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Tailwind CSS VS Shoelace.css

Compare Tailwind CSS VS Shoelace.css and see what are their differences

Tailwind CSS logo Tailwind CSS

A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Shoelace.css logo Shoelace.css

A back to the basics CSS starter kit.
  • Tailwind CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13
  • Shoelace.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-03

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.

Shoelace.css features and specs

  • Customizable
    Shoelace.css is built using modern Web Components, allowing for easy customization and theming with CSS Variables, ensuring that developers can tailor components to their specific needs.
  • Compatibility
    Shoelace.css is designed to be framework-agnostic and works seamlessly with various JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, providing flexibility in integration.
  • Responsive Design
    The library provides components that are inherently responsive, which helps in building applications that look good on both desktop and mobile devices without additional effort.
  • Accessibility
    Components in Shoelace.css are designed with accessibility in mind, ensuring that applications are usable by people with disabilities and compliant with accessibility standards.
  • Modern Standards
    Being based on Web Components, Shoelace.css makes use of modern web standards, which promotes future-proofing and compatibility with upcoming web technologies.

Possible disadvantages of Shoelace.css

  • Size
    As a component library, Shoelace.css might introduce additional size to your project, which can be a concern for applications where performance and load times are critical.
  • Browser Support
    Since it uses Web Components, Shoelace.css may require polyfills for older browsers that do not fully support these technologies, potentially increasing the complexity of deployments.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers unfamiliar with Web Components or the concept of using framework-agnostic components might need some time to understand and effectively use Shoelace.css.
  • Community and Support
    Compared to more established component libraries, Shoelace.css might have a smaller community and fewer third-party resources, which could make finding support and solutions to issues more challenging.
  • Limited Built-in Functionality
    While highly customizable, Shoelace.css might lack some of the advanced, built-in functionalities found in larger, more comprehensive UI frameworks.

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

Shoelace.css videos

No Shoelace.css videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Tailwind CSS and Shoelace.css)
Developer Tools
98 98%
2% 2
Design Tools
98 98%
2% 2
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Gradient Generator
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 Tailwind CSS and Shoelace.css

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

Shoelace.css Reviews

We have no reviews of Shoelace.css yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Tailwind CSS seems to be a lot more popular than Shoelace.css. While we know about 1013 links to Tailwind CSS, we've tracked only 25 mentions of Shoelace.css. 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.

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 / 7 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 / 12 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 / 20 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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Shoelace.css mentions (25)

  • Show HN: Cs16.css – CSS library based on CS 1.6 UI
    Dashboards, tabs, trees, ... Usually require at least some JavaScript to work properly. For some components, you may be able to use hacks around that. But I would generally not recommend that outside of experimentation. So a pure CSS framework is not going to work. It seems that you are not using a frontend framework like Vue.js. So I would recommend a library using web components for the interactivity. One good... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • React v19 has been released
    Can webcomponents be trivially used with HTMX? Like for example: https://shoelace.style/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Do You Need to SSR Your Web Components?
    I created a simple example with a bunch of Shoelace components where they are being lazy-loaded from a CDN. I loaded the components this way to show worst-case-scenario loading performance. As you can see, it still loads quite quickly. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • You Should Be Shipping a Manifest with Your Web Components
    A recent example of this was when I was helping a team get up and running with Shoelace in a Next.js application. Shoelace provides react wrappers, but they were throwing an error when Next.js tried to server-side render them. Fortunately, Shoelace ships their CEM, so I was able to use it to generate new wrappers that were SSR-safe. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Web Components Are Okay
    I've yet to see this go wrong in practice. The kinds of components that are worth publishing as web components are often large, non-trivial components. Eg media libraries, emoji pickers (like the one made by this article's author), chatbox interfaces, and so on. They are the kinds of things you only have a limited number of on your page. If a component is small and focused in scope, it's likely either written in... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Tailwind CSS and Shoelace.css, you can also consider the following products

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

DaisyUI - Free UI components plugin for Tailwind CSS

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.

CSSGradient.io - As a free css gradient generator tool, this website lets you create a colorful gradient background for your website, blog, or social media profile.

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

Unused CSS - Easily find and remove unused CSS rules