Bootstrap 2,007 (Bootstrap) gives you finished components to override. Tailwind CSS 5,202 ships no buttons or cards, only single-purpose classes such as p-4 and hover:bg-sky-100 that you compose in your markup, and a build step generates CSS for exactly the classes you used.
The approach divided developers when it appeared in November 2017. It is now installed over 110 million times a week, and on September 9, 2026, its company, Tailwind Labs, announced it was joining Shopify 175 , promising that the framework stays MIT-licensed.
This chapter teaches Tailwind CSS 4.3, the current release, whose generated CSS uses the cascade layers, custom properties and OKLCH colors of CSS.
What you will learn:
Why utility-first CSS works, and how the engine turns class names into CSS
Installing Tailwind with Vite 25,978 , PostCSS 238,379 , the CLI or the browser build, and upgrading from v3
Variants, dark mode, theme variables and every utility family, from layout to effects
Plugins, component libraries and framework integration, ending with the Bootstrap landing page rebuilt in Tailwind