Look, I need to be honest with you. I have a complicated relationship with Tailwind CSS. It’s like that friend who’s really good at everything, org...
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I used to criticize Tailwind, but it's definitely not one of the tools that make me want to throw my laptop out of the window. There are many others, including inaccurate search results and unhelpful AI suggestions to do that in 2026. Concerning the oft-cited inline-style-like examples with tons of class names, we don't need to do that. Tailwind has its
@applyrule, aglobal.css, custom properties, and we can still use many of its built-ins, which are not better or worse than Bootstrap. I still don't get why we're discussing all of this pro and con functional CSS these days instead of when Bootstrap arrived.Thanks for your post though. I always love to see that there are other developers who still think in CSS and have to look up the inconsistent class names for Tailwind. CSS is great, but it's also inconsistent, and even without its historic pitfalls, descriptive programming languages are hard to understand and work with for many people, so I'd prefer Tailwind in a team setup making it easier for onboarding coworkers, while preferring PostCSS + CSS + Stylelint in my own personal projects.
You make some really solid points! I'll admit I didn't cover @apply in the article - you're right that it helps with the class-name explosion. And the Bootstrap comparison is spot-on... we had utility classes then too.
The team vs personal project split makes a lot of sense. When you use Tailwind with teams, do people actually use @apply and component extraction, or do most lean into the utility-first approach?
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
Oddly enough, it’s 2026 and I’m still interrupting casual hallway chats about Tailwind, only to jump in with: ‘How do you actually scale this? Debug it? Has anyone invented a way to kill all those classes yet?’ 😎
Thanks for the article, it totally made my day!
Thanks for reading...I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Haha, maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but hearing people deny how great Tailwind is feels totally new to me! Personally, I love using it for prototyping, but in production I still prefer the classic approach.
Thanks for reading, Sylwia!🙌 Honestly, we're probably more aligned than it seems. Your Tailwind-for-prototyping approach is super smart. Do you usually rewrite those classes into custom CSS for production, or just start over? I love hearing how different devs handle the transition
Ah, I'm just treating prototyping as my little side hobby 😄 The prototypes are later developed by other teams (or abandoned 😅), so I usually have no idea what happens to them afterward!
ohhh, thats cool 😅
A big concern for me about Tailwind is what we will do when it is gone. Web technologies come and go. CSS is at the root of web design and will remain a fundamental part of it as long as there are web pages and browsers.
For me, bootrap 5 is enough for me.
If Bootstrap's working for you, no reason to switch then👍