In this article, we will be discussing the top 10 CSS libraries and frameworks. CSS is used in web pages to provide styles, in the early days of internet and web development, CSS and HTML was all that a website had to offer. Then cam Javascript and CSS frameworks and preprocessors. Still to this day a website can have no CSS framework or library and can still work and provide beautiful UI only based on pure CSS. But having a CSS library or framework increases the workflow and gives you time to innovate in design rather than focusing all your time on building designs from scratch.
Having already built things at your disposal allows you to innovate and get creative by mixing different design elements together. If a framework provides you with various themes to choose from and also provides you the ability to modify these themes to a great extent. Then why not go for it?
Having such frameworks and libraries freely available to integrate with your web application, gives you wings. As you can get started with your web application development in a very short span f tie. And produces an MVP easily based on free designs. Once you have an initial UI to start with then you can easily upgrade or choose more supportive add-ons to extend your UI approach.
CSS libraries and frameworks
Before diving into the list of best CSS libraries and frameworks you must understand what are the basic differences between a library and a framework.
Library
A library is usually one file that can be appended in the head section of your web application. A library could have more than one file but usually, everything is minimized into one single file. Generally, a library provides helper functions or designs to pick from after you have fetched the relative library on the head level. The scope of libraries is limited as libraries focus on one particular task or area only. For example; A UI library might not provide animations support.
Framework
The scope of frameworks is somewhat larger than libraries. As a framework, in reality, is made upon several libraries or modules. A framework provides a proper way of handling things from start to end. Hereby proper way we mean that a framework can provide you essential things to get started, supportive things that you might need after getting started, also the tools that you might need for maintenance or post-release upgrades.
Top 10 CSS libraries and frameworks
- Tailwind CSS
- Bootstrap
- Material UI
- Semantic UI
- Bulma CSS
- Foundation CSS
- Materialize CSS
- UI Kit
- Ant Design
- Primer CSS
Conclusion
Most of the upper mentioned frameworks started off from small-scale libraries and are now being developed into extensive UI frameworks. The CSS frameworks consist of some common factors such as; preprocessor, theme config files, mixins, components, and normalizing CSS. All these complement each other and provide you an easy way to track down the origin of any style and override it as you wish.
One important thing to keep in mind while overriding prebuilt themes and components is that whenever you will upgrade the dependency, a new version of that theme or components will be fetched. Hence, always override on a separate file and keep it isolated from the UI package (factory styles).