Tailwind vs. Bootstrap: Comparing CSS frameworks

CSS frameworks such as Tailwind and Bootstrap give web and app developers a significant boost in creating the visual appearance of their frontend applications.

They do this by offering varying degrees of pre-built CSS boilerplate and functionality, from things like utility classes for grid layouts and responsive layouts for different screen sizes, to entire HTML and JavaScript form input elements, banners, menus, and pop-up modals.

When comparing Tailwind vs. Bootstrap, you need to be aware that both are developed for different purposes, and you can't use both, so it's a matter of making the right choice for your specific use case.

This guide explains how the Tailwind and Bootstrap CSS frameworks benefit your development process, and which you should select based on your project specification and own development style.

It also discusses which CSS library is best for rapidly getting a project off the ground, and which is best for bespoke user experiences that can scale with your requirements.

What is Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a CSS framework that uses utility-first design.

This means it forgoes providing a complete user interface with predefined classes and prebuilt components and instead provides simple, smaller CSS classes for doing things like positioning and sizing elements and handling responsiveness for different screen sizes.

It is intended to provide a solid foundation for you to build your own user interface on top of. The primary features of Tailwind CSS include:

• A utility-first approach to building interfaces: Tailwind provides low-level CSS classes that you can combine to create your own designs, without having to write the CSS markup yourself. This utility-first approach also grants reusability: rather than repeatedly writing the same CSS to set fonts, sizes, or margins, or otherwise style on-screen elements, you can just use the Tailwind class that provides that functionality.

• Easier responsive design: Tailwind takes care of positioning and sizing based on screen size with its included CSS classes, removing the need for coding responsive designs from scratch using CSS media queries. Tailwind also includes flexbox and grid utilities for creating complex layouts. These classes have also been pre-tested, removing a lot of the frustration of building responsive front ends that adapt to devices of almost any size.

• Complete customization: Tailwind provides its utility classes to streamline your user-interface development, and then largely stays out of the way. This foundation does make a few assumptions, including a default theme (including colors and font) and a plugin system. You can edit the Tailwind configuration to override these and create your own custom utility classes.

• Performance and optimization tools: Tailwind helps you optimize your production code by stripping out any unused CSS classes and minifying (compressing) your CSS files.

Tailwind is used by websites such as GitHub, Algolia, and Vercel.

What is Bootstrap?

Bootstrap is a CSS framework that takes a far less minimalist approach: rather than focusing on utility classes, Bootstrap provides everything you need to build a complete user interface with minimal effort (the kitchen sink approach). This includes things like form inputs, buttons, banners, pop-up modals, and navigation.

Bootstrap also includes JavaScript for added interactivity, providing an extensive frontend tool kit and taking it far beyond just being a CSS library to help you build user interfaces. The primary features of Bootstrap include:

• Everything you need out of the box with pre-built components: Bootstrap includes everything you need to build front ends. The components are consistent and provide a unified design that works across devices. After installing Bootstrap and adding its CSS classes to your HTML, your application will be responsive and look polished.

• Interactivity provided by JavaScript: Bootstrap includes some JavaScript-powered components that are interactive — for example, pop-up modals and alerts to appear dynamically, and dropdown menus to smoothly animate. Additional JavaScript plugins are also available.

• Theming: You can modify Bootstrap's default color schemes and other styles by editing its Sass files.

• Utility classes, flexbox, and grid utilities: Like Tailwind, Bootstrap provides a number of utility classes for positioning elements and working with different screen sizes.

Bootstrap is used in websites such as X / Twitter (that originally developed it), LinkedIn, and Airbnb.

Why this choice is important for you

On its surface, Bootstrap would appear to be the best option because it includes more “stuff,” but this doesn't make it the best choice.

Both Tailwind and Bootstrap help you create frontend user interfaces, but they take different approaches, and serve different purposes within this task.

Choosing the wrong CSS library could waste development resources, or restrict what you are able to achieve with your project.

