Head-to-Head: MaterializeCSS vs Tailwind CSS Analysis
materialize-css
v1.0.0(about 6 years ago)
Materialize CSS is a modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design principles. It provides a clean and intuitive user interface with ready-to-use components like buttons, forms, cards, and navigation elements. Materialize CSS offers a grid system for easy layout structuring and supports customization through Sass variables and mixins.
Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that provides a set of pre-built classes to quickly style your web projects. It focuses on a functional and responsive design approach, allowing developers to easily create custom designs without writing additional CSS. Tailwind CSS offers a low-level utility class system that enables rapid prototyping and efficient styling by composing classes together.
Both Materialize-css and Tailwind CSS are popular choices in the front-end development community. Materialize-css has been around for longer and has a sizable user base, while Tailwind CSS has gained significant popularity in recent years.
Approach
Materialize-css is a pre-designed CSS framework with a set of ready-to-use UI components, while Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that provides a toolbox of utility classes to build custom UI components.
Design Style
Materialize-css has a more opinionated design style with material design components and a modern, sleek look. Tailwind CSS, on the other hand, focuses on providing utility classes and leaves the design decisions to the developers, allowing for more flexibility and customization.
Development Experience
Materialize-css offers a complete out-of-the-box solution with pre-designed components, which can speed up development time. Tailwind CSS, on the other hand, requires more manual customization and configuration, but provides a lot of flexibility and control over the styling.
Customization
Tailwind CSS is highly customizable and allows developers to create unique designs easily. It offers a wide range of utility classes that can be used to create custom styles without writing much CSS code. Materialize-css provides a set of predefined styles, but customization might require overriding CSS or modifying the framework's code directly.
Integration
Materialize-css is primarily designed for jQuery and uses JavaScript extensively for its components. Tailwind CSS is framework-agnostic and can be integrated into any project, including React, Vue, or Angular.
Performance
Tailwind CSS is more performant as it generates optimized CSS based on utility classes used, resulting in smaller bundle sizes. Materialize-css is optimized in terms of performance but may have a larger overall package size due to its pre-designed components and JavaScript dependencies.
