16 CSS Frameworks to Help You Construct Faster

Back in my day, a stylesheet was only a stylesheet.

You hand-coded the CSS for each element. And we liked it that way. 

Ahem. Okay. Disengaging curmudgeon mode.

CSS has come a great distance because the days of raw HTML pages, and some of the vital developments is the creation and proliferation of CSS frameworks. These tools make it light years easier for developers and designers to construct and launch recent projects, each big and small.

Additionally they have a huge effect on users and the best way we experience the online. Frameworks create a shared language for UI and UX on web sites and web applications, making nearly every site easier to grasp, navigate, and use.

Today, about 1 in every 4 web sites on the web is built using a CSS framework.

In this text, we’ll explore 16 of the most well-liked frameworks and the way they’re utilized by everyone from the enterprise to indie hackers.

What’s a CSS Framework?

A CSS framework is a pre-prepared library of code to assist implement fast and consistent website styling and layouts. Frameworks include pre-written, reusable code for common design elements and components that will be easily applied to base HTML to create familiar and consistent user interfaces or website designs.

CSS frameworks are utilized by front-end developers to quickly deploy things like responsive grids, styled forms, buttons, or other vital UI elements on web pages and apps.

Advantages of Using a CSS Framework

Okay, but why trouble using a framework?

Couldn’t you simply construct all of these things yourself? Well, yeah. But that’s type of the purpose. Frameworks are the inevitable consequence of a world where designers and developers write the identical basic CSS over and yet again for every website or app.

Why not only write it once and use it in all places? That’s why they exist.

Speed Up Development Time

The only answer as to why people use frameworks: Speed. Frameworks come out of the box with loads of elements and styles you’ll otherwise need to construct from scratch when developing a web site.

So why recreate the wheel?

Many developers and web designers also use frameworks as a tool for rapidly prototyping recent web sites or apps before constructing a custom design system.

Consistent Style and Design

The opposite key advantage of using a CSS framework is that your entire styles, UI elements, buttons, and more will look consistent out of the box. You won’t need to spend hours (or days or perhaps weeks or years) tweaking individual styles to make sure all of them have the identical padding, spacing, and font sizes.

For the reason that framework has already been meticulously crafted, all of the tedious work is completed.

As an additional advantage, the most well-liked CSS frameworks are widely used, helping the web site feel and appear familiar to users. That’s clutch from a UX standpoint.

Last but not least, consider accessibility. Hottest frameworks are built for a wide selection of devices and screen sizes, making them more accessible to a broader range of users.

Facilitate Responsive Design

Let’s be honest: Constructing a superbly responsive layout is a pain.

There are such a lot of variables and aspects to contemplate. Then extrapolate from there to all of the tens of millions of devices, and your perfect grid system quickly becomes a multitude.

Once more, modern CSS frameworks have you ever covered. They’ve done the exertions (and math) to construct a pixel-perfect responsive design system. All you have got to do is apply the proper CSS classes.

Improve Collaboration and Maintainability

Raise your hand should you like maintaining another person’s code, creating docs, and deciphering another person’s comments.

That’s a giant no.

Since most frameworks include an intensive documentation library and a community of users, you get the advantage of a standard codebase and intensely well-documented information on exactly find out how to use said system.

Plus, most of them are open-source projects. Meaning you’ll be able to freely use, adapt, and even (in some cases) redistribute your personal version if that’s your thing.

Key Features of a Modern CSS Framework

CSS frameworks run a fairly broad gamut, but most of them have some key features in common.

Predefined Grid Systems and Layouts

Grids make the online go….not ‘round? They make the online into perfectly-proportionate boxes. That’s what they do.

Most CSS frameworks have a built-in grid system that helps create a versatile and fluid layout for the web site. The system normally offers a number of customization that makes it easily adaptable to different screen sizes, resolutions, and page structures.

Responsive Media Queries

The opposite nice thing that almost all frameworks handle out of the box is media queries to mechanically adjust styles based on device characteristics.

