Why I switched from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS after 3 months of fighting

I was building my first real project, a personal portfolio site, and I had to decide between Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS. I went with Bootstrap at first because everyone said it was easier for beginners. But after 3 months of overriding default styles and fighting with bloated components, I finally switched to Tailwind. The difference was huge. With Bootstrap, I spent half my time digging through docs to undo styles. With Tailwind, I can just write utility classes right in my HTML and see exactly what's happening. My code is way cleaner now and I actually understand what each piece does. Has anyone else made a similar framework switch early on and found it changed how they learned? I'm curious what other beginners are using.

2 comments

2 Comments

john_cooper5d ago

Honestly that sounds like a lot of problems you caused yourself. Bootstrap gives you a solid grid and basic components that work right out of the box, you just have to accept you're not going to make it look like a custom design agency site with zero effort. Spending months overriding everything is on you for trying to fight the framework instead of working with it. Tailwind makes your HTML look like a dump of ten thousand classes, good luck changing anything six months from now when you have to find that margin-4 class buried in a 200 character long string. Beginner developers usually benefit more from learning actual CSS fundamentals instead of relying on some utility-first system to hold their hand.

kaiharris4d ago

Man nah I gotta push back on this hard. Bootstrap sites all start looking the same, thats just a fact. You can only override so much before you're fighting the framework more than building anything. Tailwind's class strings look ugly but I can actually make something that doesnt look like every other site on the internet. And that "learn CSS fundamentals" gatekeeping is tired, nobody is saying skip CSS entirely. You learn CSS way faster when you actually see what each class does right there in your HTML instead of digging through a separate stylesheet. Its just a different workflow, not a crutch.