Most Popular Responsive CSS Frameworks: Bootstrap, Foundation, Materialize, Pure, and more
By: Altexsoft Inc
Tags: UI Design, Bootstrap, Material Design, Web Development, CSS

Ideal for advanced developers, who know JavaScript well.

UIkit: iOS specific CSS framework

Designed precisely for iOS development, UIkit defines the core components of iOS apps from navigation controllers to labels, and buttons. Although most often UIkit is used for phone applications, there are breakpoint systems available for tablets, desktops, laptops, and large desktop systems too. UIkit helps create fast and powerful web interfaces and is often considered to be the best UI framework while having one of the broadest ranges of UI and interactivity components in the market.

Using UIkit: PHP CMS Pagekit, WordPress and Joomla themes YOOtheme Pro, themes tagged “UIkit” on Themeforest.

Benefits:

With an emphasis on structure-only styling, it’s easy to modify UIkit to suit your application, without preprocessor variables, using only raw CSS structure.

UIkit offers a concise collection of simple-to-use and easy-to-customize components that help create an entirely new look to fit the needs of a designer. This is highly appealing to modern developers who want to differentiate their creations. Furthermore, with its flexible control over the website/app elements, UIkit allows you to quickly make profound changes to the style of your website.

UIkit is stylish right out of the box and might need no additional customization. There are plenty of ready-to-use themes available. On downloading a theme from the official website, you can choose the core files in CSS, SCSS, or LESS.

UIkit has a wide variety of built-in animation features that can be used to enrich user’s interaction with the website components.

Weaknesses:

Since UIkit is less popular than its contenders, it may be hard to find learning resources other than the official documentation.

There are lots of classes used to support a wide range of UIkit components. Being helpful on the one hand, they add complexity in terms of dealing with a multitude of names.

Use cases: UIkit is successfully used in iOS development and many WordPress themes. It is great for simple and complex projects alike.

Ideal for experienced developers due to the current lack of available learning resources.

Bulma: easy-to-learn CSS framework

Bulma is a fairly new CSS framework that emerged in 2016 but is gaining quite a lot of popularity due to simplicity and a mild learning curve. Bulma doesn’t include any JS options, and focusing only on CSS it provides lightweight solutions that can easily be implemented in any development context.

Using Bulma: Bedtime Stories, Mod API, Pollygot.

Benefits:

With just a handful of well-crafted UI components and default styles, Bulma is a great option in terms of saving your time and energy.

Bulma has very readable syntax, which may be a considerable advantage for some developers. The framework offers almost a declarative experience with its simple class names like .button or .title and a straightforward modifier system like .is-primary or .is-large.

In addition to all user-friendly features, Bulma has a simple grid system based on Flexbox, making horizontal alignment and vertical centering much easier. To build a Bulma grid, you only need a single .columns container to wrap as many .column items as you want.

Bulma ships with 100+ CSS helpers that can be applied to almost any element, in order to specify its color, display, and spacing.

Weaknesses. While Bulma is still quite a new CSS framework, it has a much smaller community to contribute to a better understanding and further development of the product.

Use cases. Bulma enables rapid project development satisfying with results and the time spent to achieve them.

Ideal for developers with any background due to its simplicity.

Material-based CSS frameworks

Developed by Google in 2014, Material Design was born out of the need to create a consistent experience across multiple platforms. This design language set new standards for the web while synthesizing the classic principles with new visual approaches.

Material Design is based on the concept of paper and ink and its style is rooted in physics: apart from width and height, every element has a certain depth that determines its position on the webpage. The designer should aim at creating something that looks and functions like it could in the physical world. The trend for Material Design is increasing and a great number of animations, themes, and UIs that use Material-based frameworks is widely accessible.

Material design showcase by Google

Material Design Lite: Google official framework

This is a wide library of components for web developers that lets users add a material design look and feel to their websites. MDL is a self-dependent design framework as it doesn’t rely on any libraries or JavaScript frameworks. The “Lite” part of MDL comes from several key design goals:

easy to install and use

framework-agnostic, meaning MDL is compatible with every tech stack

light code size (~27KB gzipped)

narrow focus: material design styling for websites

Using MDL: Google wallet, Google Project Sunproof, Talks at Google.

