Tailwind CSS VS Alpine.js

Compare Tailwind CSS vs Alpine.js and see what are their differences.

Alpine.js

A rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup. (by alpinejs)
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Tailwind CSS Alpine.js
1,280 242
78,370 26,798
2.3% 1.8%
9.4 9.3
1 day ago 4 days ago
TypeScript HTML
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.

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 2024-04-25.
  • Shared Data-Layer Setup For Micro Frontend Application with Nx Workspace
    4 projects | dev.to | 25 Apr 2024
    Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.
  • Preline UI + Gowebly CLI = ❤️
    2 projects | dev.to | 25 Apr 2024
    First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…
  • Customer service pages for e-commerce built with Tailwind CSS
    1 project | dev.to | 24 Apr 2024
    Tailwind CSS
  • 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.

Alpine.js

Posts with mentions or reviews of Alpine.js. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-09.
  • Biometric authentication with Passkeys
    3 projects | dev.to | 9 Mar 2024
    Alpine.js for reactive frontend
  • 🤓 My top 3 Go packages that I wish I'd known about earlier
    6 projects | dev.to | 1 Mar 2024
    ✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.
  • Htmx Is Composable?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    > But honestly, torn towards htmx but undecided.

    We are in the middle of migrating from our monster react application into server rendered pages (with jinja2). The velocity at which we are able to ship and the reduction of complexity has been great so far.

    Managing client side state for simple things like (is the dropdown open/closed), listening to keyboard events and such can be done with something like alpine-js [1] without all the baggage that something like react brings.

    It appears this is already the trend with JS frameworks too - with server side rendering being the new norm.

    [1] https://alpinejs.dev/

  • Pocketbase: Open-source back end in 1 file
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
  • Coming to grips with JS: a Rubyist's deep dive
    16 projects | dev.to | 29 Dec 2023
    Sure, you can use any number of JS-avoidance libraries. I'm a fan of Turbo, and there's also htmx, Unpoly, Alpine, hyperscript, swup, barba.js, and probably others.
  • What is your opinion about developers who do direct DOM manipulations instead of using modern web frameworks (like React, Vue, Angular) to achieve maximum performance?
    1 project | /r/webdev | 6 Dec 2023
    Direct DOM, but with a library. Specifically AlpineJS since it follows Vue closely in design practices allowing me to scale into a full web application if necessary (basically swapping to Vue takes minimal work). The Morph plugin is specifically what I like using.
  • Kicking the tires with NestJS and Hotwire: Part II
    2 projects | dev.to | 15 Nov 2023
    If you want more details on the initial setup I encourage you to take a look at the Part I that covers more of the initial implementation. For this portion, I added Prisma as an ORM, a frontend style library called Tachyons, and AlpineJS to handle any client-side interactions. I did this to avoid needing to add a client-side bundler to the build and instead just rely on plain old module imports to compose the frontend. This is now the default for Rails and it is quite nice to not need any additional build tools for the client.
  • Deveplop a simple GUI app by Wails use Golang
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Nov 2023
    - [swallow-pywebview](https://github.com/rangwea/swallow-pywebview): Base on [pywebview](https://pywebview.flowrl.com/) using Python,the frontend base on [alpinejs](https://alpinejs.dev/) and [tailwindcss](https://tailwindcss.com/)。
  • How to Make an Animated Number Counter with Tailwind CSS
    1 project | dev.to | 3 Oct 2023
    If you’ve followed our other tutorials, you might be familiar with Alpine.js. It’s a lightweight JavaScript library that allows you to add interactivity to your site without writing a single line of JavaScript. It’s incredibly easy to use, and we’ll show you how to make the animation trigger when the user scrolls to it.
  • A First Look at HTMX and How it Compares to React
    6 projects | dev.to | 18 Sep 2023
    The approach is not new, essentially a variation of Knockout, Alpine, and similar "JS-in-HTML" approaches.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js you can also consider the following projects:

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

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps

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

petite-vue - 6kb subset of Vue optimized for progressive enhancement

unocss - The instant on-demand atomic CSS engine.

htmx - </> htmx - high power tools for HTML

windicss - Next generation utility-first CSS framework.

React - The library for web and native user interfaces.

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

Stimulus - A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have [Moved to: https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus]

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

hyperscript - Create HyperText with JavaScript.