Personally, I'm on team bootstrap. But, yes, it is subjective.
After working on several projects, I've come to realized that (atleast for me), ready-made UI kits/componenets are more important that the framework itself.
Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#22Sure Bootstrap is better, for you . Your postscript explains why: using the same "btn-primary" as every other user of the framework hints that you're not building something with its own visual identity. For the rest of us, we throw that "bg-sky-500 hover:bg-sky-600 active:bg-sky-700 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-lg" (or whatever color and shape matches our brand) into a component with a variant=primary property and ca…
oof, that looks like absolute trash. i don't get why you want to use something less readable than css but to each their own i guess
TailwindCSS is useful for applying styles to isolated components, in paper-shredder scenarios. Devs using it get to ignore the cascade, don't have to name things, and can use the predefined spacing and colors.
It is of course quite unmaintainable (good luck with updating the class soup for a bunch of components across a project).
I personally just ... cannot. CSS in 2026 is incredibly powerful and beautiful. Embracing the cascade allows for minimal CSS (see ITCSS methodology). Standardizing spacing and type with https://utopia.fyi is brilliant. Standardizing colors with custom props is trivial.
But, it seems that a lot of people are not paid to think about CSS. Tailwind embraces that. LLMs love it, because it reduces the complexity of pure CSS.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#23Sure Bootstrap is better, for you . Your postscript explains why: using the same "btn-primary" as every other user of the framework hints that you're not building something with its own visual identity. For the rest of us, we throw that "bg-sky-500 hover:bg-sky-600 active:bg-sky-700 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-lg" (or whatever color and shape matches our brand) into a component with a variant=primary property and ca…
Cant you just customize the css of btn-primary?
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#24> bg-sky-500 hover:bg-sky-600 active:bg-sky-700 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-lg What fresh fucking hell is this? I can't say I've had the (mis)fortune of being forced to work with Tailwind (I've seen the name enough to know it's something vaguely "CSS framework"-adjacent though). Seriously, though what kind of crack induced nightmare state was required for someone to think up such an abomination, implement it, and th…
Once you learn how to read it, it's actually pretty clear. This element has a small amount of x and y padding that is suitable for (for example) keeping text away from the edge of the container. The text is white. The corners of this are rounded. The background is the default intensity 'sky' colour, which darkens slightly on hover and darkens further when it's active. You can take this from 77 characters to 189 like…
Why would you want all that into the html, instrad of defining it in css?
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#25AI just generates all this. The true take is that this argument all together is obsolete, you shouldnt even be writing tailwind by hand anymore
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you learn how to read it, it's actually pretty clear. This element has a small amount of x and y padding that is suitable for (for example) keeping text away from the edge of the container. The text is white. The corners of this are rounded. The background is the default intensity 'sky' colour, which darkens slightly on hover and darkens further when it's active. You can take this from 77 characters to 189 like…
Why would you want all that into the html, instrad of defining it in css?
Why would you want to have to maintain a separate file instead of keeping it all in the same place?
Preference I guess. I’m not bashing anyone who prefers writing CSS that way. But there are a lot of people who think it’s very important to share that they don’t like how Tailwind looks.
It’s an argument that’s been pretty roundly responded to here: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you learn how to read it, it's actually pretty clear. This element has a small amount of x and y padding that is suitable for (for example) keeping text away from the edge of the container. The text is white. The corners of this are rounded. The background is the default intensity 'sky' colour, which darkens slightly on hover and darkens further when it's active. You can take this from 77 characters to 189 like…
I didn't say I can't read it. I asked who thought it was a good fucking idea. I guess you've answered that implicitly. Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable , and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work. I can now see exactly why OP made this post. If a client told me they don't want to use something akin to bootstrap or any other sane c…
> Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable, and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work.
Critical difference: media queries are unavailable to inline styles, making impossible to implement responsive designs this way. And anyway, CSS is so much more verbose than Tailwind that it really wouldn’t be very readable outside of toy examples.
Personally, I have used CSS since it was first created. I also have used Bootstrap and Foundation, but found them brittle and cumbersome. Now I just write 95% of styles with Tailwind.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly you’ve made your mind up so I won’t push harder, except one point: > Oh what's that, you want to change the style of standard button everywhere in the codebase? Tailwind excels when you are using component based frameworks. This change should be at least as simple as updating main.css, except it’s in Button.tsx
Why am I not surprised this rube Goldberg style machine seems like a rational thing to people who write xml to generate JavaScript to generate html.
I think these debates ultimately come down to what you’re making with these tools: is it documents or application interfaces? If it’s documents, then plain HTML, CSS and a touch of JS sprinkles on top works very well, as they were designed for this. If you’re making software, though, at some point you’re going to need some additional tooling to make it feasible.
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say I can't read it. I asked who thought it was a good fucking idea. I guess you've answered that implicitly. Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable , and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work. I can now see exactly why OP made this post. If a client told me they don't want to use something akin to bootstrap or any other sane c…
> Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable, and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work. Critical difference: media queries are unavailable to inline styles, making impossible to implement responsive designs this way. And anyway, CSS is so much more verbose than Tailwind that it really wouldn’t be very readable outside of toy examples. Pers…
> Critical difference
Yeah that's the critical difference, absolutely.
> Now I just write 95% of styles with Tailwind.
Which everyone says is only really useful if you use in a JSX Component...
So you're writing it in XML...
But then that gets converted into JavaScript....
Which then writes out some HTML and CSS?
I will absolutely not be surprised when someone declares that the XML part of JSX is too verbose and creates a library to generate the JSX code. Fuck it who am I kidding, it probably already exists doesn't it?
Re: Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you want all that into the html, instrad of defining it in css?
Why would you want to have to maintain a separate file instead of keeping it all in the same place? Preference I guess. I’m not bashing anyone who prefers writing CSS that way. But there are a lot of people who think it’s very important to share that they don’t like how Tailwind looks. It’s an argument that’s been pretty roundly responded to here: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes
> Why would you want to have to maintain a separate file instead of keeping it all in the same place?
The year 2001 called and is demanding royalties for copyright infringement on "How to write your first dynamic page in PHP - just one file needed".