Top 20+ CSS Frameworks for Developers & Designers: A Complete Guide

Since the 2020 pandemic, people’s screen time and internet usage have increased significantly. This sudden increase in web traffic has forced businesses to rethink their marketing and web design strategies. With people’s decreasing attention timespan, capturing someone’s attention by using mundane website designs has become much more difficult. This is where CSS and CSS Frameworks come into play.    

According to a study by Top Design Firms, almost 42 per cent of users leave a website owing to uninteresting design and poor functionality. CSS Frameworks help developers and designers with ready-to-use designs that are much more accessible and interactive with the users. CSS Frameworks provide pre-written CSS code & components to simplify web development. Explore this blog to learn about the best Frameworks for Developers and designers. 

Table of contents 

1) What are CSS Frameworks? 

2) Benefits of CSS Frameworks 

3) Top 22 CSS Frameworks 

4) Conclusion 

What are CSS Frameworks? 

When building a web application, the two prime factors to consider are the content and User Interface. A good UI displays the intended content in a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate manner. Cascading Style Sheets or CSS is a presentation language to control the appearance of text written in HTML or XML. Different Types of CSS enable users to employ a wide variety of font styles, colours, layouts and much more to make the web application visually appealing and navigable. CSS Frameworks are a bunch of ready-to-use CSS stylesheets for developers and designers to use.  

Scaling a website in terms of the content on it increases the difficulty of designing a CSS Website. Repeating the same styles over and over again may lead to code redundancy. CSS Frameworks answers this by coming up with pre-built sets of CSS rules and styles that can be easily applied to the intended website. CSS Frameworks provide set design ideas and templates for different screen sizes and layouts. Front-end CSS Frameworks contain pre-written and standardised CSS code in a package or a library with resources like responsive grid systems, pre-defined UI components, and styling for elements like buttons, forms, text, and more.



 

Benefits of CSS Frameworks 

Here are some benefits of using CSS Frameworks: 

1) Ease of use and customisation: CSS Frameworks are naturally designed to be easy to use and customise, especially for developers and designers with little to no CSS knowledge. 

2) Time saving: CSS Frameworks allow developers and designers to use the pre-built templates and not start from scratch. 

3) Consistency: The predefined styles and components offered by CSS Frameworks ensure that there is a uniform and consistent look across multiple pages of a web application. This also improves user experience and allows the developers to follow best practices. 

4) Cross-browser compatibility: CSS Frameworks include code that has been exhaustively tested on several platforms and browsers. This allows developers to make their websites accessible across several platforms in a coherent fashion.  

5) Public support and community: Popular CSS Frameworks that are publicly released have large and active communities of developers and designers constantly working on them. This makes it easy to connect with fellow practitioners and seek assistance as and when needed.  

6) Responsiveness: CSS Frameworks help design websites to be responsive and snappy even when rendered to different screen sizes. 

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Top 22 CSS Frameworks 

Choosing the best-suited CSS Framework and component library for a particular type of application is often an onerous task. This list of the best CSS Frameworks known amongst developers and designers tries to solve this conundrum by giving an overview of their use cases and features.  

1) Bootstrap 

Bootstrap, a highly responsive CSS Framework, provides prebuilt HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components that designers and developers can use to build their web applications. Bootstrap Method has a large and established developer community who constantly keep working on the project. Being developed and backed by Twitter, it has increased the framework's reputation and attracted the interest of most new professionals in the field. As a result, the framework is constantly being worked upon and improved by thousands of developers across the world. Being highly amenable and flexible to new features allows the framework to adapt well to common display breakpoints. One of the reasons Bootstrap has become the darling of the developer community is because of its inclusion of almost every component needed to build a web application from scratch.   

2) Foundation 

Foundation, one of the most progressive and intricate CSS Frameworks, creates highly responsive websites and apps using features like a flexible grid system, ready-made UI elements like buttons and forms, and templates. The advantage of Foundation is that the web applications it produces are compatible across all platforms and look equally stunning on all intended devices. The amount of customisation and added functionalities that Foundation unlocks gives the web applications a cohesive look and feel for your site. The addition of JavaScript, HTML and CSS plugins to Foundation enables all these added features and makes the framework compatible. Developed by ZURB in 2011, Foundation is based on Bootstrap and is put to use by major corporations like Facebook. Disney, Adobe, eBay and Mozilla.    

3) Bulma 

Bulma, an open-source CSS Framework, was created with the intention of providing mobile-first designs using its ready to-use front-end component library. Bulma is able to create responsive web applications by utilising its strict CSS-only approach with no JavaScript components and distinguished templates that give the websites a natural flow and clean UI. Bulma is a class-based CSS Framework that has gained a lot of traction among front-end developers since its launch and today competes with established giants like Bootstrap. Bulma is built on Flexbox and uses a modular approach for styling and layout instead of using classes. This enables developers to create custom designs without writing much CSS code. Bulma is easily customisable to suit the specific needs of a project alongside its cross-browser compatibility.   

4) Sakura 

Sakura is a lightweight and easy-to-use CSS Framework that comes with a preliminary set of CSS styles for styling HTML elements like text, forms, and buttons. The framework promotes a clean and minimalist look for websites. Sakura CSS doesn’t use classes or special components and contains styles for only specific tags. Sakura CSS provides a minimalistic framework ideal for quick prototyping and demonstration purposes. Sakura supports theming using variables, which allows developers to customise the colour palette of their website without the hassle of rewriting any CSS code. 

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5) Semantic UI 

Semantic UI is a CSS Framework used to create responsive layouts with ease using prebuilt components that can be used on the website. Semantic Ui is also easy to integrate with some of the most popular front-end libraries, including React, Angular, etc. While Bootstrap 4 also has similar features, Semantic UI results in better and cleaner-looking interfaces without much hassle. The issue with this framework is that it has a pretty steep learning curve and is much more rigid with its coding conventions.   

6) Susy 

Susy is a relatively unknown entrant in this field of CSS Frameworks but offers significant variations on the conventional designs. As a pure-layout framework, Susy excludes concepts like float, grid, Flexbox and tables and allows the developers to construct any kind of layout from scratch. Susy as a framework is mainly meant for modular and unusual layouts with highly unconventional and complex use cases. This complexity means that it offers much more raw power and potential, which can be a double-edged sword for the uninitiated and amateurs in the field. It is an excellent choice for experienced designers who prefer individuality and uniqueness over ease of use and speed.   

7) Materialize 

Materialize is based on the popular design language Material Design created by Google.  Material Design tends to use paper and ink as a visual metaphor for its user interface elements and makes the design much more approachable. Materialize makes use of these features and provides a modern and responsive design for front-end web development. This framework, unlike Susy, has only a handful of components and classes to learn and follows the well-established 12-column grid format used by Bootstrap. Materialize includes UI components, such as navigation bars, forms, cards, buttons, and models, pre-styled and ready to use with little to no effort. The framework supports the addition of JavaScript components to the website to make it much more interactive for the users.     

8) Pure 

Pure CSS, created by Yahoo, offers a minimalist set of styles for HTML elements. It is a modern and responsive framework for developers to clean websites with minimal loading time. The entire framework is just under 3.5 KBs including the entire set of modules. The framework’s mobile-first approach allows easy development of projects with a focus on mobile devices. The framework provides a small set of basic styles for common HTML elements like buttons, forms, tables, etc. And reduces the volume of CSS code required for styling the websites. Overall, Pure CSS has become an excellent option for developers with a preference for a minimalist and fast-loading framework for their projects. 

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9) Skeleton 

Skeleton is basically a boilerplate which contains only 400 lines of source code. The entire code is so minimal that it does not even describe itself as a CSS Framework, library, or even module. Skeleton was designed for small-scale projects that need basic layouts and positioning. It is lightweight and fast-loading and is easily downloadable without bloating the page with unnecessary elements. Skeleton provides preset styles and UI elements like buttons, forms, tables, typography styles, and some grid and layout options to be used while designing a website. Skeleton’s minimalism allows developers to start with a clean slate and create custom and responsive designs without any pre-styled components. 

10) Milligram 

Milligram is another microframework that uses Flexbox and grid system and offers a concise and easy-to-use set of classes for styling the website’s elements. Milligram does not offer endless customisation options and overwhelms the developers. It is a minimalistic approach which is not overly large and covers the bare basics of web designing. Milligram offers classes picked out to style a website. Each of these classes has its own style choices but is sometimes customisable to fit the designer’s needs. Even though it involves some extra work, extending it by adding a few lines of additional CSS code lets the developers design their projects according to their preferences. 

11) Tailwind CSS 

Tailwind CSS describes itself as a “utility-first CSS Framework” with equipped classes to build custom UI designs directly in the users’ markup. The framework simplifies the implementation of inline styling to end up with an efficient and beautiful UI without writing any CSS code. Tailwind CSS also follows a mobile-first design approach, and thus, its default styles are designed for smaller screen dimensions, such as mobiles. This approach helps create responsive web applications that can easily be scaled up to larger screen sizes like laptops and monitors. As one of the best CSS libraries for beginners, Tailwind allows front-end developers to quickly build custom interfaces with a focus on speed and efficiency. Tailwind allows developers greater control over the look and feel of their websites.    

12) Tacit 

Tacit defines itself as a “CSS Framework for dummies who want their web services to look attractive but have almost zero skills in graphic design.” As the description suggests, adding the Tacit link to the website code results in a great-looking website instantaneously, but mixing codes from other CSS Frameworks to add additional features to the website might break the website. According to the framework’s developer, Yegor Bugayenko, developing Tacit allowed him to focus on the functionality of a project from day one. It also solves most of the problems associated with the responsiveness of forms, the appearance of form controls, tables, fonts, and colours on the website and makes it attractive almost immediately. 

