What is Tailwind CSS and what are its top alternatives?
Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that allows developers to rapidly build custom user interfaces. Its key features include a large set of pre-built utility classes for styling, a responsive design system, and the ability to customize styles using configuration files. However, its verbose class names can make the HTML markup cluttered, and some developers may find the learning curve steep.
- Bootstrap: Bootstrap is a popular front-end framework that provides a wide range of pre-designed components and utility classes for building responsive websites. Its key features include a grid system, reusable components, and extensive documentation. Pros: Rich set of components, active community support. Cons: Less customization compared to Tailwind CSS.
- Bulma: Bulma is a modern CSS framework based on flexbox that offers a clean and minimalistic design. Its key features include a responsive grid system, customizable variables, and lightweight file size. Pros: Easy to learn and use, well-documented. Cons: Limited number of components.
- Materialize: Materialize is a CSS framework based on Google's Material Design guidelines, providing a sleek and modern look for websites. Its key features include responsive components, Sass integration, and JavaScript plugins. Pros: Material Design aesthetics, comprehensive documentation. Cons: Less flexibility in customization.
- Foundation: Foundation is a responsive front-end framework that offers a customizable grid system, flexible styling options, and a library of components. Its key features include semantic markup, Sass support, and accessibility features. Pros: Highly customizable, robust framework. Cons: Steeper learning curve compared to Tailwind CSS.
- Semantic UI: Semantic UI is a development framework that uses human-friendly HTML to create responsive designs with ease. Its key features include a modular structure, theming support, and a large ecosystem of plugins. Pros: Intuitive syntax, theming capabilities. Cons: Limited grid system compared to Tailwind CSS.
- Foundation for Apps: Foundation for Apps is a front-end framework specifically designed for building web applications with AngularJS. Its key features include AngularJS integration, a responsive grid system, and a focus on performance. Pros: Optimized for web apps, support for AngularJS. Cons: Limited compared to Tailwind CSS for general website development.
- Spectre.css: Spectre.css is a lightweight and modern CSS framework that offers a minimalistic design approach for fast and responsive websites. Its key features include a responsive grid system, CSS variables support, and a focus on performance. Pros: Lightweight file size, flexible customization. Cons: Smaller community compared to Tailwind CSS.
- Tailwind Components: Tailwind Components is a collection of ready-to-use components built with Tailwind CSS, allowing developers to quickly integrate common design elements into their projects. Its key features include a variety of components, responsive design, and easy customization. Pros: Easy integration with Tailwind CSS, time-saving for developers. Cons: Limited compared to full-fledged CSS frameworks.
- UIKit: UIkit is a lightweight and modular front-end framework that offers a rich set of components and utilities for building modern websites. Its key features include a modular architecture, flexible layout options, and customizable themes. Pros: Modular components, extensive documentation. Cons: Smaller community support compared to Tailwind CSS.
- Chakra UI: Chakra UI is a simple and modular component library for building accessible and responsive web applications with ease. Its key features include a set of customizable components, theme-based styling, and extensive documentation. Pros: Accessible design system, theming capabilities. Cons: Less mature compared to Tailwind CSS.
Top Alternatives to Tailwind CSS
- Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. ...
- tachyons
Create fast loading, highly readable, and 100% responsive interfaces with as little CSS as possible. ...
- Bulma
Bulma is a CSS framework based on Flexbox and built with Sass
- Material-UI
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design. ...
- Sass
Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It's translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin. ...
- Vuetify
Vuetify is a component framework for Vue.js 2. It aims to provide clean, semantic and reusable components that make building your application a breeze. Vuetify utilizes Google's Material Design design pattern, taking cues from other popular frameworks such as Materialize.css, Material Design Lite, Semantic UI and Bootstrap 4. ...
- styled-components
Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps without stress 💅 ...
- BEM
This methodology was developed at Yandex with the goals in mind that Fast development and long-lasting results for standard projects,A project involves many people,Scalable teams,Code reuse. ...