Benefits:

Created by Google, MDL is up to date, easy to use, has a wide feature coverage, and no external dependencies.

MDL provides a great out-of-the-box look that may need no customization.

An important advantage is that MDL can be used with Elm, a language of graphical user interfaces.

MDL provides a rich set of components, including material design buttons, text fields, tooltips, spinners, and many more.

With their blogging templates, Material Design Lite enables you to get a blog started in minutes.

Weaknesses:

Currently, MDL has limited support and no further development is taking place.

Material Design Lite may be difficult to customize. Consequently, websites risk looking very much alike.

Use cases. MDL is optimal for websites heavy on textual content, such as marketing pages, text articles, and blogs.

Ideal for everyone as MDL essentially makes the concept accessible to pick up quickly and easily.

Materialize: a great option for a starter framework

With around 37K stars on GitHub, Materialize is the hottest Material-based CSS framework. It comes in two different forms. The first is a typical standard version with both minified and unminified CSS and JS files. The second version is SASS-based and gives you more control over component selection.

Websites using Materialize: RSJoomla!, Closeheat, Post Planner, Fuddruckers.

Benefits:

Following Google’s guidelines for Material design, Materialize is device-agnostic, which means that it looks good on every device.

Many choose Materialize over other more popular alternatives like Bootstrap, for its design, which is very opinionated on how elements should behave and look. This creates a consistent feel without making every product look the same. In addition, this framework enhances animation for a smoother experience.

Materialize also provides various components and behaviors not routinely found in other front-end frameworks. For example, CSS components: badges, scrollFire, scrollSpy, wave behaviors, and mobile-specific ones: slide-out drawer menus and toasts.

Weaknesses:

Materialize refused to use Flexbox, which results in lower compatibility with Internet Explorer 10+ and a potential lack of future cross-browser compatibility.

Large file size makes Materialize a bulky framework to work with.

Use cases. Material Design websites are few and far between — and that’s why they stand out in the crowd. Materialize can be also used in designing hybrid mobile apps.

Ideal for less experienced developers looking for a guided introduction to material design specifications.

Pure: very lightweight, simple, and fast CSS framework

While choosing a CSS framework, loading speed is a very important quality factor to consider. If you want to build super-fast loading websites, give preference to a lightweight CSS framework.

Pure is a set of small, responsive CSS modules for all your needs. Having all the common features you need in a standard web design framework, Pure’s size is incredibly small — only 3.8 KB minified. And if you choose to only use a subset of available modules, you’ll save even more bandwidth. Built on Normalize.css, Pure provides layout and styling for native HTML elements, plus the most common UI components. Its minimal styles encourage you to write your application styles on top of it.

Websites using Pure CSS: Yahoo, LastPass, Flickr, CanYouSeeMe.org.

Benefits:

Pure’s design makes it easier to override styles. Its minimalist look gives designers a foundation on which they can build their design. That said, Pure is super-easy to customize.

The framework is very simple. The class names are easy to remember, extend, and maintain.

Weaknesses. Some refer to Pure as “bare-bones styles” and underline that this framework misses a lot. Pure lacks some of the UI components like tabs or an accordion menu and the ‘mobile-first’ approach can sometimes be confusing. However, poor functionality can be easily solved if you are experienced in coding on JavaScript or integrating third-party plugins.

Use cases. If you’re building a theme for WordPress or a custom website of your own, Pure could be a good option.

Ideal for people who don’t need a full-featured framework but only specific components to include in their work.

Settling on a go-to CSS framework

To begin with, here is the following disclaimer: Using a third-party CSS should never mean caring less about your own CSS code.

Another important point to make is that hip and trendy never means best suited for the job. In other words, it is necessary to grow the understanding of why one tool would be better suited for the case than the other.

The framework should be in line with your needs and expectations. Therefore, it’s important to decide on the priorities: Are you trying to make a lightweight site that will work fast or a maintainable site to work for years? Once the priorities are set, you can choose a framework that will allow you to achieve the appearance that you want with as little effort as possible.

To sum up, the right framework for you will depend on your project’s requirements, where you need help in programming: design or coding functionality and your personal coding philosophy. Experienced developers advise not to stick to one and only framework, but rather use several of them for the benefit of your website. Besides that, having a working understanding of multiple frameworks will contribute to building up your skillset.