Tailwind vs Material UI – Full Comparison

Most front-end developers are aware that a front-end framework can make or break your project. In this article, we’ll compare two of the most popular styling and UI component libraries – Tailwind CSS and Material UI. Both offer unique strengths and cater to different developer needs, but how do you decide which one is right for you? Let’s dive into a side-by-side comparison that will help you make an informed decision.

Do you want to quickly test which is better for you – Tailwind vs Material UI? UXPin Merge’s trial comes with imported Tailwind UI and MUI libraries that you can prototype with. Start your trial, pick one of the libraries in UXPin’s editor, build your design, and copy the ready code to see which one fits you better.

UXPin Merge is a prototyping tool that renders components as code, not pixels, so you can quickly move from design to development with no hurdles. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Design UI with code-backed components.

Use the same components in design as in development. Keep UI consistency at scale.

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS has taken the web development world by storm with its utility-first approach. Rather than providing predefined components, Tailwind offers a set of low-level utility classes that let you build custom designs without leaving your HTML. This methodology promotes rapid development and exceptional flexibility, allowing developers to create highly bespoke interfaces.

Customization at its Core: Tailwind allows you to style your components directly within your HTML, offering unparalleled control and customization.
Speedy Development: By using utility classes, you can prototype and build faster, eliminating the need to write custom CSS from scratch.
Responsive Design Made Easy: Tailwind’s responsive utility classes enable you to design for multiple screen sizes effortlessly.
Community and Ecosystem: With a growing community and a rich ecosystem of plugins, Tailwind ensures you have the tools and support you need.

Who uses Tailwind?

Tailwind CSS is used by a diverse range of companies and developers across various industries. Some notable organizations and platforms that use Tailwind CSS include:

GitHub: GitHub uses Tailwind CSS for several of its interfaces, leveraging its utility-first approach for rapid and flexible development.
Laravel: The Laravel framework has integrated Tailwind CSS into its ecosystem, making it a popular choice among developers within the Laravel community.
Dev.to: The popular developer community and blogging platform Dev.to utilizes Tailwind CSS for its frontend design, benefiting from its customizable utility classes.
Statamic: Statamic, a CMS for static site generation, uses Tailwind CSS to provide a sleek and efficient user interface.
Algolia: Algolia, a powerful search-as-a-service platform, incorporates Tailwind CSS in its documentation and various web interfaces.
Vercel: Vercel, a platform for frontend frameworks and static sites, uses Tailwind CSS for its documentation and marketing pages.
Superhuman: The email client Superhuman uses Tailwind CSS for its sleek and fast user interface, highlighting its efficiency and customizability.

These examples illustrate the versatility and popularity of Tailwind CSS across various sectors, from large tech companies to individual developers and small startups.

Material UI

Material UI (called MUI by front-end devs) is a React component library that implements Google’s Material Design philosophy. It provides a comprehensive set of pre-styled components that follow best practices in user experience design, making it a go-to choice for developers seeking consistency and modern aesthetics.

Ready-to-Use Components: Material UI comes with a vast array of pre-built components that adhere to Material Design guidelines, ensuring a cohesive look and feel across your application.
Theming and Customization: While the components are pre-styled, Material UI offers robust theming capabilities, allowing you to tweak and customize the look to match your brand.
Accessibility and Performance: Built with accessibility in mind, Material UI components are optimized for performance, providing a seamless user experience.
React library: Material UI leverages the power of React’s component-based architecture, making it a natural fit for React projects.

Who uses MUI?

MUI is widely used by various companies and organizations, ranging from startups to large enterprises, due to its comprehensive set of pre-styled components and adherence to Material Design guidelines.

Here are some notable examples of organizations and platforms that use Material UI:

Netflix: The streaming giant utilizes Material UI for certain internal tools and applications, benefiting from its component-driven architecture and consistent design.
Spotify: The popular music streaming service leverages Material UI for some of its web applications, ensuring a cohesive and modern user experience.
Nasa: NASA uses Material UI in some of their data visualization and internal tools, taking advantage of its robust and accessible components.
Amazon: Parts of Amazon’s internal dashboards and tools are built using Material UI, providing a streamlined and efficient development process.
Shutterstock: The stock photography company incorporates Material UI in their web applications, ensuring a clean and professional look across their platform.
Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos’s aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company uses Material UI for some of their internal tools and applications.
Hootsuite: The social media management platform uses Material UI to provide a consistent and user-friendly interface for its customers.

The framework’s versatility and adherence to Material Design principles make it a popular choice for companies looking to build modern, responsive, and accessible web applications.

How to Choose Between Tailwind CSS and Material UI

Choosing between Tailwind CSS and Material UI ultimately boils down to your project requirements and personal preference.

If you thrive on granular control and customization, Tailwind’s utility-first approach will be your best friend. On the other hand, if you prefer a structured, component-driven framework with a focus on consistency and rapid development, Material UI might be the way to go.

Design Approach and Philosophy

Tailwind CSS:
- Utility-First: Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework, providing low-level utility classes that enable developers to build custom designs directly in their HTML. This approach promotes rapid prototyping and high flexibility.
- Customization: Tailwind offers extensive customization options, allowing developers to configure their styles and create a unique design system.
Material UI:
- Component-First: Material UI is a React component library based on Google’s Material Design guidelines. It provides pre-built, styled components that ensure a consistent and cohesive user experience.
- Design Consistency: Material UI focuses on maintaining consistency across applications by adhering to Material Design principles.

