Writing CSS from scratch can be a tricky and time-consuming process, especially if you're working in a development team fulfilling multiple roles or working as a full-stack developer. It can be frustrating when your workflow gets interrupted and you have to switch context to deal with a difficult layout issue or some unexpected behavior.

That's why CSS frameworks are important: not only do they improve efficiency and scalability, but they also help to keep your design consistent. The right CSS framework can save lots of development time, and in 2025, the number of frameworks to choose from is bigger than ever.

In this post, we explore the top CSS frameworks of 2025, looking at their unique features and ideal use cases.

What are CSS frameworks?

CSS frameworks are pre-prepared libraries of CSS stylesheets, which often include scripting languages like JavaScript or Sass to support them with things like interactivity and maintainability. They simplify UI development by providing you with pre-built styles and components, and they include standardized styles for elements such as buttons, typography, and grid systems, which make responsive layouts easier to build. As the stylesheets are already set up, all you have to do is consult the documentation and use the correct classes, IDs, or components to style your website.

By using these frameworks, you get rid of the need to write all of your CSS from scratch. This saves time and, if used correctly, ensures consistency and quality across your project. Say goodbye to putting !important all over your stylesheet just so you can center some text.

The key components of a CSS framework

Grid system

To help you structure the layout of your website, most CSS frameworks have a grid system. A grid system divides the page into columns and rows so you can simplify the alignment and positioning of your content and define how the page should break down on window resize, so it’s essential for responsive design.

Predefined styles

CSS frameworks provide prebuilt styling for common UI elements such as buttons, forms, text elements, navigation bars, modals, and more. You can consider these styles a base level that gives you a consistent foundation from which to introduce your own styling if needed. This saves time and effort, especially if you're prototyping and just need to quickly demonstrate a design.

Responsive design features

Most CSS frameworks have a mobile-first approach: prioritizing the design and development of apps for mobile first and expanding from there. This includes automatic optimization for different screen sizes. Under the hood, the framework uses media queries to target different screen size breakpoints for device-specific styling.

Utility classes

Some CSS frameworks provide you with utility classes, which are just shortcuts for common CSS properties. These allow you to apply styles quickly without custom CSS. For example, in the CSS framework Tailwind, you can use a utility class like bg-green-500 to change the background color to green, and the p-4 class which adds 16px (1rem) of padding by default (note that this value can be customized by changing the --spacing variable in the Tailwind configuration file):

Theming and customization

Most CSS frameworks allow you to apply theming and customization to the existing styles. This enables you to customize colors, typography, and spacing via variables. This added customization allows you to match your project or company's branding. Some CSS frameworks support the use of Sass or Less for variables and mixins to apply modular styles, making your code easier to reuse across larger projects. 

Accessibility features

Some CSS frameworks have accessibility built in — providing ARIA attributes to add extra context to interactive elements for users using screen readers, or providing focus management and keyboard navigation, which is needed for users who don't use a mouse when they interact with non-standard elements like custom modals, dropdowns, or carousels.

JavaScript components

Some CSS frameworks have JavaScript built in for interactivity in UI components like modals, tooltips, dropdowns, and carousels. This can save developers lots of time because they don’t need to implement custom scripts for complex interactivity and animation.

Top CSS frameworks in 2025

1. Bootstrap

Bootstrap, with its focus on responsive design, introduced the first widely adopted grid system. It's an intuitive and long-standing framework used by major companies like Spotify and LinkedIn. The following are some of its key features:

• Extensive component library: As well as its intuitive grid system layout, it gives you an extensive library of pre-built components for different needs, which you can access through different class names, such as btn or container. This component-based design makes it beginner-friendly.

• Huge ecosystem: It offers a huge array of different themes, templates, and plugins for developers and designers to choose from, along with well-established community support to help if you get stuck on something.

• Built-in JavaScript: Bootstrap comes with built-in JavaScript for interactive components such as modals and carousels, which saves time when building interactive UI.

