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styled-components VS Tailwind CSS

Compare styled-components VS Tailwind CSS and see what are their differences

styled-components logo styled-components

styled-components is a visual primitive for the component age that also helps the user to use the ES6 and CSS to style apps.

Tailwind CSS logo Tailwind CSS

A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.
  • styled-components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27
  • Tailwind CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13

styled-components features and specs

  • Component-Scoped Styling
    Styles are encapsulated within components, ensuring that styles do not leak or conflict with other parts of the application.
  • Dynamic Styling
    Enables dynamic styling with the help of JavaScript variables and props, allowing for highly customizable components.
  • CSS Syntax
    Allows developers to write actual CSS code within JavaScript, making it easier for those familiar with CSS to adapt.
  • Automatic Vendor Prefixing
    Automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS properties, ensuring cross-browser compatibility without additional configuration.
  • Theming Support
    Provides a built-in theming solution, making it easier to implement and switch between different themes in the application.
  • Server-Side Rendering
    Supports server-side rendering, improving initial page load times and SEO.

Possible disadvantages of styled-components

  • Bundle Size
    Styled-components can add to the overall bundle size, potentially affecting performance, especially in large projects.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires developers to learn the styled-components library and its API, which can be a hurdle for new team members or those unfamiliar with CSS-in-JS.
  • Performance Overhead
    The runtime cost of parsing and injecting styles can impact performance, particularly in larger applications or with frequent style changes.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While improving, the ecosystem around styled-components (e.g., linting, debugging) is not as mature as traditional CSS or CSS preprocessor tools.
  • CSS-in-JS Limitations
    Some CSS features, like advanced selectors or cascading, may be more cumbersome or less intuitive to implement compared to traditional CSS approaches.

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.

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Tailwind CSS videos

Why I Don't Like Tailwind CSS

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  • 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 styled-components and Tailwind CSS)
Developer Tools
7 7%
93% 93
Design Tools
8 8%
92% 92
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
CSS Framework
11 11%
89% 89

User comments

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Reviews

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

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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 should be more popular than styled-components. 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.

styled-components mentions (169)

  • 11 Interview Questions You Should Know as a React Native Developer in 2025 📈🚀
    Using the same CSS-in-JS approach as React, you can use libraries like Styled Components to style your components. This allows you to write CSS directly in your JavaScript files (personally not a fan of using these). - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago
  • CSS-in-JS: Pros and cons
    The 2016 release of styled-components popularized the approach, offering a clean syntax and React integration. - Source: dev.to / 28 days ago
  • Woovi monorepos best practices
    This detail implies if any dependencies can be resolved correctly and if not have a version conflict. As the example we have the styled-components lib, it can have a problem with type Symbol reference where the library doesn´t find your properties of themes because, in your internal code, it uses the symbolObject which is a unique object that refers your set configs. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: Styled Components Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to Use Styled-Components for Elegant React UI Design
    Styled-Components is a library that allows you to write CSS directly within your JavaScript files (CSS-in-JS), ensuring that your styles are scoped to individual components. Rather than managing separate CSS files, you define your styles alongside your component logic. - Source: dev.to / 3 months 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 / 9 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 / 14 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 / 22 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
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing styled-components and Tailwind CSS, you can also consider the following products

Storybook - Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.

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

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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.

Ant Design - An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best React UI library for enterprises

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces