Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 VS Tailwind CSS

Compare Material Design for Bootstrap 4 VS Tailwind CSS and see what are their differences

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 logo Material Design for Bootstrap 4

Powerful and free UI KIT for the newest Bootstrap 4 and Material Design

Tailwind CSS logo Tailwind CSS

A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.
  • Material Design for Bootstrap 4 Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-21
  • Tailwind CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 features and specs

  • Consistency
    Material Design for Bootstrap (MDBootstrap) combines Google's Material Design principles with Bootstrap 4’s robust framework, ensuring a cohesive and modern design across different components.
  • Rich Component Library
    MDBootstrap offers a wide range of pre-built components such as cards, buttons, navigation elements, and forms, which can speed up development substantially.
  • Responsive Design
    Being built on Bootstrap 4, MDBootstrap is highly responsive out of the box, ensuring that websites look good on both desktop and mobile devices.
  • Customization
    Extensive customization options are available, allowing developers to adjust the design to fit specific needs while maintaining Material Design guidelines.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    MDBootstrap provides thorough and detailed documentation, including examples, tutorials, and explanations, which can help developers quickly learn and implement the framework.
  • Community and Support
    MDBootstrap has a strong community and offers premium support options, which can be very beneficial for resolving issues and getting advice.

Possible disadvantages of Material Design for Bootstrap 4

  • Learning Curve
    Although MDBootstrap is well-documented, the combination of Material Design principles with Bootstrap might introduce additional concepts for new developers to learn.
  • File Size
    Incorporating both MDBootstrap and Bootstrap may increase the total file size, potentially affecting page load times and performance.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    MDBootstrap relies on jQuery, which could be a downside for projects aiming to minimize dependencies or for developers preferring vanilla JavaScript or other frameworks.
  • Cost for Advanced Features
    While a significant portion of MDBootstrap's features are free, some advanced components and plugins are locked behind a paid subscription, which might be a drawback for developers or companies on a tight budget.
  • Potential Overhead
    Using a framework with extensive features may introduce overhead, particularly if only a small subset of those features are needed for a specific project.
  • Fragmentation Risk
    As MDBootstrap gets updates, keeping up with changes in both Bootstrap 4 and Material Design guidelines might introduce additional maintenance overhead and potential fragmentation.

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 Design for Bootstrap 4 videos

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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 Design for Bootstrap 4 and Tailwind CSS)
Design Tools
8 8%
92% 92
Developer Tools
3 3%
97% 97
Web App
100 100%
0% 0
CSS Framework
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Material Design for Bootstrap 4 and Tailwind CSS

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 Reviews

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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 a lot more popular than Material Design for Bootstrap 4. While we know about 1013 links to Tailwind CSS, we've tracked only 11 mentions of Material Design for Bootstrap 4. 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 Design for Bootstrap 4 mentions (11)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    MDBootstrap - Free for personal & commercial use Bootstrap, Angular, React, and Vue UI Kits with over 700 components, stunning templates, 1-min installation, extensive tutorials & colossal community. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • What do you use for quick UI?
    I used this a while back, if you're into material design it's pretty solid https://mdbootstrap.com/. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Building Composable Commerce with Nuxt, Shopify, and Storyblok Crash Course Part Two
    By default, the IPX image optimizer that the image module is using, needs to have a list of domains that can be used for optimizing the images. For now, what would happen is that our Banner would be displayed, but it wont be optimized. In order to enable the optimization, we need to add the [mdbootstrap.com](http://mdbootstrap.com) to the allowed domains for IPX. Let’s do this below:. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • [FOR HIRE] Django Web Application Developer, CICD Development, and Any Kind of Automation
    Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX, Bootstrap; I use Django's Jinja2-based templating system. I also have a commercial license for https://mdbootstrap.com/, if you want to build out and customize your own pages with a sleek material design. I'm open to substituting any of the major front-end frameworks in lieu of this vanilla approach. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Top 10 Backend Frameworks in 2022
    Express, or Express.js, is a Node.js based web framework written in JavaScript. It is the standard web framework for Node.js. Express is popularly used in JavaScript development stacks like MEAN, MERN and MEVN along with MongoDB and JavaScript frontend frameworks. Some popular websites using Express are Unsplash, MDBootstrap, Paypal, Coursera, Atlassian, Shopee and Docker Hub. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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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 / 11 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 / 17 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 / 24 days 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 1 month ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material Design for Bootstrap 4 and Tailwind CSS, you can also consider the following products

Material UI - A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design

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

Craftwork - A collection of User Interface resources made by Craftwork

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.

DevExtreme - HTML5 Widgets & SPA Framework for Desktop and Mobile

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces