Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Tailwind UI VS Tailwind CSS

Compare Tailwind UI VS Tailwind CSS and see what are their differences

Tailwind UI logo Tailwind UI

Beautiful UI components by the creators of Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind CSS logo Tailwind CSS

A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.
  • Tailwind UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-19
  • Tailwind CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13

Tailwind UI features and specs

  • Rapid Development
    Tailwind UI provides pre-designed components that help developers build interfaces quickly, reducing the time required to go from design to production.
  • Customization
    The components are built with Tailwind CSS, which allows for easy and extensive customization directly within the HTML, providing flexibility in design without needing to write custom CSS.
  • Consistency
    Using Tailwind UI ensures consistency across the application by providing a unified design language and pre-designed, reusable components.
  • Accessibility
    Components in Tailwind UI are designed with accessibility in mind, helping developers to create more inclusive and usable interfaces.
  • High-Quality Design
    The components are designed by professionals, ensuring high visual and functional quality, which can be beneficial for projects without a dedicated design team.
  • Documentation
    Tailwind UI comes with comprehensive documentation that aids developers in integrating the components effectively and understanding how to best utilize them.

Possible disadvantages of Tailwind UI

  • Cost
    Tailwind UI is a paid product, which can be a barrier for small projects or individual developers who are operating on a limited budget.
  • Learning Curve
    While Tailwind UI components are easy to use, the underlying Tailwind CSS framework can have a learning curve for those unfamiliar with utility-first CSS approaches.
  • Overhead
    Incorporating a large number of components can increase the initial bundle size, which may affect the performance unless optimized appropriately.
  • Dependency on Tailwind CSS
    Tailwind UI components are tightly coupled with Tailwind CSS, which means switching to or migrating from another CSS framework may require substantial effort.
  • Not Always Unique
    Using pre-built components might result in less unique designs, as other developers and projects using Tailwind UI can have similar looks and feels.
  • Limited Scope
    The pre-designed components cover a wide range but may not fulfill every niche use case, requiring additional custom development or design.

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.

Tailwind UI videos

TAILWIND UI: First Impressions!

More videos:

  • Review - Tailwind UI: A collection of fully responsive components from creators of Tailwind CSS
  • Review - Build a landing page using Tailwind UI

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 Tailwind UI and Tailwind CSS)
Design Tools
22 22%
78% 78
Developer Tools
9 9%
91% 91
UI Design
100 100%
0% 0
CSS Framework
13 13%
87% 87

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 UI and Tailwind CSS

Tailwind UI Reviews

Tailwind CSS: 15 Component Libraries & UI Kits
Tailwind UI has over 500 components in total; the documentation has component code for React, Vue, and raw HTML. The project has over 61,000 stars on GitHub and gets around 4 million weekly downloads on npm. *
Source: stackdiary.com
22 Best Sites for Free Tailwind Components
This Tailwind UI kit was introduced by the creators of the Tailwind CSS framework. So, this is undoubtedly one of the most reliable UI Kits for Tailwind CSS out there. Their responsive UI Tailwind components included 400+ professional-looking elements. For full interactivity, there is also a production-ready JavaScript. In addition, it is also compatible with Vuejs and Reactjs.
How to Choose a Tailwind Component Library (Plus the Top 6 Options)
First, you might be wondering: how does a TailwindCSS component library differ from just using TailwindCSS itself? Well, out of the box TailwindCSS doesn’t give you any pre-built components; it only offers utility classes. This means if you want a component, you need to build it using the classes provided to you. Or, you can use a component library built with TailwindCSS and...
Source: prismic.io

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 Tailwind UI. It has been mentiond 1016 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.

Tailwind UI mentions (212)

  • Ask HN: Link to interactively learn UI/Typography design
    Studying existing component systems is a great starting point. You have to imitate and respect the systems that already exist before you can innovate on new things from scratch. I'd recommend starting by reading, building with, and imitating the most well-known frameworks for some personal projects. You can also find some good Figma projects to get started with on each of these. https://tailwindui.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Session and User Registration in PHP
    Require base_path('views/partials/head.php') ?> require base_path('views/partials/nav.php') ?>     class="flex min-h-full items-center justify-center py-12 px-4 sm:px-6 lg:px-8">         class="w-full max-w-md space-y-8">                             class="mx-auto h-12 w-auto" src="https://tailwindui.com/img/logos/mark.svg?color=indigo&shade=600"                      alt="Your Company">                 ... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Ant Design – the second most popular React UI framework
    There's https://tailwindui.com/?ref=top, from the Tailwind CSS people. They come with a "HTML" mode, which I think means no JS. But if you need interactivity, on the web it has to be JS, because that's the only thing that can manipulate the DOM. The alternative would be something like a server-updated Canvas where the UI is done outside of the DOM and not in the client, but even that would need some JS shims just... - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago
  • How to Use Tailwind CSS for Your Ruby On Rails Project
    If you want to learn more, you can access many ready-to-use templates and components thanks to Tailwind's vibrant community, and products such as TailwindUI (from Tailwind's creators). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Playing around with Hotwire ⚡️
    I won't take credit for the re-design though. If you're using the Tailwind CSS Library you should checkout Tailwind UI. It's helped me scaffold a few components and pages quite easily, without having a designer onboard. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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Tailwind CSS mentions (1016)

  • MailPlanet🌍: Visualize email origins on a global map
    Styling: Tailwind CSS (Assumed, common with Next.js). - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • How to add markdown to a Next.js project
    This article assumes the reader is a developer that knows their way around Markdown, TypeScript, React.js, and [Next.js] https://nextjs.org/). Familiarity with Tailwind-css would also be useful. - Source: dev.to / 24 days ago
  • SonicScan - A Music Fingerprinting and Identification App
    Then I learned Tauri and used my favourite frontend framework SolidJS with TailwindCSS and DaisyUI to build the UI with MotionOne to add animations and Tauri to build the desktop/web/android/ios app. - Source: dev.to / 25 days ago
  • 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 / about 2 months 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 / about 2 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

DaisyUI - Free UI components plugin for Tailwind CSS

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

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.

Chakra UI - Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

FlowBite - Build UI interfaces and simplify the process of integrating into live websites with Tailwind CSS