In web development, we have a variety of amazing web platforms and responsive designs. The top-notch websites have a responsive layout with an interactive design.
Bootstrap is a starting point that offers modularity, consistency, and style across all your pages. Tailwind provides essential support for responsive design by automatically adapting the widths, heights, margins, paddings, and font sizes of your content so it looks good on any device or resolution.
In this article, we will explore the primary differences between Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap. There will be examples of both categories for better learning.
Table of Contents
Bootstrap
- Bootstrap was initially released in 2011, i.e., nine years ago. In a very short time, Bootstrap was considered to be the most popular CSS framework. It was initially known for being the smartest framework of CSS.
- Bootstrap is a component-based framework.
- It is based on object-oriented CSS.
- Bootstrap comes with a set of pre-made components that are used to design a typical website quickly.
- Bootstrap CSS is an easy-to-learn framework that maintains consistency for different browsers and devices. If you know CSS, then it is pretty easy to learn customization in Bootstrap for website development.
Tailwind CSS
- The first release of Tailwind CSS came in 2017. It was accepted that the development is much faster with this new framework.
- Tailwind is known as Utility-First CSS Framework.
- The most interesting feature of Tailwind CSS is high customization. You can style each component of your website as the Tailwind UI demands from it.
- This framework has no ready-made components for designing. You can build your own custom components with the utility classes.
- In this framework, you are not required to write a lot of CSS code. Instead, you will be creating many classes for the HTML elements.
- Tailwind CSS is highly flexible for transforming the look and feel of the elements on the website.
Performance of Bootstrap vs. Tailwind CSS
- Bootstrap requires four main files to be incorporated in the project for development which requires heavy space to be occupied about 300 kb.
- In Tailwind CSS, we need style sheets to get our task done. This CSS file occupies about 30kb of the space.
Build time of Bootstrap vs. Tailwind CSS
- In Bootstrap, we have a lot of overhead code, and this causes the build time to be around 160 seconds.
- As Tailwind has built-in utility libraries, this shortens the build time up to 8 to 10 seconds.
Community of Bootstrap vs. Tailwind CSS
- Bootstrap has been released about nine years ago and used as the most popular framework of CSS. That’s why it is having one largest communities of millions of developers with tools and forums.
- If we talk about Tailwind, it has been introduced recently and has started growing gradually. That’s why there is still a lot of room for Tailwind to have a strong community of developers and tools.
Which one to Pick and Why?
Before deciding which framework is better than the other, let’s first discuss few examples of Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS for proper understanding.
Here we will see how the creation of the primary button differs in Bootstrap and Tailwind.
Bootstrap Example:
Button:
<button type="button" class="btn btn-primary">
Primary Button
</button> 
You can see it is quite simple to make a button in Bootstrap, but what if we need to change the styling of this button. We would need another unique class for doing this.
Grid:
<div class="row" style="background-color: skyblue;">
<div class="col-sm-4" > 1 </div>
<div class="col-sm-4" > 2 </div>
<div class="col-sm-4" > 3 </div>
<div class="col-sm-4" > 4 </div>
<div class="col-sm-4" > 5 </div>
<div class="col-sm-4" > 6 </div>
</div> 
Tailwind CSS Example:
Button:
<button class=" bg-blue-800
hover:bg-green-600
text-black
font-italic
py-2 px-4 rounded "> Button
</button> 
Here you can see Tailwind is providing interesting customization without even touching stylesheet. These states like hovering and focusing using classes were never part of bootstrap.
Grid:
<div class="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 bg-blue-400">
<div> 1 </div>
<div> 2 </div>
<div> 3 </div>
<div> 4 </div>
<div> 5 </div>
<div> 6 </div>
</div> 
Decision:
So, we can conclude that if you are working as a new backend developer or a “Full-Stack” developer, you should opt for Bootstrap first. Whereas if you are working as front-end developer, then Tailwind CSS is the better option for the custom designs.
But in the end, it is your choice either you want to go with Bootstrap for responsive design, or you want high customization in style your web with advantages of Tailwind CSS. It depends on project requirements and personal preferences.
Conclusion
The article has discussed Tailwindcss vs Bootstrap ; the difference between Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap in different aspects. There were examples so that you may understand better. I hope this article was quite helpful in learning Bootstrap vs. Tailwind CSS.
