When it comes to styling websites and web applications, we have a variety of CSS technologies at our disposal. We can opt for traditional vanilla CSS, CSS preprocessors such as SaaS and Less, or CSS-in-JS tools like Emotion and Styled Components.

In addition to these methods, CSS frameworks offer another approach to styling websites. However, with over 40 CSS frameworks currently available, selecting the most suitable one for our next project can be challenging.

If you find yourself grappling with decision paralysis, this article provides the guidance you need. We’ll delve into what CSS frameworks entail, their benefits for styling applications, and introduce five CSS frameworks you should consider in 2024.

What Are CSS Frameworks?

CSS frameworks consist of pre-written, readily usable CSS stylesheets. Rather than starting from scratch, developers can expedite UI creation and website development by leveraging these frameworks, which provide foundational styles and layout structures. They encompass styles for pre-designed UI components, responsive grid systems, and elements like buttons and forms. Some may even include JavaScript code for interactive web components like responsive navigation menus, tabs, and accordions. CSS frameworks prove invaluable for enhancing productivity and ensuring consistency in user interfaces and websites, making them suitable for projects of all sizes.

Advantages of CSS Frameworks

1. Accelerated Development

CSS frameworks streamline development by furnishing a repertoire of predefined styles, eliminating the need to define CSS classes and styles from scratch. This expedites development and circumvents redundant work.

2. Consistent Brand Identity

By offering default styles and components, CSS frameworks promote consistency in website appearance across various pages and devices. This consistency enhances professionalism, user-friendliness, and accessibility.

3. Cross-Browser Compatibility

CSS frameworks undergo extensive testing across diverse browsers, ensuring uniform rendering of styles across platforms. This mitigates the need for developers to troubleshoot browser-specific issues manually.

4. Enhanced Responsive Design

In today’s mobile-centric landscape, responsive design is paramount. CSS frameworks often integrate built-in responsive features like media queries and grid systems, facilitating the creation of responsive websites without extensive coding.

5. Code Readability and Maintainability

Adhering to best practices and coding standards, CSS frameworks enhance codebase comprehensibility and modifiability. This proves advantageous for large-scale projects or collaborative development efforts.

So let’s look at the top 5 CSS frameworks for 2024.

1. Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS stands out as one of today’s most favored CSS frameworks. Created by Adam Wathan, one of the minds behind Refactoring UI, its hallmark is the utility-first approach. This methodology offers a comprehensive set of utility classes for styling layout, typography, colors, spacing, and more. The beauty of this approach lies in its ability to minimize the need for additional CSS, except for specific cases like custom animations.

Despite being relatively new, Tailwind CSS has swiftly ascended to prominence, rivaling other established CSS frameworks. Let’s explore its features and considerations:

Features

• Tailwind Play: An online code editor enabling direct experimentation with Tailwind CSS in the browser. It’s invaluable for developers conducting quick tests, assessing responsiveness across various screen orientations, or acquainting themselves with Tailwind CSS.
• Utility-First Approach: Unlike frameworks offering predefined components, Tailwind CSS focuses on a vast array of utility classes that can be directly applied to HTML elements. This empowers you to construct and personalize UI components without resorting to custom CSS.To grasp the utility-first approach, imagine styling a card component. Traditionally, you’d craft custom CSS and tailor-made classes for the component. Tailwind diverges by creating utility classes targeting specific CSS properties, facilitating component styling sans custom CSS.
• Dark Mode Support: Tailwind leverages the prefers-color-scheme CSS media query to integrate dark mode functionality. Implementation involves using Tailwind’s dark variant, though note that while classes are provided, you’ll need to devise the dark mode theme switcher.

Pros

• High Customizability: Tailwind furnishes a tailwind.config.js file enabling comprehensive customization of every framework aspect, from colors and spacing to typography and breakpoints, catering to your project’s unique demands.
• Responsive Design: Equipped with built-in responsive utilities, Tailwind CSS simplifies the creation of responsive layouts. Apply responsive classes to elements for control over their appearance on diverse screen sizes, ensuring a seamless user experience across devices.
• Complete Control of Design Tokens: Tailwind CSS grants full control over design tokens and variables, enabling management of elements like colors, spacing, and typography, facilitating the creation of distinctive websites.
• Starter Templates: Access a plethora of free and paid templates from the core team and community, tailored to various use cases.
• Developer-Friendly Syntax: Tailwind CSS adopts intuitive class names describing each utility’s purpose. For instance, bg-blue-500 sets the background color to a specific shade of blue, while p-4 adds padding around an element, enhancing developer comprehension and usability.
• Customizability: With its extensive configuration file, Tailwind CSS offers unmatched customization options, allowing developers to adjust colors, spacing, typography, and other design elements to align with their project’s branding and style requirements.

Cons

• Learning Curve: Tailwind CSS presents a steeper learning curve compared to other frameworks, primarily due to its utility-first approach. Mastery necessitates familiarization with an extensive list of utility classes to effectively combine them.
• File Size: Due to the multitude of utility classes, the resultant CSS file may be sizable, particularly for expansive projects. This could impact page load times, especially on slower networks or mobile devices. Nevertheless, file size reduction and production optimization can be achieved through minification and compression tools like cssnano and Brotli.

2. Bulma

Bulma stands out as an open-source CSS framework designed to offer a modern, lightweight, and adaptable solution for website development. Renowned for its simplicity and user-friendliness, it has gained widespread acclaim.

Differing from frameworks such as Bootstrap, Bulma operates sans reliance on JavaScript, concentrating solely on delivering a robust assortment of CSS classes. Its emphasis lies in presenting a straightforward syntax and a modular approach, facilitating seamless developer interaction.