Development Speed and Workflow

Tailwind CSS:
- Rapid Prototyping: The utility-first approach allows for quick styling changes directly in the markup, making it easier to iterate on designs.
- Learning Curve: Developers might need to adjust to using utility classes instead of traditional CSS methods.
Material UI:
- Out-of-the-Box Components: Material UI provides ready-to-use components, which can speed up the development process by reducing the need to build and style components from scratch.
- React Integration: Seamlessly integrates with React, leveraging React’s component-based architecture for building complex UIs.

Customization and Flexibility

Tailwind CSS:
- Highly Customizable: Tailwind’s configuration file allows developers to define their styles, color schemes, and spacing scales, offering extensive customization.
- Component Libraries: While Tailwind is primarily utility-based, developers can create or use component libraries that fit within the Tailwind ecosystem.
Material UI:
- Theming and Styling: Material UI offers theming capabilities, allowing developers to customize the appearance of components to match their brand’s design language.
- Limited by Design Guidelines: Customization is possible, but components are designed to follow Material Design guidelines, which might limit flexibility for highly unique designs.

Community and Ecosystem

Tailwind CSS:
- Growing Ecosystem: Tailwind CSS has a rapidly growing ecosystem with plugins, themes, and tools that enhance its functionality.
- Community Support: A vibrant community and extensive documentation provide support and resources for developers.
Material UI:
- Mature Library: Material UI is a well-established library with a strong community, extensive documentation, and numerous examples and tutorials.
- Comprehensive Component Set: Provides a wide range of components, from basic UI elements to more complex features like data tables and charts.

Performance Considerations

Tailwind CSS:
- Smaller CSS Bundle: By using PurgeCSS, Tailwind can significantly reduce the size of the final CSS bundle by removing unused styles, leading to better performance.
- Custom Builds: Tailwind’s configuration allows for creating custom builds tailored to the specific needs of a project.
Material UI:
- Optimized Components: Material UI components are optimized for performance, but the library’s size can be a consideration for highly performance-sensitive applications.
- Tree Shaking: Supports tree shaking to remove unused components and reduce bundle size.

Use Cases

Tailwind CSS:
- Custom Designs: Ideal for projects that require highly custom, bespoke designs and where developers want full control over the styling.
- Rapid Prototyping: Useful for quickly prototyping and iterating on UI designs.
Material UI:
- Consistent UI: Perfect for applications that benefit from a consistent, polished look and adhere to Material Design principles.
- React Projects: Best suited for React-based projects where ready-to-use, styled components can significantly speed up development.

Can you use Tailwind and MUI together?

Yes, you can use Material UI (MUI) with Tailwind CSS in a project. Integrating these two can allow you to leverage the utility-first approach of Tailwind CSS for rapid styling while also using MUI’s pre-built, highly customizable React components.

While specific examples of companies or high-profile projects that publicly acknowledge using both Tailwind CSS and Material UI together might not be as readily available, the combination is certainly popular among individual developers and smaller projects. It gives developers flexibility, rapid development capabilities, and ability to maintain a consistent and polished UI.

Better option: Tailwind CSS with Tailwind UI

Tailwind UI is a premium component library created by the makers of Tailwind CSS. It provides a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive UI components built using Tailwind CSS. These components help developers quickly build beautiful and consistent user interfaces without having to start from scratch.

How Tailwind UI Fits into Tailwind CSS

Complementary Tool: Tailwind UI is a natural extension of Tailwind CSS. While Tailwind CSS provides the utility-first framework for creating custom designs, Tailwind UI offers a collection of pre-built components that can be directly used in projects.
Efficiency and Speed: Tailwind UI enhances the efficiency of Tailwind CSS by allowing developers to quickly assemble UIs from a library of components. This is especially useful for prototyping and MVP development.
Consistent Design Language: Using Tailwind UI ensures a consistent design language across the application since all components follow the same design principles and are built using Tailwind CSS.
Educational Resource: Tailwind UI also serves as an educational resource, demonstrating how to use Tailwind CSS effectively. Developers can learn best practices and advanced techniques by examining how Tailwind UI components are constructed.
Integration: Integrating Tailwind UI components into a Tailwind CSS project is straightforward. Developers can copy the HTML structure and corresponding utility classes from Tailwind UI and paste them into their Tailwind CSS-based project. From there, they can further customize the components as needed.

Using Tailwind UI in UXPin

UXPin Merge has a built-in Tailwind UI library. You can take the CSS components and build fully functional prototypes with them.

Nest components together to create complex elements or use “Custom Component” tile to paste in pre-built sections that are posted at Tailwind UI website.

Can’t find a section you like? Use AI Component Creator to generate one based on your prompt. See a full tutorial of using component creator here.

Using MUI in UXPin

If you want to build a React app, use the MUI library in UXPin. We integrated UI components that allow you to build fully functional and responsive React interfaces.

You can style them anyway you like and even bring more components if you like to. Follow this tutorial to see how to build your prototype: Dashboard Example.

What Do We Recommend – Tailwind vs Material UI?

Both Tailwind CSS and Material UI are powerful tools in a developer’s arsenal. Your choice will depend on your need for customization versus convenience, and how closely you want your project to adhere to Material Design standards. Whatever you choose, both frameworks promise to enhance your development workflow and help you build beautiful, responsive web applications.

UXPin Merge is a powerful tool that transforms the way design and development teams collaborate, offering a unified platform where designs are directly linked to the production code. This innovation not only speeds up the workflow but also ensures a high level of accuracy and consistency, making it an indispensable tool for modern design teams aiming to create high-quality digital products efficiently. Try UXPin Merge for free.

Try UXPin Merge