Tailwind CSS alternatives & related posts
Bootstrap
- Responsiveness1.6K
- UI components1.2K
- Consistent943
- Great docs779
- Flexible677
- HTML, CSS, and JS framework472
- Open source411
- Widely used375
- Customizable368
- HTML framework242
- Easy setup77
- Popular77
- Mobile first77
- Great grid system57
- Great community52
- Future compatibility38
- Integration34
- Very powerful foundational front-end framework28
- Standard24
- Javascript plugins23
- Build faster prototypes19
- Preprocessors18
- Grids14
- Good for a person who hates CSS9
- Clean8
- Easy to setup and learn4
- Love it4
- Rapid development4
- Great and easy to use3
- Easy to use2
- Devin schumacher rules2
- Boostrap2
- Community2
- Provide angular wrapper2
- Great and easy2
- Powerful grid system, Rapid development, Customization2
- Great customer support2
- Popularity2
- Clean and quick frontend development2
- Great and easy to make a responsive website2
- Sprzedam opla2
- Painless front end development1
- Love the classes?1
- Responsive design1
- Poop1
- So clean and simple1
- Design Agnostic1
- Numerous components1
- Material-ui1
- Recognizable1
- Intuitive1
- Vue1
- Felxible, comfortable, user-friendly1
- Pre-Defined components1
- It's fast1
- Geo1
- Not tied to jQuery1
- The fame1
- Easy setup21
- Javascript is tied to jquery26
- Every site uses the defaults16
- Grid system break points aren't ideal15
- Too much heavy decoration in default look14
- Verbose styles8
- Super heavy1
related Bootstrap posts
I'm planning to create a web application and also a mobile application to provide a very good shopping experience to the end customers. Shortly, my application will be aggregate the product details from difference sources and giving a clear picture to the user that when and where to buy that product with best in Quality and cost.
I have planned to develop this in many milestones for adding N number of features and I have picked my first part to complete the core part (aggregate the product details from different sources).
As per my work experience and knowledge, I have chosen the followings stacks to this mission.
UI: I would like to develop this application using React, React Router and React Native since I'm a little bit familiar on this and also most importantly these will help on developing both web and mobile apps. In addition, I'm gonna use the stacks JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Bootstrap wherever required.
Service: I have planned to use Java as the main business layer language as I have 7+ years of experience on this I believe I can do better work using Java than other languages. In addition, I'm thinking to use the stacks Node.js.
Database and ORM: I'm gonna pick MySQL as DB and Hibernate as ORM since I have a piece of good knowledge and also work experience on this combination.
Search Engine: I need to deal with a large amount of product data and it's in-detailed info to provide enough details to end user at the same time I need to focus on the performance area too. so I have decided to use Solr as a search engine for product search and suggestions. In addition, I'm thinking to replace Solr by Elasticsearch once explored/reviewed enough about Elasticsearch.
Host: As of now, my plan to complete the application with decent features first and deploy it in a free hosting environment like Docker and Heroku and then once it is stable then I have planned to use the AWS products Amazon S3, EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53. I'm not sure about Microsoft Azure that what is the specialty in it than Heroku and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Anyhow, I will do explore these once again and pick the best suite one for my requirement once I reached this level.
Build and Repositories: I have decided to choose Apache Maven and Git as these are my favorites and also so popular on respectively build and repositories.
Additional Utilities :) - I would like to choose Codacy for code review as their Startup plan will be very helpful to this application. I'm already experienced with Google CheckStyle and SonarQube even I'm looking something on Codacy.
Happy Coding! Suggestions are welcome! :)
Thanks, Ganesa
For Etom, a side project. We wanted to test an idea for a future and bigger project.
What Etom does is searching places. Right now, it leverages the Google Maps API. For that, we found a React component that makes this integration easy because using Google Maps API is not possible via normal API requests.
You kind of need a map to work as a proxy between the software and Google Maps API.
We hate configuration(coming from Rails world) so also decided to use Create React App because setting up a React app, with all the toys, it's a hard job.
Thanks to all the people behind Create React App it's easier to start any React application.
We also chose a module called Reactstrap which is Bootstrap UI in React components.
An important thing in this side project(and in the bigger project plan) is to measure visitor through out the app. For that we researched and found that Keen was a good choice(very good free tier limits) and also it is very simple to setup and real simple to send data to
Slack and Trello are our defaults tools to comunicate ideas and discuss topics, so, no brainer using them as well for this project.
related tachyons posts
- Easy setup12
- Easy-to-customize the sass build6
- Community-created themes6
- Responsive5
- Great docs5
- Easy to learn and use4
- Not yet supporting Vue 32
related Bulma posts
I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.
Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.
As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.
To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .
CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.
Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.
I'm building, from scratch, a webapp. It's going to be a dashboard to check on our apps in New Relic and update the Apdex from the webapp. I have just chosen Next.js as our framework because we use React already, and after going through the tutorial, I just loved the latest changes they have implemented.
But we have to decide on a CSS framework for the UI. I'm partial to Bulma because I love that it's all about CSS (and you can use SCSS from the start), that it's rather lightweight and that it doesn't come with JavaScript clutter. One of the things I hate about Bootstrap is that you depend on jQuery to use the JavaScript part. My boss loves UIkIt, but when I've used it in the past, I didn't like it.
What do you think we should use? Maybe you have another suggestion?
Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component26
- Looks great15
- Responsive13
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Flexible6
- Code examples6
- JSS5
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Interface3
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Accessibility1
- Easy to work with1
- Css1
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation36
- Hard to customize29
- Hard to understand Docs22
- Bad performance9
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
related Material-UI posts
I picked up an idea to develop and it was no brainer I had to go with React for the frontend. I was faced with challenges when it came to what component framework to use. I had worked extensively with Material-UI but I needed something different that would offer me wider range of well customized components (I became pretty slow at styling). I brought in Evergreen after several sampling and reads online but again, after several prototype development against Evergreen—since I was using TypeScript and I had to import custom Type, it felt exhaustive. After I validated Evergreen with the designs of the idea I was developing, I also noticed I might have to do a lot of styling. I later stumbled on Material Kit, the one specifically made for React . It was promising with beautifully crafted components, most of which fits into the designs pages I had on ground.
A major problem of Material Kit for me is it isn't written in TypeScript and there isn't any plans to support its TypeScript version. I rolled up my sleeve and started converting their components to TypeScript and if you'll ask me, I am still on it.
In summary, I used the Create React App with TypeScript support and I am spending some time converting Material Kit to TypeScript before I start developing against it. All of these components are going to be hosted on Bit.
If you feel I am crazy or I have gotten something wrong, I'll be willing to listen to your opinion. Also, if you want to have a share of whatever TypeScript version of Material Kit I end up coming up with, let me know.
I just finished tweaking styles details of my hobby project MovieGeeks (https://moviegeeks.co/): The minimalist Online Movie Catalog
This time I want to share my thoughts on the Tech-Stack I decided to use on the Frontend: React, React Router, Material-UI and React-Apollo:
React is by far the Front-End "framework" with the biggest community. Some of the newest features like Suspense and Hooks makes it even more awesome and gives you even more power to write clean UI's
Material UI is a very solid and stable set of react components that not only look good, but also are easy to use and customize. This was my first time using this library and I am very happy with the result
React-Apollo in my opinion is the best GraphQL client for a React application. Easy to use and understand and it gives you awesome features out of the box like cache. With libraries like react-apollo-hooks you can even use it with the hooks api which makes the code cleaner and easier to follow.
Any feedback is much appreciated :)
- Variables613
- Mixins594
- Nested rules466
- Maintainable410
- Functions300
- Modular flexible code149
- Open source143
- Selector inheritance112
- Dynamic107
- Better than cs96
- Used by Bootstrap5
- If and for function3
- Better than less2
- Inheritance (@extend)1
- Custom functions1
- Needs to be compiled6
related Sass posts
Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:
- Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
- Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
- Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
- TypeScript as programming language
- Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
- ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
- Jest as testing framework
- Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
- NativeScript-Vue for mobile development
The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:
- Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
- Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
- Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
- Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
- Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
- Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
Application and Data: Since my personal website ( https://alisoueidan.com ) is a SPA I've chosen to use Vue.js, as a framework to create it. After a short skeptical phase I immediately felt in love with the single file component concept! I also used vuex for state management, which makes working with several components, which are communicating with each other even more fun and convenient to use. Of course, using Vue requires using JavaScript as well, since it is the basis of it.
