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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Bootstrap user for a long time, but I recently made the jump to Tailwind. It's not the revolutionary upgrade I was hoping for, but it's nice evolutionary step in the right direction. It's quite intuitive, but it doesn't get rid of most of the frustrations that come from doing layouts, as those come from the design of CSS itself. `@apply` makes the upgrade worth it though, it's easy to make custom classes from the Tailwind elements.

The one thing I don't like is that the culture around Tailwind seems a lot more proprietary, like you're getting three quarters of a product that you need to buy the rest of, whereas Bootstrap felt like you got everything you could ever need for free.

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If you're talking about Tailwind UI[1] — I use Tailwind extensively and have basically never looked at Tailwind UI. It's just useful snippets of HTML styled with Tailwind. It is by no means required to get value out of Tailwind.

I'm not sure what you mean by proprietary culture! Based on the fact that I've pretty much never seen anyone talk about it, I would guess (total guess, no real knowledge) that no more than 1% of Tailwind users have paid for Tailwind UI.

[1] https://tailwindui.com/

That's what I mean, though. $250 for some styled HTML! I think that's crazy. Compare with Bootstrap, which has basically just as many snippets simply as part of the documentation.

I'm saying you don't need that and almost nobody uses it. There are tons of snippets in the Tailwind documentation. I just scrolled down the side nav and clicked a page at random:

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/divide-width#add-borders-betwee...

Ok, I can see how if you're used to relying on the Bootstrap examples[1] you would experience the lack of such examples as a big hole in the TW docs. I guess I would argue that those examples don't go very far at all in a real-world application.

[1] https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.1/examples/

I think $250 is perfectly reasonable. If it saves you a few hours, it's already paid for itself.

I don't think it's crazy. It's a good business model for them and a way to monetize their work on Tailwind.

Spending $250 in order to get a well implemented and well designed HTML and CSS framework for your app sounds like money well spent to me, depending on the circumstance.

If you're an expert or pro at CSS, then yes, that's expensive. But if you have a little budget and need to make some quick progress on a new site, it's a great deal. Hiring someone who can recreate these designs and give you exactly what you want is probably going to cost more than $250.

I paid the $250 and it's an incredible time saver for prototyping & making decent looking, fully responsive internal apps for clients. Based on the number of billable hours saved, it's paid for itself many many many times over.

You have to do literally everything from scratch with Tailwind though, for example I never realised how much work is involved in a simple avatar dropdown / logout component (hidden full-screen button). Tailwind is much closer to raw CSS than Bootstrap. That's not a criticism, it's just a different value proposition.

My favorite thing about Tailwind is all the sites that offer copy-and-paste components, ready to use (since you already have all the CSS, you just copy HTML-and-classes and it looks exactly how you'd expect). Sure, you can pay for TailwindUI, but you can also just browse (free) components from e.g.

* https://tailblocks.cc

* https://blocks.wickedtemplates.com

* https://tailwindcomponents.com/

* https://merakiui.com/

* https://www.tailwind-kit.com/

* https://www.tailwindtoolbox.com/

Most of the sites I put together this year used an amalgamation of components from those sites for basic structure, and then just get customized to the brand and site function. I hate writing raw CSS and I would also hate writing raw Tailwind.

That's a bit of an odd criticism. I wouldn't expect any library/framework to offer copy-paste-able usage of itself as a feature.

Tailwind is just a different way of writing CSS styles. Not a bunch of premade UI templates.

It seems proprietary because there are ad links disguised as documentation links. You can't click "Components" anywhere on TailwindCSS.com or you'll end up on TailwindUI.com pricing page.

It's fine that they want to make money but it's very confusing for a new user. Ultimately, they might make more money by dropping the shady links if it's turning away enough new users.

  s/Components/Tailwind UI/g

across their site would be a big improvement.

I can maybe see how that could potentially be confusing to a brand new visitor, but how is it shady? It's a clearly labeled link that does take you to components made with tailwind. Are they supposed to link to all the freeware out there first?

It's an ad designed not to look like an ad. It looks like internal site navigation but is an external link. Not a big deal but a bit shady/confusing.

Gotcha. Yeah, phrased like that, I can see your perspective better (and I even agree!). Maybe a little external site icon and moving that link to the end of the nav could clear that up.

Just started with tailwinds and similiar thoughts. A framework like this without components.

Try daisyui as a tailwinds plugin. It comes with the missing components. It also allows you to replace your 80 character style for buttons with btn btn-primary.

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