These systems will be complex and tedious to develop from scratch, but they’re a critical a part of the trendy web to make sure content scales and displays properly on various devices

Pre-built UI Components and Templates

Most CSS frameworks include a library of pre-built, pre-styled UI components. Things like buttons, forms, tables, toggles, and more – all able to use by just applying a straightforward class.

This makes it faster to construct interfaces and pages, plus it creates a foundation for a consistent look and familiar UI throughout the web site (and across the online).

Typography and Theme Customization Options

Most of the frameworks shared here include built-in customizing and theming options. This makes it super easy to use things like your brand colours, preferred fonts, and other personal touches that transform the feel and appear to match your brand’s style.

16 Popular CSS Frameworks

1. Bootstrap

Bootstrap began as a side project built and shared by developers at Twitter. Now it’s essentially the most widely-used CSS framework for responsive, mobile-first website design. Hundreds of thousands of individuals use Bootstrap to craft clean, consistent, and familiar web layouts.

Key features:

• Responsive grid system
• Pre-built UI components
• Customizable and extensible themes
• Extensive documentation

Many firms, including Twitter (obviously), Spotify, and Udacity, have used the Bootstrap framework partially or fully on their web sites.

Why People Love Bootstrap

The explanations to like Bootstrap are the explanations to like frameworks– it’s easy, clean, and straightforward to make use of.

There’s an enormous community of experts with experience constructing with Bootstrap to reply almost any query you’ll be able to imagine.

And, even though it sometimes gets a fame for being vanilla, Bootstrap is pretty dang customizable if you should transcend what comes out of the box.

What People Don’t Like About Bootstrap

By far, the largest knock on Bootstrap is that each one of the sites using it look the identical.

“They’re boring,” some will cry.

But that’s generally just the results of people using it exactly the way it comes without taking much time to experiment or customize.

One other thing to concentrate on is that the framework is sort of bulky overall. The file size could also be greater than you’d expect for a straightforward website. That’s probably a part of the explanation why the State of CSS Survey found that satisfaction with Bootstrap is split about 50/50.

2. Tailwind CSS

Tailwind is maybe as much a movement because it is a framework.

The creator, Adam Wathan, wrote something of a manifesto in regards to the pondering behind Tailwind. And essentially, the thought is that CSS shouldn’t be descriptive and semantic (e.g., “.header” class), but as a substitute must be functional (e.g., “.center-flex-3”).

He calls it a utility-first CSS framework.

And this approach seems to work for many individuals. Tailwind ranks highest in satisfaction on the State of CSS survey at about 80%.

Key features:

• Utility classes for simple styling
• Responsive design capabilities
• Customizable configuration
• Component-friendly approach

Many well-known tech firms like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Shopify, Wealthfront, and Loom use Tailwind CSS.

Why People Love Tailwind

Since Tailwind is utility-first, it has nearly countless flexibility.

There aren’t really prebuilt layouts in the identical way as, say, Bootstrap. As an alternative, you’ll be able to mix and layer classes to position your HTML elements in an almost infinite variety of layouts and CSS grids.

The fundamental thing people like about this approach is that they will style their divs without referring to the documentation. For the reason that utility classes are intuitively named (for essentially the most part), you’ll be able to quickly apply styles without consistently flipping between the CSS library and the markup.

What People Don’t Like About Tailwind

In a nutshell: People don’t like change, right?

Tailwind breaks some well-worn traditions for CSS frameworks and even web development more broadly.

There are lots of arguments for why this approach to CSS code is suboptimal. The “separation of concerns” is the underlying principle behind how CSS (and most other code) is written. Tailwind puts that idea, well, on its tail.

Bonus: Daisy UI

If Tailwind’s utility framework isn’t your cup of tea, there may be an awesome library called Daisy UI, written by Pouya Saadeghi, a plugin that builds on-top of Tailwind CSS providing you with a set of classes that feels more harking back to Bootstrap.