How to choose the right CSS library for your project

Finding the balance between the quick setup, convenience, and pre-built components of Bootstrap and the high customization that Tailwind offers can be difficult. You need to ask yourself:

• What kind of app are you creating? For simple applications or internal tools that just need a tidy interface and aren't going to be breaking ground or trying to appeal to a design-savvy demographic, Bootstrap gets the job done.

• Is your design compatible with the pre-built components Bootstrap offers? If so, this means that you shouldn’t rule Bootstrap out. If you need components Bootstrap doesn’t offer, Tailwind may be a better option.

• Do you want to stand out with a unique look? Bootstrap looks like Bootstrap, and uses a very safe set of design paradigms. If you want to stand out, you should build a user interface that is bespoke and reflects your own brand and style, using the flexibility Tailwind offers.

• Are you in a hurry to build a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP)? Bootstrap can get you there faster, but it may limit your creativity and need to be replaced with a more flexible framework such as Tailwind later.

• What are your long-term goals? Dropping Bootstrap into a project and making some tweaks accelerates development, but if you are working on a long-term project that you plan to expand later with new features and interfaces, it can become difficult to maintain, whereas Tailwind provides a clean foundation to work with.

Attempting to implement a minimalist CSS framework like Tailwind if you are not yet proficient with writing CSS, or want to prototype quickly, may become a frustrating, drawn-out experience.

Conversely, developers using a heavy user interface toolkit such as Bootstrap to build a fully bespoke user interface may find that it gets in the way, and spend more time and resources trying to add customizations to the default classes to change it to work how they want, rather than working from the ground up.

Which is easier and faster to build with?

The answer here is clear: Bootstrap.

In many cases, you can just add Bootstrap to your project, append its CSS classes to your HTML elements, and immediately see your user interface adopt the familiar Bootstrap style.

An easy way to start using Bootstrap is to add the Bootstrap CSS to your HTML <head> section. jsDelivr provides this for free on its CDN:

You'll also need to add the Bootstrap JavaScript at the end of your HTML <body> section:

The Bootstrap CSS classes and components are fully documented. Bootstrap classes provide everything required, including interactivity provided by Bootstrap's JavaScript, just by adding the class name of the component to your HTML.

For example, the below code snippet shows an HTML link that will appear as a clickable button because it belongs to the btn and btn-primary classes:

<a href="https://example.com" class="btn btn-primary">Example Button</a>

Most elements have their color set by adding their variant (primary, secondary, light, dark, and other colors defined in your Bootstrap configuration) — in this case, the default primary color is blue.

Which is better for making unique user interfaces?

The answer to this one is Tailwind CSS.

This is because Tailwind takes a light touch. Beyond some sensible defaults for things like fonts, colors, and spacing, Tailwind decides very little for you (and you can override anything it does decide).

The aim of Tailwind is to simply provide utility classes that make it easier to design, build, and maintain responsive user interfaces, using your own CSS, that reflect your own brand and style.

The Laracon (a Laravel developer conference) website shows how Tailwind can form the basis of unique, engaging user-interface designs.

Because Tailwind isn't designed to be used in production out of the box, it takes a little more initial setting up. Once it's installed, you can start using its utility classes to build your user interface, adding your own CSS where required to make it yours.

Above, you can see that the text size and color are set for several elements, all without having to write any CSS. Tailwind also lets you use its utility classes to set arbitrary values:

<div class="text-xl font-medium bg-[#ff0000]">This text has a red background!</div>

App frameworks that implement Tailwind CSS vs. Bootstrap

App frameworks often use Tailwind to provide base-level CSS for you to build on top of. For example, Laravel is a PHP framework that uses Tailwind CSS in its Laravel Jetstream and Laravel Breeze starter kits, and SvelteKit's default templates are based on Tailwind CSS.

Using Tailwind vs. Bootstrap shouldn't affect your choice of other components: neither is limited to any specific framework or language, so they can be leveraged in any web front end.

Many app frameworks do, however, come with integrations: for example, for Bootstrap support, Ruby on Rails has a bootstrap gem, Angular has the ng-bootstrap package, and Vue.js has bootstrap-vue. For Tailwind, you can use the tailwindcss-rails gem for Rails, add Tailwind to Angular projects, and integrate Tailwind CSS with React and Vue.js using Vite.

