Tailwind CSS Vs. Material UI: Which is better?

Material UI definition

It is also referred to as MUI; it made its grand entrance in 2014. Being a popular React library, it has pre-built components curated following the Google guidelines for material design. Not only this, it also provides a diverse range of customizable components, such as navigation bars, buttons, etc., for designing visually appealing and responsive interfaces that look great on any device. The primary purpose of the material UI is to design a modern, clean, and user-friendly interface. 

It is ideal for projects that need a consistent, sleek design and requires a rapid development process.
 

Material UI Benefits

 

Material UI Benefits	Description
Easy learning curve	This is one of the easy-to-learn frameworks— as it is extensively documented, making it easy for developers to learn. The best part? It has a supportive developer community, so when developers get stuck, they will always ask their queries.
Reusable components	It is a modular-based web development framework in which UI elements are reusable as required.
Highly responsive	Due to its high responsiveness, it will be easy to build web apps for various screen sizes and devices.
Extensively customizable	Owning to its theme feature, which can help design customized component styles with ease.
Pre-build components	It is flooded with many pre-built user interface (UI) components, including navigation components, making forms, etc., which can make the task easier and faster. Besides this, these components help to create immersive web interfaces.

 

Cons of Using Material UI framework

Performance
It's quite a heavy framework with architectural issues, and guess what? The result is that the website page loading becomes slow, as expected.

Exclusive to React
Unfortunately, due to its exclusivity towards the React framework, it cannot be used with other open-source libraries, including Laravel, Vue.js, Or Gatsby.

 

Tailwind CSS Definition

It is said that "necessity is the mother of invention." The same happens in this case. Tailwind CSS was born in 2017 after the limitations of CSS frameworks. With no time, it has massively become a popular CSS framework that provides more flexibility and excellent control over design. 

It is one of the go-to frameworks that helps to be used when it has more control over the design elements and develops a style from scratch. Due to its utility-first approach, it helps in crafting highly custom designs. 

Anything else? It is well suited for projects that demand unique designs. 

Tailwind CSS Benefits

Tailwind CSS Benefits	Description
Pre-defined classes	Due to the availability of pre-defined classes, creating unique designs is like child's play, as you don't need to write the CSS codebase from scratch.
Rapid development	It is a CSS utility-first approach framework that supports rapid development by helping developers easily add styles to the components.
Lightweight & fast loading	Using this web development framework, only the necessary CSS code for the components used in the project needs to be developed.
No React Exclusive	One of the intuitive Tailwind CSS benefits is that it is not React exclusive; it can be utilized with any JavaScript framework.
Plugins & extensions	It offers a power pack range of third-party plugins and extensions for better functionalities.

 

Cons of Tailwind CSS

• Code readability complications

Its utility-first approach creates complex and large class names, which is responsible for making the code complicated to read and maintain. 

• Lack of pre-built components

Some pre-built components and functionalities are lacking in Tailwind CSS, so the customization & development time gets shot up for some features.
 

Here we will look at the comparison between Tailwind CSS vs. Material UI to perceive which framework wins the frameworks battle and lead the show. 
 

Features	Tailwind CSS	Material UI
Ideal for	Highly customizable to create unique designs.	Provide consistent design with the help of in-built components available.
Philosophy	Utility-first approach	Follows principles of material design.
Learning curve	In the beginning, the learning curve is steeper and becomes easy with familiarity.	Easier if you have prior knowledge of React.
Installation	It is simply done with npm or yarn, but postcss is needed.	Simply done with npm or yarn.
Customizability	It offers extensive customization with a blank slate of design implementation.	It is customizable due to its theming feature, but it is limited.
Performance	Optimized by using purged CSS, reduced bundle sizes are acquired.	Good, it may require optimizing larger bundle sizes.
Community support	It keeps growing due to its extensive documentation.	Active community
Set up	It's not that simple; it needs utility classes & purging.	Simple setup (when it comes to React projects.)
Flexibility	Excellent, a great web development framework for creating highly custom designs.	Good, but when creating unique designs, it seems restrictive.
Project type	It helps to build projects that require Unique designs Creative flexibility	It is ideal for projects that demand Design consistency.  Rapid development.

 

Here we will see, what are the similarities and differences between both the frameworks—Tailwind CSS and Material UI

Similarities

• Both frameworks are customizable, which means they offer the ability to create and modify custom styles per evolving needs. 
• These two frameworks are available for free as they are both open-source frameworks with massive developer communities. 
• These two frameworks are the right choices for developing responsive and interactive user interfaces when it comes to different screen sizes. 

Differences

• They both have different theming features, as material UI consists of powerful theming features while tailwind CSS consists of default properties that can be used to edit the classes. 
• Tailwind CSS offers extensive utility classes and customization properties compared to Material UI. 
• Material UI has an extensive range of customizable and pre-built components. On the other hand, in tailwind CSS, site components are curated with the help of utility classes.

Conclusion: Which is better? 

There is no specific answer when comparing both frameworks, " Tailwind CSS vs. Material UI”, — as apples and oranges are incomparable. Similarly, both frameworks have their unique set of pros and cons and can be used according to the project design requirements. Like material, UI is an excellent choice for a project that requires speed of development and design consistency. On the other hand, tailwind CSS becomes a perfect choice for projects requiring a unique design with a Clean Codebase. 

So, while considering the distant features and capabilities of the framework, you may decide the best framework for your project. 

But hold on, if you are still on the fence and do not know the right framework for your project, then you can contact Zenesys, a pioneer in web development who will partner with you and transform your dream project into a reality.

 

1. Which Companies are using Material UI & Tailwind CSS? 

Companies using Material UI

• Google
• Netflix
• PayPal
• Uber
• Airbnb
• LinkedIn

Companies using Tailwind CSS

• GitHub
• Stripe
• Medium
• Starbucks
• Firefox
• TED

2. What are the reasons for choosing Tailwind CSS & Material UI for my project? 

Reasons to select material UI for your project-

• Pre-built React components and theme. 
• It has various icons to build websites or web apps. To put it in another way, with its JSX style library, no separate styling components need to be created. 
• It has a simple folder structure, which can make web apps and websites responsive. 

Reasons to choose Tailwind CSS

• It consists of various pre-configured classes. 
• The Unity little classes can be defined inside the HTML tag, so there is no need to leave the HTML. 
• Responsive designs and components can be styled quickly without the need to code HTML CSS functions.

 

3. Which framework is best for the fast-loading speed of the website? 

Tailwind CSS is one of the best options as it is a lightweight framework that can load the website at a fast speed. But how so? Due to tailwind CSS benefits, it automatically eliminates all the CSS elements not used during the development for production. Therefore, the final CSS bundle comes with the smallest size possible, and most of the projects are less than 10 KB. 

On the other hand, Material UI, when loaded on the website, needs to be loaded every time the whole framework is loaded, which can accelerate the website loading time.