Daisy UI provides class names for common UI components like buttons, cards, toggles, and more, allowing developers to concentrate on more critical points of their project as a substitute of styling basic elements​​. It’s built on top of Tailwind CSS, and hence all the pieces will be customized using utility classes​.

One in all the numerous advantages of using Daisy UI is that it significantly reduces the number of sophistication names it’s worthwhile to write, by roughly 80%, and may make your HTML size about 70% smaller​​. Moreover, it adds a set of customizable color names to Tailwind CSS, providing developers with the pliability to create Dark Mode and other themes without adding recent class names​.

3. Bulma

Bulma is a light-weight CSS framework based on Flexbox.

The syntax of this framework is plain-language, meaning it relies heavily on descriptive utility classes or modifiers like “.button” and “.is-large”.

Key features:

• Flexbox-based grid system
• Modular architecture
• Sass-powered for simple customization
• Minimalistic code and design

Examples of well-known web sites using Bulma: CSS Ninja and Signal.

Why People Love Bulma

Bulma can feel a bit just like the Lego set of CSS frameworks. It’s very simple and straightforward to grasp which makes it great for beginners or folks who just desire a quick solution.

By applying just a few logically-named classes, you’ll be able to construct out modules, apply CSS animations, and create more advanced styling. There are not any JavaScript dependencies, so you should utilize it together with just about any JavaScript framework.

What People Don’t Like About Bulma

The simplicity of Bulma could be a double-edged sword.

While it’s great as a tutorial or introduction to CSS frameworks, more advanced developers would likely complain that it lacks the sophistication or extensibility of more robust options.

4. Foundation

On the alternative end of the spectrum from Bulma, we now have Foundation.

Foundation makes no qualms about being advanced and, as such, fairly complex in comparison with a number of the other selections. It’s a responsive front-end framework designed for mobile-first development and used for each sites and emails, and it’s utilized by roughly 500,000 web sites worldwide.

Key features:

• Responsive grid system
• Comprehensive set of UI components
• Customizable Sass variables
• Integration with popular front-end tools and libraries

Why People Love Foundation

Foundation is type of the O.G.

It’s been around since before the Willennium millennium, which suggests many developers are well-versed in Foundation and aware of its syntax and conventions.

It’s also a mature product. It has tons of features, extensive documentation, and resources.

Plus, it’s considered among the finest frameworks for accessibility.

What People Don’t Like About Foundation

Like most mature products, Foundation can feel a bit bulky in comparison with modern, lightweight frameworks.

It’s accrued loads of requested features and customization options that make the codebase and file sizes a bit heavier. Plus, because conventions have shifted, the training curve is a bit steep for a beginner used to something like Tailwind or Bootstrap.

5. Semantic UI

“Every little thing arbitrary is mutable.”

That’s the dogma of Semantic UI.

At its core, this framework is built to assist construct and scale familiar-feeling interfaces for web sites and web applications.

Key features:

• Intuitive and human-readable class names
• Wide selection of UI components and layouts
• Customizable themes and styles
• Integration with popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks like Angular

Many sites and corporations use Semantic UI, including Accenture and Snapchat.

Why People Love Semantic UI

Semantic UI has an easy-to-understand syntax that makes it easy to construct out from its vast collection of UI components, including buttons, modals, cards, toggles, text fields, and more.

But perhaps the most well-liked wizardry is the theming and customization.

Semantic features a theming library with over 3,000 customizable variables after which inherited across your entire UI components.

What People Don’t Like About Semantic UI

Since Semantic is so UI-focused and so extensive, it might contain loads of code that goes unused in your project. Which means some folks will find it overly bulky for easier projects in comparison with more contained frameworks.

6. Materialize

Materialize CSS framework relies on Google’s Material Design principles.

It emphasizes daring visual design and UX-focused animation (motion).

Materialize is pretty popular, with over 38,000 stars on GitHub.

