Tailwind vs Bootstrap

What is Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is a popular, utility-first CSS framework for building custom user interfaces. It is a framework that provides a library of pre-defined CSS classes that can be used to apply styles to HTML elements in a fast and efficient manner.

What is Bootstrap

Bootstrap is another popular, open-source CSS framework for developing responsive and mobile-first websites. It is a framework that provides a grid system, as well as pre-built UI components, such as buttons, forms, navigation menus, and more, that can be used together to provide a consistent look and feel for web designs.

Is Tailwind better than Bootstrap?

No. You can't say tailwind is better than bootstrap, and neither can you say bootstrap is better than tailwind. These two technologies have been created to provide a fast and efficient way to add styles to HTML elements, without having to write custom CSS code and they both provide these fast and efficient solutions in their own unique ways.

You may say bootstrap is better than tailwind because it helps you write styles for your html faster, but just because a ferrari is faster than a truck, doesn't mean it is better. What if you want to move heavy things? You won't do that with your precious ferrari. Would you?

Like I said, these technologies provide solutions in their own unique ways. And as such, there are some cases where tailwind would be the better technology to use, while in other cases bootstrap would be the better technology to use.

When to use Bootstrap or Tailwind

Whether or not you use bootstrap or tailwind is largely dependent on which of the technologies you know, your design preferences and the requirements of your project. But ultimately, you can use bootstrap when:

• You need to create a quick prototype without really caring about the uniqueness of the design. A lot of people use bootstrap, and your website can end up looking really similar to those ones.

You can use tailwind when:

• You need more flexibility in the design and customization of your website.

Should I learn Bootstrap or Tailwind

Learn both. The more technologies you know as a web developer, the more valuable you become, and the better your life become as a web developer.

You need to start seeing bootstrap and tailwind as tools you can have in your toolbox as a developer. And the more tools you have in your toolbox, the easier your job becomes.

The order in which you learn these technologies doesn't really matter, but if i were in your shoes, i'd probably learn tailwind css first. This is just my opinion.

How much time does it take to learn Tailwind CSS?

The amount of time it takes for you to learn tailwind, is completely dependent on how much CSS knowledge you already have. Ultimately, if you have a really deep understanding of normal CSS, learning tailwind CSS will be no problem for you.

Note: It is always advisable to learn the base technology before learning whatever framework that is built on top of it.

Is Bootstrap easier than Tailwind CSS?

The ease of use of bootstrap or tailwind is actually dependent on individual preferences.

Tailwind CSS gives you a lower-level API which gives you more control over your design, the overall appearance and behaviour of your styles. While bootstrap offers a higher-level API with a lot of pre-defined components you can plug-in to your designs and use. If you already know CSS, and you enjoy customizing the look and feel of your designs, you will find tailwind easier for you. While if you don't like writing so much styles and you are looking for a tool that can take care of most of the design work, then you are going to find bootstrap easier.

Is Bootstrap easier to learn than Tailwind?

Yes. Here are my reasons:

• Boostrap is more popular, and as such, will have more tutorials and resources for you to learn from. Also, it has a larger community, so there are a lot of people that can potentially help you if you ever need help.
• Tailwind gives you more control over your design, and as such, makes the learning curve more steeper
• In tailwind, you are going to be learning how to build custom designs from scratch, using the utility classes provided by the framework. In order to use these utility classes properly, a deep understanding of CSS is required.

Is Tailwind CSS good for beginners?

If you are a total beginner, I will not recommend learning tailwind. In order to learn tailwind or bootstrap (or any other CSS framework), you should at least have knowledge of normal CSS.

You may be able to learn bootstrap with a decent level of understanding in css, but in order to use tailwind CSS, you need to really understand how normal CSS work. The reason why i'm saying this, is because in tailwind, you are still writing normal css. The only different is that, you won't need to use an external stylesheet and you will be using pre-defined utility classes to add styles to your html elements.

Here is an example of what creating a button looks like in tailwind css:

<button class="bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white py-2 px-4 rounded">
  Button
</button>

Here is an equivalent in bootstrap:

<button type="button" class="btn btn-primary">Primary</button>

From the both examples above, you can see that creating a button in tailwind involves using pre-defined classes that are similar to regular css styles. While in bootstrap, using the btn btn-primary class enables you to create a similar button without any problems.

Now, from the examples above, it may seem like using bootstrap is the easier option, but the truth is that, if you want to add some certain styles to the bootstrap button, you are going to need to start writing custom css styles to achieve that. While for the tailwind button, there are pre-defined utility classes you can use to add those extra styles.

This is what I mean:

Let's say you want to create a pink button in bootstrap, at this point, you're going to need to create custom styles because bootstrap has no in-built class for a pink button.

So this is how you do it:

<button class="btn btn-custom" style="background-color: pink;">
  Pink Button
</button>

while in tailwind you can just add a bg-pink-500 utility class to your button and you're done.

Here's an example:

<button
  class="bg-pink-500 hover:bg-pink-600 text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded"
>
  Pink Button
</button>

Some advantages of using Bootstrap over Tailwind:

• Popularity: Bootstrap is a more established framework and has a larger user base and a wider community of developers contributing to it.

• Ready-made Components: Bootstrap provides a large number of pre-designed UI components such as buttons, forms, modals, navigation bars, etc., which can be easily included in your project.

• Speed: Speed of development is one of the advantages of using bootstrap as it comes with some ready-made components.

Some advantages of using Tailwind over Bootstrap:

• Customizability: Tailwind provides low-level utility classes that can be combined in a variety of ways to create custom designs, allowing for a higher degree of flexibility and control.

• Performance: Tailwind generates minimal and optimized CSS, resulting in faster loading times and improved performance compared to Bootstrap.

Conclusion:

Learning a css framework definitely makes your work easier. Bootstrap and tailwind css are two amazing technologies that have been created for that purpose. Learning any of them, can potentially make you a better developer.