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Comment by andruby | Hacker News Reader

What's with all the negativity here on HN, especially about the pricing?

The Tailwind team created one of the most used CSS frameworks ever and charge nothing for it. The framework needs a revenue stream to enable continued investment. Rails has basecamp. Bootstrap had twitter. React has meta. Tailwind has Tailwind UI.

I find it great value. It's a one-off cost comparable to hiring a designer or front-end developer for a day, and you get a bunch of usable components + future upgrades.

Usually HN isn't as negative about revenue streams for open-source developers.

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I paid for the UI kit early last year and think it's good value. The amount of time its saved me has more than paid for itself, and it's just nice to have something that isn't a subscription model, or licensed per project.

The developers are very generous too. 4 years back when I was in college I reached out to them and asked for a student discount. They gave me free access to Tailwind UI ( under a restricted license).

I agree with you on the pricing. I'm a Tailwind UI customer and have found it more than worth the money.

That said, it is disappointing to see recent work all tied to React. I generally prefer Phoenix LiveView (or Rails + Hotwire, etc) over a React/Angular/Vue approach. By tying it to React, they destroy most the value this kit would have otherwise had to me.

They already earned my money, though. I still enthusiastically recommend Tailwind UI to people.

Yeah. I’m also not using React. Vue would be nice and so would Phoenix. I think they might add Vue support, as they do for headless-ui. Phoenix is less likely imo.

The paid nature makes it hard for the community to fill in that gap, which is a shame. I’d love to collaborate on a Phoenix version of Catalyst.

I think it's the surprisingly poor quality of Catalyst compared to their other products and also how limited it is considering the price.

This is an extra thing on top of everything they made. I praise them for not adding any extra costs. It is never enough for some people. They have a one off price for so much stuff. Absolutely no brainer for a lot of people.

> This is an extra thing on top of everything they made. I praise them for not adding any extra costs.

Only if you're an all access customer. Otherwise it's $149.

I like the Tailwind folks but $149 for Catalyst in its current state is a bit steep.

It’s only a £30 surcharge for me and I don’t have all access.

> I think it's the surprisingly poor quality

It's also a friggen preview and uncompleted thing. They could have waited for the whole thing to be done and polished but everyone was barking at them "just release it I don't care if it's not done"

Judging by your previous comments, you're not even a customer of theirs and have very misguided views on the product and it's pricing.

I have a feeling you have a competing product and are just trying to drum up negativity about Tailwind.

edit:// yep, I just checked your history, you're the creator of that nue thingy that is trying to compete with next/astro/nuxt/tailwind/etc all at once.

Obviously not the reason for my feedback on Catalyst

This makes so much more sense now. Thanks for investigating

> one of the most used CSS frameworks ever

Any evidence for this claim?

I'd say I see more tailwind than bootstrap for newer sites, but that's anecdotal.

74K stars on github is _some_ evidence.

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss

You can see it clearly by watching the trends in any of the NPM tracking sites, such as npmcharts[1].

[1]: https://npmcharts.com/compare/bulma,tailwindcss,bootstrap,ui...

Tailwind and Hero Icons eclipsed Bootstrap and Font Awesome in NPM downloads a year or more ago.

Most people using bootstrap wern't getting it through npm. It was a script tag importing off a cdn.

ReactStrap is npm though.

That was the last time I used bootstrap about 2-3 years ago before going all in on Hero Icons, Headless-UI, and css design tokens and utility classes (Tailwind)

Reactstrap is only one library, there is react-bootstrap, and also many people don't use a specific library with Bootstrap.

Tailwind is neat but I think people get a little too rah-rah about it given the build complexity and integrating with existing codebases.

I'm not sure what your point is.

My point was that a lot of use of bootstrap was through CDNs. Yes, there was plenty of npm downloads also. However comparing tailwind npm downloads vs bootstrap downloads is not a fair comparison of use.

They have different use cases and target audiences. A lot of people want to just chuck a button in a template and have it look in their internal tool that 3 people will see. They likely copied the dist/bootstrap.min.css file and never updated.

It's also likely all the users of server side frameworks like django or ruby on rails never setup npm in those projects, but certainly used bootstrap. It's less likely those projects would use tailwind because you need have a js buildstep for it unless you want to ship 10mb of css.

There's no denying tailwind is popular, but thinking npm is the only way people are getting css frameworks/libraries is flat wrong.

The claim is "one of the most used CSS frameworks ever", not "a CSS framework that has more downloads on npm than bootstrap."

I should mention that I did a study about 6 months ago for a government client, and successfully convinced them to migrate away from Bootstrap 4, Font Awesome, and an in-house patchwork of 10 years of different css styles, to Tailwind CSS and Hero Icons in their mission critical app.

It took many long brain dump sessions, and some help from the U.S. Digital Service and Tailwind themselves.

At the end of the day, Tailwind solved more problems for them than it created.

You wouldn’t think that moving from loading icons via css versus loading them via inline svg’s would make a huge difference; but I found that it can actually reduce a second or two of render time from a legacy and bloated code base.

Font Awesome and Bootstrap Icons can be inlined too?

No, that is where the efficiency in Hero Icons comes from.

The download count may not reflect the adoption rate. It is largely affected by CI/CD.

I used to use Bootstrap. Now the only frameworks I ship anymore are Bulma and Tailwind.

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