Features

• Modularity: Bulma’s modular design empowers users to import only the specific components or styles required, minimizing unnecessary bloat in the resulting CSS output. With 39 .sass files available for individual import, customization becomes streamlined.
• Modifiers Syntax: Bulma offers modifier classes prefixed with “is-” or “has-“, allowing for the creation of variant styles for elements. These modifiers can be combined to produce diverse styling options.

Pros

• Simplicity: Bulma’s straightforward and intuitive syntax simplifies the learning curve, enabling developers of all proficiencies to utilize it effectively.
• Flexibility: The framework grants a high level of flexibility in terms of customization, enabling developers to craft distinctive designs without constraints imposed by predefined styles.

Cons

• Limited Ecosystem: In comparison to larger frameworks like Bootstrap, Bulma’s ecosystem may feature fewer third-party integrations and community-generated resources.

3. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a widely-used, open-source web development framework offering a rich collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components and styles.

Popular among developers seeking to craft responsive websites and web applications, it provides pre-built templates and reusable elements such as navigation bars, buttons, forms, and grids, all customizable to suit specific requirements.

Originally conceived as “Twitter Blueprint” within Twitter’s internal projects, Bootstrap transitioned into an open-source endeavor, now maintained by a community of developers.

Features

• Right-to-Left (RTL) Text Support: Bootstrap includes RTL text support, crucial for projects necessitating text direction variations.
• Responsive Design: Leveraging a flexible and fluid grid layout, Bootstrap enables the creation of responsive websites adaptable to diverse screen sizes and devices.
• Comprehensive Set of Plugins: Offering a variety of JavaScript plugins, Bootstrap facilitates the setup of interactive components like modals, alerts, and toasts.
• Bootstrap Icons: While not integrated by default, Bootstrap Icons provides a vast library of SVG icons, numbering over 2,000, simplifying icon implementation with relevant classes.
• Utility API: Version 5 introduces a Utility API, a Sass-based utility for generating and customizing classes, granting control over properties like background color, borders, shadows, and spacings. This advanced feature requires a deep understanding of the framework.

Pros

• Fully Customizable: Bootstrap’s default styles and components are easily modifiable, allowing for seamless alignment with project requirements.
• Large Ecosystem: Supported by a thriving community, Bootstrap receives regular updates, bug fixes, and new features, while offering ample learning resources.
• Extensive Documentation: Detailed documentation replete with code snippets and examples simplifies the learning curve and aids in understanding its functionalities.
• Starter Templates and Themes: The Bootstrap team offers paid themes, and the community has crafted numerous starter templates, expediting development.

Cons

• Similarity in Designs: Historically, Bootstrap-built websites have been criticized for their uniform appearance. However, advancements such as the Utility API in version 5 enable greater customization, fostering uniqueness in designs.
• Multiple Versions: With five major versions and numerous minor releases, managing multiple Bootstrap versions can prove challenging, particularly when dealing with legacy projects and encountering outdated information.

4. UIKit

UIKit stands out as a modular CSS framework designed for swiftly creating visually appealing and responsive web interfaces. Featuring a diverse array of customizable components, it enables developers to construct attractive websites efficiently, without the need to start from scratch.

Features

• Internationalization: UIKit supports component internationalization through an i18n options object it provides.
• RTL Support: Facilitating right-to-left language compatibility, UIKit allows for orientation changes in all design elements. Its RTL version reverses design element orientations, including floats, text alignment, position coordinates, and background shadow direction.
• Animations: A curated collection of built-in animations enriches user interactions, enabling the addition of flair and interactivity to websites.
• Responsive Design: By automatically adjusting website layouts, UIKit ensures seamless and accessible experiences across desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

Pros

• Ease of Use: Renowned for simplicity and user-friendliness, UIKit streamlines interface creation, eliminating the need for extensive CSS coding.
• Customizability: UIKit offers flexibility for customizing and extending styles and components to suit specific requirements, empowering developers to craft unique and personalized designs.
• Wide Range of Components: With an extensive selection of ready-to-use presentational and interactive components, including spinners, accordions, and icon navigation, UIKit facilitates diverse design possibilities.

Cons

• Paid Features: While offering a robust free version, UIKit also provides a paid offering called “UIKit Pro,” boasting over 100 styles, a layout library, and a page builder. Access to these advanced features requires a payment.

5. Pure.CSS

Pure.CSS distinguishes itself as a lightweight CSS framework emphasizing simplicity and minimalism, catering to developers seeking efficiency and a streamlined codebase.

Features

• CSS-Only Components: Prioritizing CSS-only components over JavaScript reliance, Pure.CSS focuses on delivering lightweight, efficient solutions.
• Responsive Grid System: Pure.CSS introduces Pure Grids, a responsive grid system facilitating effortless layout customization across various screen sizes, simplifying the creation of responsive designs without excessive complexity.

Pros

• Lightweight File Size: Notably, Pure.CSS boasts an exceptionally small file size, with the entire framework weighing merely 3.5kb when minified and gzipped. This translates to swift page load times, enhancing overall performance.
• Modular Structure: Embracing a modular architecture, Pure.CSS allows developers to cherry-pick necessary components, minimizing unused code and optimizing performance through enhanced flexibility.

Cons

• Limited Pre-designed Components: While offering a robust foundation for website development, Pure.CSS may lack the extensive pre-designed components found in frameworks like Bootstrap or UIKit. Styles for components such as nav, cards, tags, and dropdowns are notably absent.
• Learning Curve: Pure.CSS’ grid system and the naming conventions employed for grid classes may pose a challenge for beginners, requiring additional time and effort to grasp.