Component libraries and themes for Tailwind and Bootstrap

If you want to use Tailwind CSS but would like to start with premade components, there are several UI component libraries for Tailwind. 

• daisyUI: daisyUI is a plugin for Tailwind that provides buttons, form inputs, cards, pop-up modals, and more. It also includes a number of different color schemes to match your design and brand.

• Flowbite: Flowbite also provides pre-built components for Tailwind, but with a different look and feel to daisyUI. It also offers pre-built Tailwind components built specifically for Vue.js, Angular, React, and other popular frontend frameworks.

• Skeleton: Designed for Svelte and SvelteKit, Skeleton provides pre-built components with some very cool themes that have a personal touch.

If you've chosen Bootstrap but aren't happy with the included theme and don't want to customize Bootstrap yourself (which would minimize one of its primary benefits), there are many, many pre-made themes available.

• Bootswatch: There's no need to reinvent the wheel — Bootswatch offers a number of free Bootstrap themes ranging from business-like, neutral, and flat designs to bright, neon designs with more personality.

• Start Bootstrap: More than just themes, Start Bootstrap also provides full templates for dashboards, blogs, landing pages, and online shops.

• Bootstrap Magic: Feeling creative but don't want to write any CSS? Bootstrap Magic generates Bootstrap themes for you based on your selection of colors, fonts, and other parameters.

Performance and maintainability strategies

One major consideration when deciding between Tailwind CSS vs. Bootstrap is performance.

While the lightweight Tailwind wins out over Bootstrap on this metric, it can quickly lose those gains if you write your own bloated CSS on top of it. There are also performance optimizations that you can make to both Tailwind and Bootstrap, as well as to your own CSS markup.

Optimization and maintainability strategies for Tailwind CSS include:

• Purge unused CSS: Removing unused CSS will make your CSS files smaller, and thus make your website load faster.

• Using just-in-time (JIT) mode: Tailwind's JIT mode generates your final stylesheets on demand as you update your CSS, outputting only the CSS classes you use in your templates.

• Set the production environment when building: Ensuring that your NPM project is correctly set to the production environment will ensure that Tailwind applies minification and optimizations when you build.

• Add your own custom utility classes: If you apply the same custom CSS repeatedly, defining your own custom utility classes for them improves both performance and maintainability.

Optimization strategies for Bootstrap include:

• Remove unused components: You can remove the CSS for unused Bootstrap components using PurgeCSS.

• Use Sass for customization: By utilizing Bootstrap’s Sass files for customization, you can reduce the amount of your own custom CSS that you need to add, reduce bloat, and improve maintainability.

Both Tailwind and Bootstrap benefit from using a component-based framework like React or Vue.js, so that you can reuse elements and more easily maintain them (by editing a single reused component, rather than having to find and update the same code repeated across your codebase).

Code splitting can also improve performance by letting you load only the required CSS/JS for a page, rather than loading a single CSS file that contains every class and component for a whole website even if the current page only uses a small subset of it. A fast, reliable content delivery network (CDN) will also greatly reduce the load times of your websites, as they deliver content to your users from a high-speed server that is physically close to them.

You should leverage as much of the built-in functionality of the CSS library you use as much as possible, and add descriptive comments to your custom CSS code to improve maintainability. It's always helpful to know why you did something odd (maybe a nudging a <div> to prevent scrollbars appearing on small screens) rather than having ambiguous CSS markup in your codebase that might be confusing to revisit.

Choosing the right components for your apps will make development fast (and fun!)

When deciding between Tailwind vs. Bootstrap, you need to consider what it is you need to accomplish, and what you need to prioritize for your specific project (Tailwind’s customizability vs. Bootstrap's speed of development).

Composability doesn't end with your ability to choose which libraries and frameworks you use to build your applications. Whether you choose Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, or a different CSS library to build your frontend user interfaces, you'll benefit from a composable content platform with a global high-speed CDN.

Contentful lets you define your content, including text, images, and videos, and deploy it to your apps, websites, and newsletters seamlessly. You can see it in action with Tailwind and Next.js by following our tutorial: Build a blog with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Contentful.

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