Ever since its evolution, Bootstrap came as a boon for developers that helped make their websites more dynamic, responsive, and mobile-friendly. With its latest release, Bootstrap 5, the CSS framework added new features giving more flexibility to web developers. But what about site speed? Other related factors affect your site’s performance; plus, there is a steep learning curve with every advanced version released. And that’s where developers tend to look elsewhere for Bootstrap alternatives. There are few front-end website creation tools comparable to Bootstrap. With over 150,000 GitHub stars as of December 2020, Bootstrap has a large user base. While Bootstrap is undoubtedly great at what it does, other frameworks or Bootstrap alternatives may be just as good and perhaps more suitable to your needs. Let’s have a closer look.
1. Spectre CSS
Spectre is a popular CSS framework used to create flexible events. It offers font type, component, and layout components and unrestricted CSS parts and utilities with the best coding and trustworthy language design. The distinctive characteristics of Spectre are Flexbox, quick reaction, and mobile-first. Spectre also includes various features such as avatars, cards, chips, modals, navigation, badges, toasts, etc. In general, you can also use Spectre CSS instead of Bootstrap. Spectre is a lightweight and responsive CSS framework built with modern web design trends in mind. It has a minimalist style and offers a wide range of features, including a grid system, typography, buttons, forms, and more. Spectre is also fully customizable and easy to use.
2. Foundation
Like Bootstrap, Foundation is also responsive and modular, making it perfect for developing websites that work equally well on all devices. Foundation also comes packed with tons of features, such as menus, buttons, form elements, carousels, and more. The Foundation framework is what you might call a highly responsive and detailed network of front-end software that makes it simple to create amazing, adaptable sites, applications, and messages. The W3C’s HTML and CSS standards provide a technical framework for building websites that are based on the ideas of semantic markup, coherent content, adaptable style sheets, and scalable designs. Foundation offers support for right-to-left languages and is Ruby on Rails compatible. Furthermore, it may be readily customized to meet your particular needs.
3. Bulma
Bulma is another great alternative to Bootstrap that offers a wide range of features, including a responsive grid system, Flexbox, and animations. Bulma is also easy to use and customizable, making it perfect for creating websites and apps that look great on all devices. Bulma is an open-source framework that offers ready-to-use frontend components that you can combine to build responsive websites. Bootstrap is largely driven and relies on the cutting-edge Flexible Box Module, generally known as Flexbox. Bulma is a mobile-first framework that calculates colors and other values using utility routines. Bulma is actively updated and includes a wide range of parts capable of coding any website. If you’re a website designer who doesn’t utilize any JS-plugins and only uses linear layouts, Bulma could be an excellent alternative to Bootstrap.
4. Materialize
Materialize is a Design-inspired front-end framework that offers everything you need to create beautiful websites and apps. It includes a responsive grid system, CSS components, and animation libraries. Materialize is also easy to use and customizable, making it the perfect choice for any project. Furthermore, a single basic responsive framework across all phases minimizes the amount of work required by the client. Material Design is a design language that unifies excellent plan standards and progress and invention into one cohesive whole. Materialize has negative aspects: it does not support previous versions of web browsers, and it occasionally mishandles specific components, producing an odd appearance. Finally, Materialize is a highly responsive framework that saves you from writing code from scratch.
5. Tailwind CSS
Tailwind is a CSS framework that prioritizes usefulness first and foremost, with classes like flex, pt-4, text-focus, and 90 others that can be utilized to generate any design in your markup quickly. It’s also highly adaptable since it utilizes utility classes. Also, the Tailwind CSS Intellisense extension for VS Code that we’ll use here prevents you from cramming things like class names together. It has excellent CSS framework quality, composable changes and angles controlled by CSS parameters, maintenance for current state selectors such as center obvious, and much more. However, it does not come with any components by default.
6. Pure
Pure is a lightweight CSS framework that’s designed specifically for mobile. It uses Normalize.css and offers design and styling to local HTML components in addition to the most well-known user interface components. Minimalism is based on Pure, which is incredibly little; a complete set of modules weighs in at 3.7KB* minified and gzipped, making it one of the tiniest libraries available. You can create beautiful, responsive designs for all screen sizes using grids and menus. The primary USP of this platform is, without a doubt, its simplicity and small size. The only problem is that there are only a limited number of templates and designs available.
7. UI Kit
UIKit offers an easy approach to developing sophisticated web interfaces. It’s a modular front-end framework that can be used with HTML or JavaScript. With this structure, you may quickly create your web layouts with ease. This structure is perfect for laying out your website. When compared to Bootstrap, this framework offers more UI components. It also includes oddity parts such as Totop, Thumbnav, etc. As a result of this, you may fairly argue that this framework is an excellent substitute for Bootstrap. You should note that owing to its many unresolved issues on GitHub; it is not yet very polished for use in a high-end application.
8. Luxa CSS
Luxa CSS framework is a minimalist’s dream since it is extremely light and readily implemented in any environment. Luxa comprises a simple modifier system, such as .has-dflex and basic class names like .lx-btn and .lx-row. Luxa is a lightweight and fast CSS framework created for quick development. It offers everything you need to quickly create beautiful websites, including responsive grids, typography, buttons, and forms. Luxa is perfect for small projects where time is of the essence. It’s also easy to use and customizable, making it the perfect choice for any project. However, it does not offer as many features as some of the other Bootstrap Alternatives on this list.
9. Milligram
Milligram is a minimalist CSS framework that offers a tiny amount of everything you need to get started with web development. It includes global styles, typography, buttons, forms, grid systems, and more. Milligram is perfect for small projects that need to be completed quickly. It has a very small file size (2KB), making it easy to download and use. It also uses Normalize.css, so your code will be consistent across all browsers. Milligram is easy to use and customizable, making it the perfect choice for any project. The Milligram is supported by the following internet browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and others.
10. Cardinal CSS
The CSS framework Cardinal was built with performance and flexibility in mind. This model makes it simple for front-end web developers to construct, scale, and maintain CSS for responsive websites, UIs, and apps. One of the most distinctive features of Cardinal is that it allows you to dictate the planning and creativity of your project. It delivers promise by avoiding many attractive plan alternatives that commonly prevent other CSS systems i.e. frequently UI toolbox, not structures. The extension is browser-independent, supporting Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Android and Firefox. It’s also quite easy to expand the existing codebases as your project grows. One of the problematic issues with this architecture is that it isn’t updated anymore.