What is Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is the most popular utility-first CSS framework in the world for rapidly building custom user interfaces for the web. It is a highly customizable collection of low-level CSS utility classes written in PostCSS destined to be customized using JavaScript.

The first release of Tailwind CSS happened on the 1st of November, 2017 on GitHub as an open-source project. Initially, it was only a side-project for Adam Wathan that helped him with some of his projects, but in time became a fully-fledged and popular CSS framework with a new utility-first methodology.

On the 2nd of August, 2020 it is estimated that it was downloaded by over 10 million times, making it one of the most rapidly growing CSS frameworks in the world.

Bootstrap vs Tailwind CSS

If you’re a web developer chances are high that you either know about or even used Bootstrap for a long time as your primary CSS framework. Most developers ask why would they switch from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS?

Although the two frameworks are different in terms of methodology, they both can give you a strong foundation when building user interfaces. We wrote an article comparing Bootstrap vs Tailwind CSS in-depth if you’re interested.

Getting Started

Although Tailwind CSS can be used via CDN and classes only, it is highly recommended to use it with the Tailwind configuration file powered by PostCSS. Follow along the official guide to install Tailwind CSS and start building awesome user interfaces.

Tailwind CSS ecosystem and community

Because it is a fairly new CSS framework the community, although very active, is still quite small in comparison to the one around Bootstrap, which was around for almost a decade. There is a growing amount of articles and Stackoverflow questions about Tailwind CSS and we estimate it will reach the levels of Bootstrap in a few years.

Check out this awesome list of projects and resources about Tailwind CSS.