Key features:

• Material-design-inspired components and styles
• Responsive grid system
• Sass-powered customization
• Built-in JavaScript plugins

Materialize is utilized by a broad range of web sites, but most sites of their showcase are small businesses and private projects.

Why People Love Materialize

Materialize is an easy, few-frills solution for establishing a clean and usable website. They don’t really offer the moon, but that’s one among the explanations people prefer it.

What People Don’t Like About Materialize

As is at all times the case, simplicity also means limitations. Materialize is just not as robust or extensible as other frameworks, and relies on JavaScript for specific motions.

7. UIkit (UI Kit)

One other modular framework focused on website and web app interfaces, UIkit is barely less popular than Semantic UI, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

UIkit is a UI-focused framework utilized by many sites and web apps, including Crunchyroll, Moqups, and Rover.

Key features:

• Modular architecture with selective imports (huge!)
• Responsive grid system
• Sass variables and mixins for personalization
• Extensive UI component library

Why People Love UIkit

UIkit is maybe a bit smaller in market share, but it surely’s also smaller in footprint, file size, and complexity.

Without losing much in the best way of functionality, UIkit offers a particularly lightweight and comprehensive UI component library. It’s highly customizable with easy setup – using either the provided construct process or using your personal (with Less).

What People Don’t Like About UIkit

Probably the largest drawback to UIkit is that it’s a bit more under-the-radar than a number of the greater and more popular frameworks.

But, you understand, that makes it cool, right?

On a serious note: There’s a smaller community of users, which can make it tougher to search out answers to questions or find tutorials on specific implementations.

8. Ant Design

Ant Design is a little more than a CSS framework; It’s a design system with a set of high-quality React components for constructing wealthy, interactive user interfaces.

Built and released by Ant Group (parent company of Alibaba), Ant Design is comparable to design systems released by US tech firms like Alphabet and X (née Google and Twitter).

Key features:

• Comprehensive set of UI components
• Consistent design language and magnificence
• Customizable themes and appearance
• Extensive documentation and community support

Examples of well-known web sites using Ant Design (unsurprisingly): Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu

Why People Love Ant Design

Ant Design is a particularly robust collection of resources for designers and developers. Going beyond just the CSS framework, there’s a whole system (nay, language) that will be applied on to your personal projects.

There’s an enormous community, and the design system has been tried, tested, and proven across businesses and projects, generating billions of dollars in revenue.

Consider it like a franchise model in your web project.

What People Don’t Like About Ant Design

As you perhaps guessed, with extensive functionality comes extensive file size.

The complete Ant Design system (un-minified) weighs in at about 100MB.

The opposite limitation is that Ant Design is pretty purpose-built for React projects. For those who’re using one other JavaScript library, it is likely to be difficult to adapt the components.

9. Primer

The CSS framework behind GitHub’s design and UI components, Primer is a brilliant popular framework alternative for developers and developer-first web sites and apps.

It’s purpose-built and feels familiar to anyone who’s frolicked rooting across the repos.

Key features:

• Modular architecture with selective imports
• Responsive grid system
• Sass-powered customization
• Built-in accessibility features

Why People Love Primer

Primer is like an awesome piece of infrastructure; It’s understated and straightforward, but does the job rather well. Plus, knowing that the team behind GitHub created (and maintains) the library is a giant boost to the longevity and reliability of the project.

What People Don’t Like About Primer

As you’ll have guessed, GitHub’s design aesthetic isn’t the fitting alternative for each project.

So the fundamental grievance is that Primer isn’t as universal as other frameworks, and isn’t an excellent alternative for projects or web sites not built for developers. It also has a limited UI component set that is sensible within the GitHub ecosystem.

10. Tachyons

“Fast-loading, highly-readable, and 100% responsive interfaces” is the promise of the Tachyons framework.

Built to make use of minimal CSS, Tachyons is ideally fitted to standing up a fast homepage, personal portfolio, or project site.