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13) Spectre 

Spectre makes use of the latest CSS technologies, such as Flexbox and CSS grid, resulting in a lightweight and responsive modern framework. It has a minimal and customisable design that is great for designing quick prototypes and building a website without the hassle of starting from scratch. Spectre has extensive documentation, making it approachable and easy to use for amateurs. It has a range of basic styles for CSS typography and elements and a flexible and responsive Flexbox-based layout system. Spectre provides the advantages of pure CSS with its components and utilities, designed by following best practices in coding in a consistent design language.   

14) Primer 

Designed by GitHub themselves, Primer is an open-source CSS design system with customisable and reusable UI components and utilities. Primer CSS allows developers to maintain a consistent look throughout their websites with modern and responsive web interfaces. Primer ensures that the same style is used throughout the website to give the users an enjoyable browsing experience. Primer includes a CSS Framework, style guide documentation, options and numerous tools and libraries to support front-end developers and designers. By maintaining uniformity, Primer ensures that additional time and effort are not dedicated to creating custom styles for each website component. 

15) Ant Design 

Ant Design is a widely used UI component library directly competing with Material Design and is often used with frameworks such as React. Ant provides developers with easily customisable and high-quality components that enable them to meet specific design needs. The Ant Design library supports light as well as dark themes, which can be customised using CSS variables or JavaScript.  It is an enterprise-class UI written in TypeScript and supports over a dozen languages.   

16) Vanilla Framework 

Vanilla is an open-source responsive front-end framework designed to be lightweight and easily composable. The framework contains a responsive CSS grid and pre-designed HTML elements written in Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (Sass), a superscript of CSS. Widely used in Canonical products, such as Ubuntu and JAAS, the applications developed using this framework are highly responsive to different screen sizes as well. Although it does not offer the same level of extensive documentation or support community as the other bigger frameworks, Vanilla still has its uses and will only improve with greater prevalence within the community.    

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17) Blaze UI 

Blaze UI is an open-source CSS UI toolkit with a great structure that enables quick creation of web applications. The toolkit focuses on aspects like scalability and maintainability while avoiding unnecessary elements to create appealing and interactive visual elements.  Blaze UI has a set of components such as buttons, forms, tables, and many more utility helpers that can be easily integrated into web projects. Despite having a small developer community, the Blaze Ui toolkit is surprisingly well-documented and easy to learn for the uninitiated. The UI toolkit components rely on native browser capabilities and features instead of a standalone library or framework. 

18) Tachyons 

Tachyons CSS is a popular, functional CSS Framework designed to facilitate rapid web development by providing a set of pre-designed utility classes. Tachyons offers a minimalistic and highly modular, functional approach to styling web applications. By using shorthand notations and avoiding specific class names, Tachyons manages to remain lightweight and thus does not overload the web application with unnecessary and additional information.  

19) MVP 

The MVP.css framework helps developers design and style their Minimal Viable Product (MVP) quickly and efficiently. The framework does not contain any class names and styles the root HTML elements of the web application. All that MVP requires is that a one-line code is copied into the HTML files, and the styles can be easily edited using CSS variables if needed. MVP is mainly designed to look equally good across all browsers and devices. MVP provides flexibility without complexity as it has a few excellent styling options without all the bells and whistles of a complex system.   

20) Gutenberg 

Gutenberg is a CSS Framework specifically developed to improve the look of HTML pages for printing. The Gutenberg CSS styles are responsible for the visual appearance of the content blocks and the overall editor interface. They provide the necessary layout, positioning, and styling for the blocks and the interaction elements within the editor. In essence, it provides a way to format HTML pages and make them more visually appealing before printing them out. The CSS for Gutenberg is built with a modular and component-based approach to ensure maintainability and flexibility.  It uses a combination of modern CSS techniques such as Flexbox and CSS Grid for layout management and responsive designing.    

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21) UI Kit 

Developed by YOOtheme and backed by Apple, UI Kit is designed to provide a collection of ready-to-use components and styles for building modern, responsive user interfaces for web applications. It offers a wide range of pre-designed UI components, such as buttons, forms, navigation bars, sliders, modals, cards, and more. These components are designed to be modular and easily customisable. The main emphasis of UI Kit is on minimalism with a clean and no-frills approach towards web designing.  While it is a self-contained framework and would require considerable time and effort to modify, the built-in features are often more than enough to create a UI design that is easily navigable and pleasing to the eye as well.   

22) Chota

Chota CSS is a lightweight and small-sized framework once again focusing on minimalism and clean UI. It has functional class names that make the framework much easier to understand and use, with each class name serving a particular function corresponding to the name. Chota CSS includes a basic grid system based on Flexbox, allowing for easy layout management and responsive columns. Also, this framework does not rely on any JavaScript libraries or additional dependencies, which can make it easier to integrate into different projects. 

Conclusion 

CSS Frameworks provide developers and designers with a sound and compelling foundation to build upon. Any good framework increases developmental efficiency and allows developers to focus on their content rather than the design and UI aspects. Different frameworks offer distinct advantages and features, and it may well be worth the effort to explore a few before settling on one particular framework as the go-to. Sometimes, it may even be beneficial to take the best features from a few different frameworks and develop a separate and distinct set that better aligns with the project requirements.