headlessui VS Tailwind CSS

Compare headlessui vs Tailwind CSS and see what are their differences.

headlessui

Completely unstyled, fully accessible UI components, designed to integrate beautifully with Tailwind CSS. (by tailwindlabs)
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headlessui Tailwind CSS
180 1,276
24,154 78,166
2.1% 2.1%
8.8 9.4
4 days ago 5 days ago
TypeScript TypeScript
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

headlessui

Posts with mentions or reviews of headlessui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Exploring Catalyst, Tailwind's UI kit for React
    3 projects | dev.to | 27 Mar 2024
    Catalyst is a comprehensive, fully componentized UI kit for modern React projects, built on the next generation of Headless UI. With Catalyst, you can create a custom set of components to use and reuse in your projects.
  • Headless UI - a great components library for Vue & React
    1 project | dev.to | 25 Mar 2024
    And that is why I was looking for a UI library that would deliver these things for a long time and today I am happy to announce that I have found it! It is Headless UI by the Tailwind Team.
  • The Secret Weapon of Top Developers: 7 React JS Libraries You Can't Afford to Ignore
    5 projects | dev.to | 21 Feb 2024
    Headless UI provides a suite of unstyled, fully accessible UI components perfect for developers who want full control over their interface design. It's a developer's canvas, offering the foundational parts needed to build a user interface without dictating the aesthetics, making it ideal for those who love to integrate with Tailwind CSS. With https://headlessui.com/, you can ensure that your applications are inclusive and easy to use for everyone, while also maintaining the freedom to craft a unique look and feel that aligns with your brand or style guidelines.
  • Tailwind Color Palette Generator
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2024
  • 9 React component libraries for efficient development in 2023
    9 projects | dev.to | 13 Nov 2023
    GitHub stars: 22.5k GitHub link: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui Documentation: https://headlessui.com/
  • React Ecosystem in 2024
    22 projects | dev.to | 16 Oct 2023
    Website: Headless UI
  • Build E-Commerce apps faster with Storefront UI
    1 project | dev.to | 16 Oct 2023
    Few months ago, I discovered project called Headless UI and I instantly liked the idea.
  • Top 5 Headless Components For Your React Application In 2023
    8 projects | dev.to | 14 Oct 2023
    In addition to Tailwind CSS, Tailwind Labs also created Headless UI, a collection of components that work well with Tailwind CSS.
  • Accessibility and Headless UI Libraries - Adobe, Radix, Tailwind, MUI
    6 projects | dev.to | 24 Sep 2023
    Tailwind - Headless UI
  • Nue: A React/Vue/Vite/Astro Alternative
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2023
    Thanks for sharing! I love projects that reimagine entire ecosystems: there's a lot of value in imagining what could be if we didn't worry about what is.

    Some feedback: your comparison of the various ListBox implementations[0] feels disingenuous. I know Vue best, so I looked at that implementation in detail, and it's got a lot going on that you don't attempt to replicate in your version. A few key features that are missing:

    * Search—in the HeadlessUI version there are several hundred lines dedicated to making typing work for jumping to specific list items.

    * Multiselect—HeadlessUI supports multiple selections, yours does not appear to. Again, this occupies a lot of lines.

    * Focus management—HeadlessUI has a lot of code dedicated to smoothing out the focus management. In my testing, your implementation has pretty buggy support for using tab to navigate.

    * The HeadlessUI version dedicates a lot of lines to types, where your Nue implementation is dynamically typed. This may be a feature for you, but in my mind those type declarations are doing important work.

    * In general, the HeadlessUI implementation tries to be flexible for many use cases [2], while yours only needs to support the one demo list.

    You also include this render.ts file [1] from HeadlessUI, which is more part of a bespoke sub-framework used by HeadlessUI than it is a necessary part of any old Vue ListBox implementation. If you're going to count that against Vue, then there are parts of Nue JS that should be included as well.

    These kinds of comparisons are most persuasive if you can write all the implementations from the ground up, using idiomatic patterns for each framework and identical feature sets for each implementation. When you do that, it's easy to compare and contrast the frameworks. As it is, it's like comparing a house to a garden shed: yes, you've used fewer lines of code, but it's not obvious to me that that's a feature of Nue and not just a byproduct of a less ambitious component.

    [0] https://nuejs.org/compare/component.html

    [1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui/blob/%40headlessu...

    [2] https://headlessui.com/vue/listbox#component-apihttps://head...

Tailwind CSS

Posts with mentions or reviews of Tailwind CSS. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-22.
  • The best testing strategies for frontends
    8 projects | dev.to | 22 Apr 2024
    With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.
  • ChatCrafters - Chat with AI powered personas
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Apr 2024
    This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository
  • Mojo CSS vs. Tailwind: Choosing the best CSS framework
    3 projects | dev.to | 9 Apr 2024
    Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.
  • Collab Lab #66 Recap
    7 projects | dev.to | 7 Apr 2024
    JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite
  • Show HN: Brutalisthackernews.com – A HN reader inspired by brutalist web design
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Apr 2024
    - Performance is a feature.

    Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

    A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

    A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

    My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

    As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    - Staff Software Engineer ($275k/yr): https://tailwindcss.com/careers/staff-software-engineer

    We're small, independent, and profitable, with a team of just 6 people doing millions in revenue, and growing sustainably every year. You'd work directly with the founders on open-source software used by millions of people.

    If you like the idea of working on a small team that cares about craft and isn't trying to achieve VC scale, I think this is a pretty awesome place to do your best work.

  • Deploy a Golang serverless function for a demo form with htmx
    3 projects | dev.to | 30 Mar 2024
    Instead of Booststrap, I used Tailwind CSS as the CSS library.
  • Shared Tailwind Setup For Micro Frontend Application with Nx Workspace
    6 projects | dev.to | 29 Mar 2024
    Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.
  • Building a Dynamic Job Board with Issues Github, Next.js, Tailwind CSS and MobX-State-Tree
    6 projects | dev.to | 28 Mar 2024
    Basic knowledge of Tailwind CSS and MobX-State-Tree
  • CSS Styling (Next.js)
    1 project | dev.to | 28 Mar 2024
    Tailwind is a CSS framework that speeds up the development process by allowing you to quickly write utility classes directly in your TSX markup.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing headlessui and Tailwind CSS you can also consider the following projects:

daisyui - 🌼 🌼 🌼 🌼 🌼  The most popular, free and open-source Tailwind CSS component library

flowbite - Open-source UI component library and front-end development framework based on Tailwind CSS

antd - An enterprise-class UI design language and React UI library

shadcn/ui - Beautifully designed components that you can copy and paste into your apps. Accessible. Customizable. Open Source.

unocss - The instant on-demand atomic CSS engine.

downshift 🏎 - 🏎 A set of primitives to build simple, flexible, WAI-ARIA compliant React autocomplete, combobox or select dropdown components.

windicss - Next generation utility-first CSS framework.

Material UI - Ready-to-use foundational React components, free forever. It includes Material UI, which implements Google's Material Design.

emotion - 👩‍🎤 CSS-in-JS library designed for high performance style composition

chakra-ui - ⚡️ Simple, Modular & Accessible UI Components for your React Applications