• Great documentation: Bootstrap has clear and well-defined documentation, which makes it easier to learn and provides something helpful to consult if you run into any problems.

• Popularity:  172k GitHub Stars / 4,710,233 npm downloads

The problem with using Bootstrap is that many websites end up looking the same because it's so popular and many people just use the default components. Another thing to be aware of is Bootstrap's size; it's quite large and can impact performance if you use the full framework. It is possible to optimize performance by customizing builds, but that would require more configuration.

How to use Bootstrap

The below example shows how to place content within the grid system, which will reposition on window resize:

2. Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS was the most used CSS framework in 2024. It employs a utility-first approach that gives you more control and customization. Tailwind CSS comes with the latest CSS features in easy-to-use utility classes, which you can apply directly in your components, eliminating the need for stylesheets. Tailwind is also highly adaptable and can be used with most JavaScript frameworks. It seems to be popular with experienced developers and has a high retention rate, signaling its quality. The following are some of its standout features:

• Utility classes: These classes typically represent a single CSS property, e.g. text-blue-500, which represents a specific shade of blue text. Utility classes are granular and composable, unlike Bootstrap's component classes. For example, in Bootstrap you can apply one component class, btn-primary, which represents a pre-defined class of CSS properties, but in Tailwind you might apply the following classes to get the same effect: class="bg-blue-500 text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded". This is more time consuming but allows for full control and flexibility. 

• Minimal custom CSS: Tailwind reduces the need for custom CSS, as styling is applied to the HTML itself, and utility classes are granular.

• Just-in-time (JIT) compilation: Tailwind uses JIT to generate only the styles your project uses, which in turn improves performance.

• CSS only: It doesn’t include any JavaScript for interactive components, but you can pair it with most JavaScript frameworks to add these features, and it also provides CSS transitions and animations out of the box.

• Popularity:  86.3k GitHub Stars / 14,904,344 npm downloads

How to use Tailwind

The code above makes a flexbox, then centers it horizontally with justify-center. The button inside the flexbox has classes that add some color to its background and text and add padding.

3. Chakra UI

Instead of component or utility classes, Chakra UI provides developers with pre-built React components (which makes it a React component library). It uses React properties (props) that you can pass through to these components to configure their behavior and style — for example, the props colorScheme and size, which are shown below:

  <Button colorScheme="blue" size="lg">Click Me</Button>

Here are some of its standout features:

• Component library: Chakra UI offers a comprehensive library of pre-built components (including a SimpleGrid component for grid-based layouts) that are customizable and allow you to move quickly to develop the UI.

• ARIA compliant: All components are designed to be fully accessible out of the box, offering full support for keyboard navigation and screen reader use. This helps you to create inclusive applications accessible to all users.

• Ease of theming: Chakra UI has out-of-the-box themes for light and dark mode, and, as it’s using CSS-in-JS under the hood, it makes it easy to change styles dynamically at runtime (e.g., changing from light to dark mode dynamically). It's also easy to customize themes to apply your own styling for brand consistency.

• Popularity:  38.7k GitHub Stars / 701,081 npm downloads

How to use ChakraUI

Here's an example to show how you might center a button with ChakraUI. To get this example up and running you would need to start a new React project and install ChakraUI:

4. Foundation

Foundation is an open-source, responsive CSS framework providing a set of pre-styled, customizable (with Sass) utility classes that can be used to create layouts for websites (Foundation for Sites) or emails (Foundation for Emails). It also provides UI templates and "building blocks" to help you get started on your designs as quickly as possible. Here are some of its standout features:

• Two different grid types: Foundation comes with two different grid types: Flex grid (built on Flexbox for simple alignment and equal-height columns), which is similar to Bootstrap, and CSS grid (for advanced layouts with precise row and column control).

• Accessibility: With Foundation, accessibility is built in; all code snippets come with ARIA attributes, making sure your users have a good experience regardless of ability or device

• Modular design: Foundation is modular by default, allowing you to divide your codebases into self-contained components, resulting in a tidier and more maintainable codebase.