Key features:

• Atomic CSS architecture with utility classes
• Responsive design capabilities
• Minimal setup and configuration
• Small file size for fast loading

Why People Love Tachyons

People love Tachyons since it’s a fast and straightforward framework. It’s lightweight and fast-loading, which makes it ideal for small projects, personal sites, and other easy use cases.

It’s just like the Honda Civic (base model!) of frameworks.

You recognize what you’re getting. It really works. And it’s reliable.

What People Don’t Like About Tachyons

It will take quite a little bit of work to make use of Tachyons for a more complicated or visually-complex project, meaning it won’t be the primary alternative for anyone in search of greater than a straightforward, grid-powered page or two.

11. Pure (Pure CSS)

Yahoo!

That’s a reputation you don’t hear on a regular basis. (Unless you’re on Jeopardy answering a matter about alternatives to Google, possibly.)

But their CSS framework, Pure CSS, has turn into quite popular for hackers and hustlers alike. With 23k stars and a couple of.5k forks on GitHub, it’s definitely some of the popular selections on this list.

Key features:

• Small and light-weight
• Responsive grids
• Built on Normalize.css
• Out-of-the-box form handling

Why People Love Pure

PureCSS is a favourite powerup for custom CSS or as an addition to other frameworks. It’s ultra-lightweight and offers many useful components that may easily bolt onto existing systems.

This makes it easy so as to add grids, forms, buttons, tables, and more to your current stack.

What People Don’t Like About Pure

Pure works best as an add-on relatively than a standalone framework. It doesn’t have a comprehensive library like other solutions and doesn’t offer theming or other features that make it easy to customize the feel and appear of the project with just a few quick edits.

12. Material Design Lite

Speaking of Google, along with Materialize, they’ve also open-sourced their Material Design Lite framework. Because the name suggests, it’s a lighter, simpler version of the Material Design-inspired framework.

It uses less JavaScript and is built to be more accessible on a broader range of devices and browsers.

You’ll be able to see Material Design Lite (MDL) on full display by visiting sites like Google Wallet, Google for Work, Google’s developer site, and more.

Key features:

• Material Design philosophy and UI components
• Large variety of components out of the box, comparable to buttons, cards, sliders, spinners, and more
• No external dependencies
• Theming options

Why People Love MDL

MDL comes with an ultra-functional set of components for apps, forms, and more.

Because it’s built on Material Design principles, usability and accessibility are front and center within the designs and the components.

What People Don’t Like About MDL

MDL is technically depreciated at this stage, so the system won’t receive any updates or support.

Beyond that, the entire aesthetic can feel a bit limiting. It feels very very like it was created for Google products, for higher or worse.

13. Spectre.css

Spectre is one other great option for getting up and running quickly. This lightweight, minimalist framework gives you most of the constructing blocks it’s worthwhile to go from zero to launch with a good-looking site and familiar UI components.

Key features:

• Small (~10KB gzipped) filesize
• Flexbox-based grid
• Built-in utility classes

Why People Love Spectre

Spectre is right for a straightforward, minimal, and clean aesthetic. The main target here is on pure usability and efficiency — You won’t get loads of extra bells or whistles, but it surely’ll do the job.

What People Don’t Like About Spectre

For those who’re in search of a sprawling framework with advanced theming options, a thriving community, and tons of documentation, this probably isn’t the pick for you.

Spectre is just a little more under the radar. It’s a capable tool for the job but doesn’t have anywhere near the type of popularity and adoption as Foundation or Bootstrap.

14. Milligram

One other lesser-known framework, Milligram is extremely small and light-weight. Much more so than the opposite small frameworks we’ve covered.

It’s the final word option for minimalist design and a fast, straightforward solution for standing up a project.

Key features:

• Minimalist design
• Very small (~2kb gzip)
• Flexbox grid system

Why People Love Milligram

Milligram is potentially the lightest, simplest CSS framework you should utilize to construct a project right out of the box. It has a lot of an important features of other frameworks but with an astonishingly small footprint.

