Fact checked by In this article, I explore the 20 best CSS frameworks in 2024.
Whether you're a beginner or an experienced web developer, CSS frameworks can help you work more efficiently thanks to their pre-prepared libraries that make web development easier and faster by providing pre-styled components, grids, and utilities.
Let’s get to it!
What Is a CSS Framework?
Front end CSS frameworks are a package or library containing pre-written and standardized CSS code. They often contain resources like responsive grid systems, pre-defined UI components, and styling for elements like buttons, forms, text, and more.
The primary purpose of a CSS framework is to provide web designers and developers with a starting point upon which to build, allowing you to design and build websites more quickly and efficiently.
Simply put, these CSS frameworks help standardize styling across a project, reduce the amount of repetitive code that you write, and ensure your designs are responsive and consistent.
With lots of fantastic reasons to get to grips with a CSS framework, frontend web developers can significantly enhance their productivity.
So if you're interested in front-end web design, chances are you'll benefit from integrating CSS frameworks into your workflow.
Benefits of Using CSS Frameworks
- Ease of use: CSS frameworks are often designed to be easy to use and customize, even for developers and designers with minimal CSS skills.
- Speed: CSS frameworks mean you won’t be starting from scratch or writing all the CSS code yourself.
- Consistency: CSS frameworks provide a consistent look and feel across all the pages of your website, improving the user experience and allowing you to follow best practices.
- Cross-browser compatibility: Frameworks mainly include code that handles cross-browser compatibility issues.
- Improved accessibility: Some CSS frameworks include code that makes your website more accessible.
- Support and Community: Popular CSS frameworks have large and active communities making it easy to connect with other users to share ideas and find help when needed.
- Responsiveness: CSS frameworks were designed for website responsiveness, ensuring the website looks good when rendered on different screen sizes.
The 20 Best CSS Frameworks in 2024
General-Purpose CSS Frameworks
1. Bootstrap
Bootstrap might be the most popular and well-known CSS framework in the world, and it happens to be my personal favorite.
And while our list includes many alternatives to Bootstrap, you can’t go wrong with this CSS framework designed by Twitter, as it provides a comprehensive set of tools and assets for designing web applications.
As one of the best CSS libraries, Bootstrap offers a consistent and tested codebase you can rely on for consistent results. The trade-off is that it leaves little room for flexibility. Bootstrap classes help front-end developers quickly add styling to their HTML code.
Bootstrap is also well-documented, making it easy to find resources. It’s one of the most popular CSS frameworks and has a large and active online community of users. We also found an 11-hour Bootstrap course for beginners.
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2. Bulma
Bulma is a free and open-source CSS framework based on Flexbox. It was created to provide a modern, minimalist alternative to other CSS frameworks.
Instead of using classes for styling and layout, Bulma uses a modular approach. And this allows developers to create custom designs without writing much CSS code. Bulma also has a strict CSS-only approach and includes no JavaScript components.
Bulma’s modular design makes it more flexible. You can easily customize it to suit your specific needs for a project. It’s also designed for cross-browser compatibility. And it’s also lightweight, fast, and optimized for performance.
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3. Foundation
Foundation is a responsive front-end framework that provides a set of CSS tools focusing on mobile-first design and accessibility. Foundation includes a range of JavaScript plugins for adding interactivity to your web applications.
Compared to other CSS frameworks, Foundation offers more control to developers for customizations. While this is a good thing, it also means newcomers will find it slightly complex and take a while before getting used to it.
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4. Fomantic UI
Fomantic UI is described as the official community fork of Semantic-UI. This stems from the fact that it began as an open-source project to provide access to Semantic UI, which is a front-end framework that’s no longer maintained.
Fomantic UI is easy to use and customize and focuses on Semantic HTML. The classes are intuitive and use syntax from natural human-friendly language.
It is also designed to be fast and efficient, as well as providing ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) accessibility support.
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5. Blaze UI
Blaze UI is an open-source user interface toolkit for building front-end applications quickly. It focuses on scalability and maintainability. Even though Blaze UI has a small community of developers, the toolkit is well-documented and easy to start with.
The UI components provided rely solely on native browser features and not a separate library or framework.
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6. Vanilla Framework
This open-source responsive front end framework is designed to be lightweight and composable. It contains a responsive CSS grid and pre-designed HTML elements to add to your projects.
Usage is highly flexible, as you can add it to your projects with yarn, npm, or a hotlink to your HTML file.
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Utility-Based CSS Frameworks
7. Tailwind
Tailwind CSS is a modern, un-opinionated, and utility-first CSS framework that’s widely viewed as one of the top CSS frameworks available.
As possibly the best CSS library for beginners, Tailwind provides a set of pre-defined CSS classes to apply to HTML elements, allowing front-end developers to quickly build custom interfaces with a focus on speed and efficiency.
Tailwind gives developers more control over the look and feel of their websites. Whether you’re a seasoned web designer or a beginner, Tailwind is a great tool to help you build a high-quality, responsive, and accessible website quickly.
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8. Open Props
Open Props is one of the few CSS libraries that’s non-prescriptive. It provides customizable design options for front-end developers to create websites quickly and efficiently.
Unlike many CSS frameworks/libraries, Open props allow developers to create custom classes instead of strictly using predefined class names.
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9. Tachyons
Tachyons CSS is a functional CSS framework that emphasizes the composition of styles through functions and utilities over lengthy, complex stylesheets.
It’s designed for speed and performance and provides a set of classes that you can use to style your HTML elements in a quick and consistent way. Tachyons also places emphasis on readability and simplicity.
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10. Materialize
Materialize is a CSS framework that provides a modern and responsive design for front-end web development and it’s based on Google's Material Design guidelines.
Materialize includes various UI components, such as navigation bars, forms, cards, buttons, and models. These are pre-styled and ready to use with minimal effort. The framework also provides JavaScript components for adding interactivity to your website.
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Looking for the best way to write CSS code? Check out:
Lightweight CSS Frameworks
11. Pure
Pure is a minimalist CSS framework that provides a small set of basic styles for common HTML elements like buttons, forms, tables, etc. It’s designed to be a place for developers to begin when styling websites.
This framework is designed to reduce the amount of CSS code required for styling your web applications, making it easier for developers and designers to understand and modify.
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12. Miligram
Miligram makes it easy to create fast-loading and responsive websites easy with a simple, clean design. Its focus on performance and developer productivity, and typography make it stand out among its peers.
Overall, it has fewer properties, allowing developers to write clean code. It’s also flexible and offers multiple ways of adding it to your projects by downloading the zip file or using any npm, yarn, or bower.
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13. Chota
Chota is a simple and straightforward micro CSS framework. It follows semantic HTML conventions and doesn’t require familiarity with too many rules with naming conventions.
It’s also very lightweight at just 3Kb, and it comes with a selection of components and utilities.
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14. Spectre
Spectre is a modern CSS framework that utilizes the latest CSS technologies, such as Flexbox and CSS grid, making it suitable for building responsive and modern websites.
Its minimal and customizable design makes it a great choice when you want to quickly prototype and build a website without having to start from scratch. Spectre is well-documented and includes examples and usage guidelines, making it easy to start.
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15. Skeleton
One of the key features of Skeleton is its minimalism, which allows developers to start with a clean slate and avoid the usual clutter and bloat of larger CSS frameworks. It also focuses on mobile-first design.
Overall, it’s a good choice for developers who want to create custom and responsive designs without the hassle of working around already-styled components.
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Class-Less CSS Frameworks
16. Water
This CSS framework is based on minimalistic design principles, providing only the bare essentials to style your web pages.
It’s easy to add to any of your projects, as you only need to copy one line of code into your HTML file. It’s also lightweight, fast-loading, and designed to make simple static websites more visually appealing.
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17. MVP
As the name suggests, this framework helps you style your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) quickly. You don’t need to learn any class names because there are none.
All you do with MVP is copy a one-liner into your HTML file, and you can easily edit the styles using CSS variables if you want to.
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Specialized CSS Frameworks
18. UIKit
UIKit is a specialized front-end framework for iOS development. It provides a set of UI components for building beautiful and user-friendly iOS applications.
It includes pre-designed elements like buttons, labels, text fields, and table views, and it also has advanced features like animations, touch handling, and more. This makes creating a dynamic and interactive UI for your applications easy.
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19. Gutenberg
Gutenberg is a CSS framework that was specifically created to improve the look and feel of HTML pages for printing.
In essence, it provides a way to format HTML pages and make them more visually appealing before printing them out. It’s available for both yarn and npm users.
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20. Bojler
This specialized CSS framework was created for email template development, which is ideal if you want to improve the design and overall quality of your email templates.
This simple CSS framework makes it easy to build beautiful, responsive email templates that work across a range of email clients
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Wrapping Up
And there you have it, the 20 best CSS frameworks you need to know for front-end development in 2024.
Using these in your projects, you can add beautiful styling and responsiveness to your application without writing CSS code from scratch. Which is fantastic for speeding up your development process!
With that said, it’s still a good idea to grasp vanilla CSS. Udemy offers several CSS courses to get you started. That way, picking up a framework will be much easier for you. It also means you’ll be able to customize styles to suit your needs with less hassle.
For complete beginners looking, we recommend you start with Bootstrap or Tailwind, as they’re easy to learn and use. For advanced front-end developers, consider looking into Foundation, as it offers more control and customization.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How Many CSS Frameworks Are There?
It’s hard to calculate the total number of CSS frameworks out there. But there are at least 40 available today. Which is a lot of choice!
2. What Is the Easiest CSS Framework to Learn?
Even the best CSS framework can be challenging without a decent understanding of vanilla CSS. With that said, if you have basic CSS skills, check out Bootstrap or Tailwind, as these are two of the most widely used and well-documented CSS frameworks in 2024.