• Responsive design: Foundation was the first responsive framework, so this comes built in. It offers a set of advanced media queries that cover a wide array of devices.

• Animation library: Foundation uses Motion UI, a Sass-based library of CSS transitions and animations that used to be included with Foundation but has since been turned into its own separate package. You can import it and use it on various components to add animation and transitions.

• Responsive typography: It provides a module to automatically adjust text sizes based on screen width.

• Visibility classes: You can control element visibility across devices, which is useful for when you might want to hide an element on specific devices with different widths.

• Popularity:  29.3k GitHub Stars / 88,890 npm downloads

How to use Foundation

5. Bulma

Bulma is an open-source CSS framework that is based on Flexbox (but built with Sass), is 100% responsive and customizable, and offers a range of different components that you can access through their utility classes, resulting in minimal CSS coding. Here are some of its standout features:

• Rich library of components: Bulma provides a big library of different components to choose from, including tables, forms, modals, and navbars.

• Lightweight: Its modular structure lets you import only what you need; for instance, you may only need the grid system for layout or just a few buttons. The ability to import only what is needed keeps the CSS file size minimal.

• CSS only: It doesn’t include any JavaScript for interactive components, although you can pair it with any JS framework, and there are extensions that provide interactive elements.

• Highly customizable: Bulma allows for customization, and you can easily extend it with Sass variables, mixins, or custom classes.

• Popularity: 49.6k GitHub Stars / 199,326 npm downloads

How to use Bulma

7. Materialize

Materialize is a CSS framework built on Google's Material Design principles, giving it a visually appealing and consistent UI. It focuses on card-based layouts, bold colors, meaningful shadows, and animations that mimic real-world interactions. Here are some of its standout features:

• Easy to use: It provides ready-to-use components with CSS classes that are straightforward to implement.

• Responsive and customizable: It comes with a flexible grid system, making it easy to create layouts that work on multiple screen sizes.

• Built-in animations and transitions: It includes pre-defined animations (e.g., ripple effects for buttons) and smooth transitions to mimic real-world interactions.

• Built-in JavaScript components: Materialize provides some built-in JavaScript components such as tooltips, dropdowns, and modals that have interactivity out of the box, allowing you to create visually appealing transitions in less time.

• Popularity: 38.9k GitHub Stars / 23,092 npm downloads

How to use Materialize

8. UIkit

UIkit is a modular CSS framework that focuses on simplicity and is designed to help you build lightweight and fast front ends with minimal effort. It provides a set of components that you can access through CSS utility classes. Here are some of its standout features:

• Modularity: Include only the components you need (e.g., grid, buttons, modals) rather than the entire framework; this makes it lightweight, leading to a smaller file size and a faster website for you.

• Advanced grid system: UIkit supports Flexbox and CSS Grid to give you advanced features such as masonry layouts and parallax effects out of the box.

• Built-in JavaScript components: It has a set of JavaScript components (modals, sliders), so you don’t need any extra libraries for interactivity.

• Popularity:  18.4k GitHub Stars / 20,904 npm downloads

How to use UIkit

A comparison of the top 7 CSS frameworks of 2025

Generally, beginners will prefer a framework that offers a decent aesthetic quality for its predefined components out of the box: the less customization that is required, the better. They will also gravitate toward frameworks with bigger communities and clear and comprehensive documentation.

Out of the seven top frameworks we have mentioned, Bootstrap and Bulma would be most suited to beginners, due to their pre-styled components, easy-to-read documentation, and supportive communities.

If customization is more important to you, then Tailwind CSS might be a better option, as it provides the most granular control with its utility classes, allowing you to access CSS properties, and gives you the option to use only what you need.

Foundation is a solid choice for enterprise-level applications, offering advanced responsive design for complex layouts and modular components for scalability.