The conventions and classes also make it pretty easy to learn on the fly.

What People Don’t Like About Milligram

Milligram suffers from the identical drawbacks as other lesser-known systems on the list. Lower overall popularity signifies that there’s less community support. Even so, the documentation is on par with much larger frameworks, and the simplicity may reduce the necessity for any additional help.

15. Water.css

Water is a classless CSS system that you simply just drop right into a static site. It’s not a system in the best way that the opposite frameworks are designed. As an alternative, it applies the styles on to the HTML elements on the page, providing you with a fast design system without the necessity (or ability) to construct more complex layouts.

Key features:

• No classes
• Extremely lightweight
• Two themes out-of-the-box: light and dark mode.
• Fully responsive

Why People Love Water

Water is great for a fast CSS solution, a boilerplate of styles, or a straightforward mockup.

It does what it says on the tin, making it an awesome, ultra-fast, no-fuss solution.

What People Don’t Like About Water

Water’s simply not going to work for any complex website or app project. It doesn’t have grids, it lacks many components that you simply’d need for larger projects, and ultimately prioritizes simplicity (to the intense) on the expense of customization or extensibility.

16. Vanilla

Vanilla Framework or Vanilla CSS (to not be confused with the colloquial term vanilla CSS, referring to base-level or traditional CSS) is a framework created and utilized by Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu.

Key features:

• Scalable architecture suitable for big web projects
• Modular systems
• Built on Sass

Why People Love Vanilla

Although less popular than the large frameworks like Bootstrap, Vanilla has the backing, resources, documentation, and even support of an enterprise-level product.

There’s a particularly detailed evaluation related to accessibility and meticulously detailed notes on compatibility with different browsers (right down to the particular version) and screens.

The components and styling are easy and universal, too.

What People Don’t Like About Vanilla

The project might indeed be a bit vanilla for some tastes. That’s to say, the design aesthetic is essentially neutral and functional without much flare.

Select the Best CSS Framework for Your Project

Now that we’ve shared 16 awesome options, how do you select the fitting one?

As at all times, there isn’t a right or improper answer here, but there are some key questions that you simply might use to narrow down your options.

Project Requirements and Goals

The very best place to begin is by understanding the sort of project you’re constructing. For those who’re creating a straightforward website for a small project or personal use, then a light-weight and straightforward system like Water or Milligram.

But should you need something more robust, you may go for Foundation or Bootstrap.

Learning Curve and Ease of Use

Next, consider the system’s complexity versus your or your team’s capabilities. Are you experts at diving into recent CSS frameworks? Or is that this your first time using something that’s not home-baked?

Understanding find out how to use a CSS framework takes a little bit of learning in-and-of itself. For those who’ve never worked with a framework, you’d probably be higher off selecting a straightforward starting option. Then, once you have got the hang of the meta, you’ll be able to dive into learning more complex systems.

Customizability and Flexibility

Are you constructing something that should adhere tightly to existing brand or design guidelines?

Then you definitely’ll need to select an option that has built-in theming and customization to make it easy to match the obligatory styles and design systems.

For those who’re more adaptable, you’ll be able to select a system with a definite style but lacks a number of the flexibility of the more robust systems.

Community Support and Resources

Having a community of parents using the framework could make all of the difference. Search for community forums, Discord servers, or subreddits to see what number of persons are helping other users and the way energetic the community is for every framework.

Performance and File Size

Be sure you consider the file size and performance of the frameworks you evaluate.

While your website’s performance is influenced by many aspects (like your internet hosting), the CSS also can greatly impact your pages, file sizes, and loading speed.

Keep Constructing

Hopefully this list of CSS frameworks gave you an idea of where to begin in your next project.

Whether you’re constructing the following Facebook or a private website to showcase your rock collection, we love helping creatives and entrepreneurs construct a fantastic web.

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