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Tailwind v/s Bootstrap with React

19 January, 2023

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Introduction to Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework. It provides a set of CSS classes that you can use to quickly style your HTML elements. The classes are designed to be highly composable, so you can easily build up your styles by adding or removing classes from your elements.

The main idea

The main idea behind Tailwind is to provide a set of low-level utility classes that can be composed together to build complex user interface. These classes are designed to be highly composable, allowing you to quickly build up your styles by adding or removing classes from your elements. It gives a consistent look-and-feel without having to spend a lot of time writing custom CSS.

An example of using Tailwind CSS with React

For example, this is a simple button using tailwind

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

This will render a button with a blue background, on hover the background will change to blue-600 and the text will be white.

Advantages of Tailwind CSS

  • Tailwind CSS provides a large set of utility classes that can be used to style typography, spacing, colors, layout and many more. With the classes already in place you don't need to start from scratch with your CSS.
  • Another great advantage of tailwind is that it is customizable, you can easily customize the styles, colors, and sizes to suit your needs by tweaking the configuration file.

Disadvantage

One of the disadvantage of Tailwind CSS is that it can lead to very specific, complex selectors that can make it hard to debug and maintain, and also you need to keep in mind that using utility classes for styling can lead to a lot of class attribute on your HTML, making it harder to read the structure of your component.

Introduction to Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a popular CSS framework that provides a set of pre-built CSS classes and JavaScript components for building responsive, mobile-first websites. You can use Bootstrap in a React application to quickly style your components and add functionality like navigation bars, modals, and forms.

Working example

To use Bootstrap in a React application, you will need to include the Bootstrap CSS file in your project, either by downloading it and linking to it in your HTML file, or by importing it in your JavaScript file.

To use Bootstrap classes in your React components, you can simply add the class names as an attribute on the elements you want to style.

<button className="btn btn-primary">Click me</button>

This will render a button with Bootstrap's primary button styles.

You can also use Bootstrap JavaScript components, which often require some additional setup, such as providing a reference to the DOM element or binding event handlers. Some bootstrap components are not compatible with React's way of handling events, or require additional setup like a reference to the dom element, so you might need to use a 3rd party library to be able to use those components in your React application.

Advantage of using Bootstrap

One of the advantage of using Bootstrap in React is that it provides a consistent look-and-feel without having to spend a lot of time writing custom CSS. With pre-defined classes, it becomes much easier to create a polished and professional-looking website quickly. It also has a large community and many resources available, you can find solutions and solutions to any problems you might encounter.

Disadvantages of using Bootstrap

One of the disadvantage is that Bootstrap is not optimized for React, and the styles may not work well with the component-based architecture of React. Also, Bootstrap classes add a lot of CSS to your application which can cause performance issues, especially if you're only using a small portion of the framework. And also it might be hard to tweak and customize the styling without changing the underlying CSS.

Tailwind CSS v/s Bootstrap

While these two might appear similar from the above explanation, there are a fair number of differences between the two:

  • Tailwind CSS is designed to offer a low-level utility classes, which allow more customization and flexibility to the developers. On the other hand, Bootstrap follows a more opinionated approach, providing a set of pre-defined classes, making it easier for developers to create a responsive design quickly.
  • Thus, when it comes to customization, Tailwind CSS allows for more customization than Bootstrap since it provides a vast library of utility classes that can be combined to create custom styles. Bootstrap, on the other hand, provides pre-designed components

References

https://tailwindcss.com/
https://blog.logrocket.com/comparing-tailwind-css-bootstrap-time-ditch-ui-kits/


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