Below is a table providing an overview of where each framework excels, for comparison:

Advantages of using a CSS framework

The advantages of using a CSS framework are numerous; it takes the time-consuming activity of writing CSS from scratch and replaces it with quick and easy utility classes or pre-built components that you can customize. Here are some of the main benefits of using a CSS framework:

• Faster development process: Having a set of predefined components as a baseline from which you can build allows you to avoid reinventing the wheel, as components such as navbars and buttons are pretty well established. It greatly speeds up development if you can use something prebuilt and customize from there.

• Consistent design across projects: Employing a CSS framework will give you a consistent design across your different projects as styles are standardized, and you can import configuration files for theming, easily making sure your projects follow branding requirements.

• Responsive layouts out of the box: All CSS frameworks have some sort of grid system: either a traditional row and column setup like Bootstrap, or utility classes that allow you to build your own grid. This makes it easy to design webpages that work for different screen widths. 

• Community support and documentation: All of the major CSS frameworks have strong community support ready to lend a helping hand if you run into difficulties, and most have clear and intuitive documentation, making them easy to use.

How to choose the right CSS framework

Project size

If you are working on a small project, then a framework such as Bulma, which is lightweight and fast with fewer features, may be better suited to you. Larger, more commercial projects need something more robust with many features, so frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation might be a better fit.

Customization needs

If customization is the top priority in your project, then Tailwind is the top choice for full control over customization. For out-of-the-box, pre-designed components, go with Bootstrap or Materialize. It's also worth thinking of the developer skill of your team; people more familiar with CSS might prefer something like Tailwind, giving them more control, whereas beginners will probably prefer something that provides as much out of the box as possible, like Bootstrap.

Project type

Content-heavy sites suit Tailwind, as it provides granular control over typography, spacing, and responsiveness; this makes it ideal for websites like blogs. Corporate websites and prototypes suit Bootstrap as it provides clean, professional-looking components out of the box. It also has a big community and is popular, helping with maintainability. Foundation is best used to deliver enterprise-level applications as it provides advanced responsiveness for complex layouts and is highly customizable. 

Performance 

Tailwind CSS is great for performance because of its utility-first design; its JIT compiler only compiles the styles you need and nothing more. UIkit also allows you to load only the components you are using, resulting in better performance overall.

Compatibility with older browsers

Most CSS frameworks rely on more modern features like CSS grid, and animations, which may render incorrectly in older browsers. Although some frameworks have previous versions available that support older browsers like IE11, it’s generally advisable to use the most up-to-date releases so you can make use of the latest features. If it’s a priority for you to support older browsers, you may need to employ extra tooling with polyfills, or avoid using a modern CSS framework altogether.

Emerging trends in CSS frameworks

The emerging trend seems to be toward increased adoption of utility-first frameworks (like Tailwind) with a push toward modularity and performance. Another popular trend is zero-runtime CSS: Chakra UI, mentioned above, is one of many frameworks that allow for dynamic runtime styling. AI-assisted and low-code styling is also on the up with platforms like v0 by Vercel. Native CSS features may also replace frameworks for some use cases as CSS becomes more capable (CSS Grid is a good example of an improvement like this). Other trends include a pull toward better accessibility and user preferences (e.g., offering dark mode as standard).

CSS frameworks + Contentful for faster development

CSS frameworks provide you with a way to speed up your development pipeline by delegating basic styles, interactivity, and complex layout requirements so you can focus on other things like complex business logic or API integrations. 

Another tool that helps speed up your development is Contentful, which you can use to manage your content straight out of the box with no server or database setup required. You just create your content model in the Contentful dashboard and then fetch it through Contentful's REST or GraphQL APIs. Non-developers can update content in the dashboard and it can immediately update the content on your website.

Another way Contentful can save you time is by helping to speed up UI development. We created Forma 36, a React UI library that provides you with a comprehensive set of highly customizable, pre-built components, allowing you to create consistent user interfaces for your pages that interact with Contentful.

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