Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Thoughtbot Administrate VS Tailwind CSS

Compare Thoughtbot Administrate VS Tailwind CSS and see what are their differences

Thoughtbot Administrate logo Thoughtbot Administrate

Administrate is a library for Rails apps that automatically generates admin dashboards.

Tailwind CSS logo Tailwind CSS

A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.
  • Thoughtbot Administrate Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-12
  • Tailwind CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13

Thoughtbot Administrate features and specs

  • Customizability
    Administrate is highly customizable, allowing developers to extend and modify the dashboard to fit their specific needs. This flexibility is ideal for complex applications that require tailored admin interfaces.
  • Rails Friendly
    Administrate is designed to work seamlessly with Ruby on Rails applications, leveraging Rails conventions and making it easy to integrate into existing projects.
  • Active Community
    There is an active community and regular updates to the repository. This ensures that bugs are addressed and new features are integrated, making it a stable choice for long-term projects.
  • Simple User Interface
    The user interface of Administrate is intentionally simple and minimalistic, which helps in keeping the admin dashboard clean and easy to navigate.

Possible disadvantages of Thoughtbot Administrate

  • Limited Features Out-of-the-box
    Compared to other admin interfaces, Administrate offers fewer features by default. This might require additional development time to implement features like advanced filtering and UI components.
  • Performance Constraints
    In large-scale applications, Administrate can experience performance issues, particularly when dealing with large datasets, which might require additional optimization efforts.
  • Basic Authorization
    Administrate does not have built-in support for complex authorization schemes; developers need to manually implement and configure their own authorization logic, often using additional gems.
  • Styling Limitations
    While Administrate offers a clean UI, customizing the styling can be more challenging compared to other solutions that allow greater control over the UI look and feel.

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.

Thoughtbot Administrate videos

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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

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User comments

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Reviews

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

Thoughtbot Administrate 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 Thoughtbot Administrate. While we know about 1014 links to Tailwind CSS, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Thoughtbot Administrate. 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.

Thoughtbot Administrate mentions (5)

  • The Admin Framework for Minimalist
    Thoughtbot/administrate is a well-known framework for administrative screen, but it's not developer friendly。I implement my own template files for Administrate, so when new Administrate version released, It is hard to update Administrate because template file is changed.**. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Get help from thoughtbot for free (mentoring / office hours)
    I work at thoughtbot, you might know us for our open source work like administrate, factory_bot or shoulda-matchers. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster – Avo
    This looks very similar to Administrate by thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Rails administrate : big tutorial, bits of philosophy
    You can also open in your browser, the official repository here, and the docs here, it will be helpful. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • Free trial feature
    That's exactly what we do. Easy to extend trials as needed for users when needed too via https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate. Source: over 3 years ago

Tailwind CSS mentions (1014)

  • 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 / about 20 hours 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 / 22 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 / 28 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 2 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

Jet Admin - Build business apps really fast

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

Active Admin - The administration framework for business critical Ruby on Rails applications.

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.

Avo - Prevent human errors when implementing analytics

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces