Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Material Dashboard VS Tailwind CSS

Compare Material Dashboard VS Tailwind CSS and see what are their differences

Material Dashboard logo Material Dashboard

A free bootstrap admin built on top of Material Kit

Tailwind CSS logo Tailwind CSS

A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.
  • Material Dashboard Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-09
  • Tailwind CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13

Material Dashboard features and specs

  • User-friendly Design
    Material Dashboard adopts the Material Design principles, which offer a clean and intuitive user interface, making it easier for users to navigate and interact with the dashboard elements.
  • Responsive Layout
    The dashboard is fully responsive, ensuring it performs well and looks good across various devices and screen sizes, enhancing the usability for mobile users.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Material Dashboard comes with a wide range of components and plugins such as charts, forms, and tables, which can cater to different application needs and improve functionality.
  • Customizability
    It provides customization options allowing developers to easily tweak styles and components to fit the specific requirements of their projects.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source, Material Dashboard is freely available and can be used for commercial projects without any licensing costs, with a supportive community for assistance.

Possible disadvantages of Material Dashboard

  • Dependency on Material Design
    Since the dashboard heavily relies on Material Design, any updates or changes to these guidelines may require significant adjustments in the dashboard layout and components.
  • Potential Overhead
    For smaller projects, the plethora of features and components might be overkill, introducing unnecessary complexity and overhead in the development process.
  • Learning Curve
    New users might experience a learning curve in understanding and effectively utilizing all the features and components provided, particularly if they are unfamiliar with Material Design.
  • Limited Native Themes
    While highly customizable, the dashboard offers limited native themes, which might require additional effort to create a unique aesthetic without extensive custom styling.
  • Performance Concerns
    Including numerous third-party plugins and features might lead to performance issues if not managed properly, potentially affecting the loading times and responsiveness of the application.

Tailwind CSS features and specs

  • Utility-First Approach
    Tailwind CSS uses a utility-first approach, promoting the use of small, reusable utility classes to style elements directly in your markup. This can lead to more readable and maintainable HTML.
  • Customization
    The framework is highly customizable. You can easily configure its default theme, add your extensions, and create custom utilities. Tailwind’s config file allows for deep customization of all aspects of the framework.
  • Consistent Design
    Using utility classes ensures design consistency because the same classes will apply the same styles globally.
  • Responsive Design
    Tailwind CSS has excellent built-in support for responsive design. You can easily apply different styles for different screen sizes using responsive utility variants.
  • Performance
    Tailwind purges unused CSS in production, resulting in smaller final output files and improved performance.
  • Integrates Well with Frameworks
    Tailwind CSS integrates smoothly with modern JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular.
  • JIT Compiler
    The Just-in-Time (JIT) mode in Tailwind CSS generates styles on-demand, reducing the development build sizes and speeding up the development process.

Possible disadvantages of Tailwind CSS

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For developers coming from traditional CSS or other CSS frameworks, getting used to Tailwind's utility-first approach may take some time.
  • HTML Congestion
    Due to the utility-first approach, HTML files can get filled with numerous utility classes, making it look cluttered and harder to read.
  • Initial Setup
    Setting up Tailwind CSS initially can be complex, especially for beginners. Configuration settings and integrations with build tools can be confusing.
  • Verbosity
    Some developers find the inline utility classes verbose, particularly when complex styles are required, which can lead to bloated template files.
  • Limited Abstractions
    Tailwind doesn't provide higher-level abstractions such as components out of the box, like other frameworks (e.g., Bootstrap) do. Developers need to build and maintain these abstractions themselves.
  • Dependency Tailoring
    While Tailwind aims to be minimalistic, it may enforce some dependencies or build tool integrations that could be unnecessary for very simple projects.

Material Dashboard videos

No Material Dashboard videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Tailwind CSS videos

Why I Don't Like Tailwind CSS

More videos:

  • Review - Vanilla CSS vs Bootstrap vs Tailwind CSS - Which one should you choose?
  • Review - Get Started with Tailwind CSS in 15 Minutes

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material Dashboard and Tailwind CSS)
Design Tools
3 3%
97% 97
Developer Tools
2 2%
98% 98
Web App
100 100%
0% 0
CSS Framework
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Material Dashboard and Tailwind CSS. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Material Dashboard and Tailwind CSS

Material Dashboard Reviews

We have no reviews of Material Dashboard yet.
Be the first one to post

Tailwind CSS Reviews

  1. Awesome framework

    I use it in all my current projects. It's easy to start and very customisable. Love it so much! I improved the speed of development 2x times by using Tailwind.