For markup and style, I used Pug and Sass, since they’re the perfect match to me. I love the clean and strict syntax of both of them and even more that their structure is almost similar. Also, both of them come with an expanded functionality such as mixins, loops and so on related to their “siblings” (HTML and CSS). Both of them require nesting and prevent untidy code, which can be a huge advantage when working in teams. I used JSON to store data (since the data quantity on my website is moderate) – JSON works also good in combo with Pug, using for loops, based on the JSON Objects for example.
To send my contact form I used PHP, since sending emails using PHP is still relatively convenient, simple and easy done.
DevOps: Of course, I used Git to do my version management (which I even do in smaller projects like my website just have an additional backup of my code). On top of that I used GitHub since it now supports private repository for free accounts (which I am using for my own). I use Babel to use ES6 functionality such as arrow functions and so on, and still don’t losing cross browser compatibility.
Side note: I used npm for package management. 🎉
*Business Tools: * I use Asana to organize my project. This is a big advantage to me, even if I work alone, since “private” projects can get interrupted for some time. By using Asana I still know (even after month of not touching a project) what I’ve done, on which task I was at last working on and what still is to do. Working in Teams (for enterprise I’d take on Jira instead) of course Asana is a Tool which I really love to use as well. All the graphics on my website are SVG which I have created with Adobe Illustrator and adjusted within the SVG code or by using JavaScript or CSS (SASS).
- Enables beauty for graphically challenged devs29
- Wide range of components and active development24
- Vue22
- New age components18
- Easy integration13
- Material Design11
- Nuxt.js10
- Open Source10
- Awesome Documentation6
- Awesome Component collection5
- Internationalization5
- Not tied to jQuery5
- Best use of vue slots you'll ever see4
- Not tied to jQuery2
- Treeshaking2
- Active Community2
- Responsiveness2
- It is heavy19
- Not Vue 3 Ready (Alpha-Version)3
related Vuetify posts
Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:
- Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
- Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
- Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
- TypeScript as programming language
- Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
- ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
- Jest as testing framework
- Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
- NativeScript-Vue for mobile development
The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:
- Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
- Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
- Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
- Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
- Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
- Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
At FundsCorner, when we set out to pick up the front-end tech stack (around Dec 2017), we drove our decision based on the following considerations:
(1) We were clear that we will NOT have a hybrid app. We will start with Responsive Web & once there is traction, we will rollout our Android App. However, we wanted to ensure that the users have a consistent experience on both the Web & the App. So, the front-end framework must also have a material design component library which we can choose from.
(2) Before joining FundsCorner as a CTO, I had already worked with Angular. I enjoyed working with Angular, but I felt that I must choose something that will provide us with the fastest time from Concept to Reality.
(3) I am strong proponent of segregating HTML & JavaScript. I.e. I was not for writing or generating HTML through JavaScript. Because, this will mean that the Front-end developers I have to hire will always be very strong on JavaScript alongside HTML5 & CSS. I was looking for a Framework that was on JavaScript but not HEAVY on JavaScript.
(3) The first iteration of the web app was to be done by myself. But I was clear that when someone takes up the mantle, they will be able to come up the curve fast.
In the end, Vue.js and Vuetify satisfied all the above criteria with aplomb! When I did our first POC on Vue.js I could not believe that front-end development could be this fast. The documentation was par excellence and all the required essentials that come along with the Framework (viz. Routing, Store, Validations) etc. were available from the same community! It was also a breeze to integrate with other JavaScript libraries (such as Amazon Cognito).
By picking Vuetify, we were able to provide a consistent UI experience between our Web App and Native App, besides making the UI development ultra blazing fast!
In the end, we were able to rollout our Web App in record 6 weeks (that included the end to end Loan Origination flow, Loans management system & Customer engagement module). www.jeyabalaji.com
styled-components
- Very easy to use and integrate11
- Huihui1
related styled-components posts
I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.
I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!
I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.
Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.
Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.
With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.
If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.
I just finished a web app meant for a business that offers training programs for certain professional courses. I chose this stack to test out my skills in graphql and react. I used Node.js , GraphQL , MySQL for the #Backend utilizing Prisma as a database interface for MySQL to provide CRUD APIs and graphql-yoga as a server. For the #frontend I chose React, styled-components for styling, Next.js for routing and SSR and Apollo for data management. I really liked the outcome and I will definitely use this stack in future projects.