CSS Vs Tailwind: Choosing the Right Styling Tool for Your React Project

When building the front-end of an application, the styling and animations play a crucial role in creating the right look and delivering a seamless user experience. Each styling tool has unique features such as ease of use, flexibility, nesting, customization, and responsiveness. Choosing a styling tool that integrates well with the React framework is important to create visually appealing and maintainable applications. Two popular styling options for building frontend applications are vanilla CSS, the traditional approach to styling, and Tailwind CSS, a utility-first framework that offers customizable styling and modern responsive design features.

In this article, you will learn about Tailwind and CSS and understand their unique features. Additionally, you will learn about their use cases and which styling tool to use in your React.js project.

How to Choose the Right CSS Tooling in React.js

Each project we build with React requires tools, libraries, and technologies tailored to its needs and functionality. Styling an application is no different; the size of the project, long-term maintenance considerations, and responsiveness should influence your decision in choosing between CSS and Tailwind. Here are the major factors to consider when building a React application.

Application Size

Firstly, before starting your React project, you should consider the size and structure of your application to decide between CSS and Tailwind. A large application has many components, folders, and libraries.

Ease of Use:

Building with a styling tool that you and your team are familiar with will lead to high productivity and better application performance. Before deciding on the styling option to use in your application, you should consider the one that fits your team’s skill set.

Performance

The performance needs of an application span both the backend and front-end. While the backend builds API endpoints and infrastructure, the frontend focuses on performance in terms of appearance, responsiveness and load time. When choosing between CSS and Tailwind, the loading time and runtime should be considered. It is advisable to work with a styling tool that can scale in large applications.

Overview of CSS:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a method of adding style to a website. It uses tags and variables to style JSX code. CSS specifies how the HTML/JSX code appears to users. The CSS is external to the HTML/JSX code that is being styled; for CSS code to work, it has to be imported at the top of the HTML or JSX code. Here is an example of how to import CSS into a React.js application.

// src/App.js
import React from 'react';
import './App.css';

Advantages of using CSS

Separation of Content and Presentation: CSS enables developers to separate a web page's content from its design and layout. This simplifies the process of updating the visual appearance of a site without impacting its underlying HTML structure.

Consistency: By utilizing a single stylesheet, CSS allows for consistent styling across multiple pages of a website. This helps maintain a unified look and feel across the entire site, ultimately enhancing the user experience and fostering brand recognition.

Improved Load Times: External CSS files can be cached by browsers, reducing the need to download data on subsequent visits. This leads to faster load times and an enhanced overall user experience.

Responsive Design: CSS offers powerful tools for creating responsive designs that can adapt to various screen sizes and devices. Features such as media queries, flexbox, and grid layout make it easier to build layouts that function well on mobile phones, tablets, and desktops.

Challenges of using CSS

Specificity and Inheritance: Managing CSS specificity and inheritance can be challenging, especially in larger projects. Understanding how styles are applied and overridden requires careful attention to the order and specificity of selectors, which can result in unexpected outcomes if not handled properly.

Maintainability in Large Projects: As a project expands, managing a large CSS codebase can become burdensome. Stylesheets can become bloated and difficult to navigate, making it challenging to locate and update specific styles without impacting other parts of the site.

Browser Compatibility Issues: Different browsers may interpret CSS rules differently, leading to inconsistencies in style rendering. Ensuring cross-browser compatibility can be difficult and often requires additional testing and the use of browser-specific prefixes or hacks.

Lack of Encapsulation: CSS lacks built-in support for encapsulating styles, which means that styles defined in one part of the application can affect other parts. This can lead to styling conflicts, making it difficult to manage styles in complex applications.

Overview of Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework for building custom user interfaces. Tailwind provides numerous utility classes such as buttons and tables for styling. Here's how you integrate Tailwind CSS into a React application.

To begin, we have to install Tailwind in our application so we can work with it.

npm install -D tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer

After installing Tailwind CSS, we will create a Tailwind customization file by running the following code:

npx tailwindcss init

Go to your Configure PostCSS file to process Tailwind CSS in your project. If there is no postcss.config.js file, create one.

// postcss.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    require('tailwindcss'),
    require('autoprefixer'),
  ],
}

Finally, to include Tailwind CSS in your project, Import Tailwind CSS in a file

/* src/index.css */
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Import the CSS file into your entry point React component to use Tailwind in the project:

// src/index.js or src/App.js
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import './index.css'; // Import Tailwind CSS
import App from './App';

ReactDOM.render(
  <React.StrictMode>
    <App />
  </React.StrictMode>,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

Advantages of using Tailwind

1. Community and Ecosystem: Tailwind has a thriving community and extensive ecosystem with plugins, extensions, and integrations that enhance its capabilities.

2. Rapid Development: Tailwind's utility-first approach allows for quick prototyping and styling without writing custom CSS.

3. Consistency: By using predefined utility classes, Tailwind ensures consistent styling across your application, promoting a cohesive design system.

4. Flexibility: Tailwind's extensive set of utility classes provides flexibility in styling components and layouts without the need for additional CSS.

Challenges of using Tailwind

1. Design Consistency: While Tailwind promotes consistency, without careful planning, it's possible to create inconsistent designs due to the freedom and flexibility of utility classes.

2. Customization Overhead: Tailwind encourages using its utility classes, which might limit creativity or require additional effort to customize styles beyond its predefined utilities.

3. File Size: Despite purging unused styles in production builds, the initial CSS file size can be larger compared to handcrafted or minimal CSS frameworks, impacting load times.

4. Tooling Dependency: Using Tailwind effectively often requires integrating with its ecosystem tools (e.g., PurgeCSS, JIT mode), adding dependencies to the project.Comparing CSS and Tailwind in React Projects

Comparing CSS and Tailwind in React Projects

Performance

CSS: Tools like PurgeCSS and other CSS minifiers are necessary to remove unused styles and optimize performance, as they exclude styles that are not used in the final application, leading to larger CSS files.

See example here:

# Using a tool like PurgeCSS for CSS minification
purgecss --css styles.css --content index.html --output styles.min.css

Tailwind: For optimized performance and smaller CSS bundles, Tailwind CSS integrates with PurgeCSS to remove unused styles in production builds, resulting in improved performance. Here is an example:

// tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  purge: ['./src/**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}', './public/index.html'],
  darkMode: false,
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  variants: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
};

Maintainability

CSS: CSS stylesheets can become large and difficult to manage as a project grows. Without careful structuring, styles may conflict, leading to bugs and inconsistencies. To manage this complexity, modular CSS solutions such as CSS Modules or styled components can be helpful. Here is an example:

Tailwind: Both CSS and Tailwind have their strengths and weaknesses when used in React projects. CSS allows for detailed control and is familiar, but it can become complicated in larger projects. On the other hand, Tailwind allows for quick development.

Conclusion

Both CSS and Tailwind have their strengths and weaknesses when used in React projects. CSS allows for detailed control and is familiar, but it can get complicated in larger projects. On the other hand, Tailwind allows for quick development and consistent styling with a utility-first approach, but it requires some initial learning and can lead to verbose HTML. Depending on your project's specific needs, team expertise, and maintenance requirements, either tool could be a good choice.