22 Best Bootstrap Alternatives & What Each Is Best For
Tailwind CSS comes with features such as responsive design, customizability, hover, focus, and active states out of the box. These enable developers to build sophisticated, interactive interfaces with ease. When it comes to integrations, Tailwind CSS can be integrated with popular front-end frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, enhancing its utility across different...
Source: thectoclub.com
15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
If you want to learn the valuable skill of Tailwind CSS, we highly recommend taking the "Tailwind CSS From Scratch" course by Brad Traversy on Udemy. In this introductory course, you will build great-looking layouts quickly and efficiently using Tailwind CSS utility classes.
Source: coursesity.com
10 Best Free React UI Libraries in 2023
TailwindCSS is a utility-first CSS framework designed to build modern and beautiful websites in no time. Here, utility class names define what to do. Each utility class comes with pre-defined CSS properties.
11 Best Material UI Alternatives
Tailwind CSS promotes a modular approach to styling, where devs can combine classes to create unique and responsive designs. It offers utilities for layout, typography, colors, spacing, and more, allowing developers to create consistent and visually appealing interfaces with minimal effort.
Source: www.uxpin.com
Top 10 Best CSS Frameworks for Front-End Developers in 2022
Tailwind enables faster development of the front-end. Instead of a default theme or built-in UI components, you’d get pre-designed widget menus and utility classes to build your website. Tailwind has modular components, and if you make changes in one place, other parts of your code won’t get impacted. Tailwind requires the least amount of learning and is easy to use. You can...
Source: hackr.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Tailwind CSS seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 1013 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Material Dashboard mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Material Dashboard yet. Tracking of Material Dashboard recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Tailwind CSS mentions (1013)

  • Top 5 Free React UI Libraries to Use in 2025
    Shadcn/ui contains a set of beautifully designed and accessible components, and it works seamlessly with major React frameworks. It’s open-source and has amassed 85.5k (and counting) GitHub stars. It’s built on the shoulders of giants — Radix UI and Tailwind CSS, making it one of the best to work with. Unlike many other UI libraries, the components are not just installed as npm modules, they’re downloaded into... - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
  • Tailwind vs Linaria: Performance Investigation
    We're going to investigate the difference in performance between Tailwind and Linaria. Tailwind, you already know. And Linaria has been getting quite a lot of traction since styled components went into maintenance mode recently. We'll cover why Linaria is a good choice for this comparison a bit further. - Source: dev.to / 26 days ago
  • How to Integrate Tailwind with 11ty – With Code Examples
    It is a well-known fact that Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework. It lets you style elements directly within your HTML, thanks to pre-defined classes. Unlike other CSS frameworks that offer pre-built components, Tailwind offers these low-level utility classes that let you create your own design system. Thus, this makes crafting unique responsive designs effortless as there is not much to do with custom CSS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • 🎨 Smooth UI Transitions in HTML with Grains.js, TailwindCSS and g-class directive
    Note: It's best to utilize TailwindCSS to use ready-made styles via their classes. g-class directive has nothing to do with TailwindCSS, however. It only switches class names based on state. After that, you can use whatever you want. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • ## Vibe Coding Adventures: Day 1 — HealthLens AI
    By having the AI building the skeleton of the project, I learn few things. First, this tool is fantastic for building impressive frontend applications with clean, well-structured Tailwind CSS styling. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material Dashboard and Tailwind CSS, you can also consider the following products

Dashboard UI Kit - A modern & responsive dashboard UI kit for designers.

Bootstrap - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

Infinity Dashboard - A beautiful way to keep track of anything you want 📊

Bulma - Bulma is an open source CSS framework based on Flexbox and built with Sass. It's 100% responsive, fully modular, and available for free.

Snapboard - An editable/hackable dashboard - unlimited & free

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces