Top 5 Best CSS Frameworks

Top 5 CSS framework

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is a style sheet language that helps in describing the presentation of the markup language. It is used for the visual styling of web pages written in HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) and XHTML(Extensible Hypertext Markup Language).

CSS helps in separation of design and content and other aspects such as layout, color, and fonts.

Now, what is CSS Framework?

CSS Framework is some pre-prepared software framework. These are front-end development framework which has the combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. These CSS Frameworks helps in the development of a website quickly and easy.

CSS framework offers different modules and tools like-

1. Reset Style Sheet

2. Grid responsive web design

3. Set of icons or icon fonts

4. Web typography

5. styling for tooltips, button and element forms

6. And parts of graphical user interface

Just like any other developer tools the CSS Framework is too in a state of evolution and improvement. So it is highly necessary to keep an eye on each modern trend of Frameworks. Here in this article, we will discuss Top 5 CSS Framework.

1. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is considered as one of the best responsive CSS Framework. It is developed using HTML, CSS and Javascript keeping in mind about the mobile environment first. It helps to build web design concepts, grid systems, typography and so on. Bootstrap has a large developer community where developers can quick and easy solutions.

Bootstrap may not be the best framework on there compared to other frameworks but the majority of people use it for its popularity and its vast community.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Bootstrap

Pros

1. Bootstrap is a great standardized development platform with all basic styles and components like layout grids, panels, buttons, tables, etc which helps in the quick and easy development of a site.

2. Bootstrap is supported by most of the browser.

3. Bootstrap CSS have responsive structures and styles for mobile devices.

4. Bootstrap has lots of professional templates, plugin, and themes.

Cons

1. In Bootstrap, Javascript is tied to jQuery.

2. Bootstrap requires a lot of rewriting of a file if a user wants customizations on their page.

Website:https://getbootstrap.com/

Github: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap

2. Bulma

Bulma CSS framework has gained quite a lot of popularity recently with its simple and easy-to-learn features. Bulma is still in its Beta stage and it is based on Flexbox. Bulma is lightweight and contains great UI components, like tabs, navigation bar, boxes, panel etc. Bulma simple to customize and it gives clean and attractive UI. Bulma is simple and easy to understand with all the necessary features to build an effective UI.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Bulma

Pros

1. Bulma is lightweight, simple and easy to understand.

2. Bulma is based on Flexbox which helps to create fancy designs.

Cons

1. Bulma is still in its Beta stage

2. Bulma runs slowly in Internet Explorer.

Website:https://bulma.io/

Github: https://github.com/jgthms/bulma

3. Materialize

Materialize CSS is a modern responsive CSS framework which is based on Android’s material design. It provides great features like Slide Nav, Chip, Waves, AutoComplete etc which other framework do not provide. This framework is good for those who like the material design. The developer provides good documentation of the frames on their website.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Materialize

Pros

1. Materialize CSS is good for creating Material design website.

2. Materialize CSS is a great responsive CSS framework.

3. Good Documentation

Cons

1. In Materialize CSS, the CSS file is large.

2. Most of the old browsers do not support Materialize CSS.

Website- http://materializecss.com/

Github- https://github.com/Dogfalo/materialize

4. Pure CSS

Pure CSS is a framework which is developed by Yahoo. Pure CSS helps to create simple, beautiful and responsive websites. Pure CSS is crafted keeping mobile devices in mind. One of the big advantages of PureCSS is its size, it’s size is ridiculously small compared to other frameworks.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Pure CSS

Pros

1. Pure CSS is lightweight, simple and if a user wants to add other files, it can be done using just a stylesheet.

2. It shows explanations of how the grid works and other related features.

3. It is available in CDN.

4. because of its simplicity, it saves lots of time.

Cons

1. Pure CSS does not have a large community.

2. Font Awesome is not integrated by default.

3. It has limited number of templates and design available.

Website: https://purecss.io/

Github: https://github.com/pure-css/pure/

5. Semantic UI

Semantic UI helps to create a website in a more semantic way. Its main feature is to utilize the HTML language and make the code more readable and understandable for users. It treats words and classes as exchangeable concepts and uses simple phrases called behaviors that trigger functionality. It has simplified Debugging that helps to get performance logging. This logging helps to track down bottlenecks without digging through stack traces.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Semantic UI

Pros

1. Beautiful design

2. Well documented

3. The elements offer huge number of customization.

4. Easy to use

Cons

1. Packages are very large in size.

2. Small number of classes

3. Not for a beginner who is not familiar with Javascript.

Website: https://semantic-ui.com/

Github: https://github.com/semantic-org/semantic-ui/

Conclusion:

Here we have discussed about top 5 front-end CSS frameworks which are each and simple to use for a developer. There are more than these five frameworks but most of them are not updated or are still in Beta state. If you want to start using any of these frameworks we would suggest you to start with Bootstrap since is very simple to learn and have a stable version. After that, you can move on to other frameworks.