any stage of the traditional process; it’s sun-dried. This makes for an even coarser, more primitive look than typical terracotta.

Encaustic Tiles

The pattern is inlaid into the tile body using coloured clay during manufacturing – not printed or glazed on afterward. The original encaustic tiles were cement-based, and today the name gets borrowed a bit loosely for any boldly patterned cement tile.

Zellige Tiles

A traditional Moroccan style of glazed terracotta, hand-cut into shape after firing rather than moulded to a uniform size beforehand. The slight unevenness and glaze pooling that result aren’t flaws—they’re the whole point of the style.

Ceramic vs Porcelain vs Vitrified

Three names, three completely different questions. Ceramic answers, “What family is this from?” Porcelain answers the question “How refined is the clay?” Vitrified answers, “How dense did the firing make it?” A tile can be porcelain and vitrified at once, simply because those two words were never competing for the same job in the first place.

A Finish Isn’t a Tile Type

Glazed, unglazed, matte, polished, honed, textured — all of that describes the surface, not the material. A porcelain tile can be matte or glossy. A vitrified tile can be glazed or left bare. So when someone says “I want a polished tile,” they’re not really naming a type. They’re naming a finish that several different types are perfectly capable of wearing.

How Many Types of Tiles Are There, Really?

There’s no single fixed number, and anyone who hands you a clean figure is rounding off. Between the ten major categories and every subtype and regional name attached to them, you can easily count well past thirty distinct tile names and new marketing terms keep showing up. What actually matters isn’t memorising that list. It’s understanding how the names relate to each other, because that’s what lets you decode a name you’ve never seen before.

Conclusion

Ceramic, porcelain, and ‘vitrified’ come down to material and firing. Mosaic and terrazzo come down to form and construction. Natural stone tiles are simply named after the stone itself, and a handful of regional or decorative names—zellige and saltillo—are describing a style rather than a brand-new material. 

Sort those questions apart, and every confusing name on a showroom shelf suddenly makes sense. If you’re weighing your options in Hyderabad, that’s exactly the kind of clarity GL Stone Expo likes walking customers through before anyone even talks about buying.

Frequently Asked Questions – (FAQs)

What are the main types of tiles?

Ceramic, porcelain, vitrified, mosaic, glass, cement, terracotta, quarry, terrazzo, and natural stone tiles like marble and granite.

What are the different types of tiles?

They differ by material, by how they’re manufactured, and sometimes by finish — which is exactly why one tile can carry more than one name at once.

How many types of tiles are there?

No fixed number. Beyond the ten major categories, subtypes and regional names push the count well past thirty, and it keeps growing as new manufacturing terms come into use.

What’s the difference between ceramic, porcelain, and vitrified tiles?

Ceramic is the broad family, porcelain is a denser type within it, and ‘vitrified’ describes the glass-like density created during firing. A tile can be both porcelain and vitrified.

What are the different types of vitrified tiles?

Full-body, double-charge, glazed (GVT), polished glazed (PGVT), and soluble salt vitrified. They differ in how colour and pattern get built into the tile.