What's with all the negativity here on HN, especially about the pricing?
The Tailwind team created one of the most used CSS frameworks ever and charge nothing for it. The framework needs a revenue stream to enable continued investment. Rails has basecamp. Bootstrap had twitter. React has meta. Tailwind has Tailwind UI.
I find it great value. It's a one-off cost comparable to hiring a designer or front-end developer for a day, and you get a bunch of usable components + future upgrades.
Usually HN isn't as negative about revenue streams for open-source developers.
I paid for the UI kit early last year and think it's good value. The amount of time its saved me has more than paid for itself, and it's just nice to have something that isn't a subscription model, or licensed per project.
The developers are very generous too. 4 years back when I was in college I reached out to them and asked for a student discount. They gave me free access to Tailwind UI ( under a restricted license).
I agree with you on the pricing. I'm a Tailwind UI customer and have found it more than worth the money.
That said, it is disappointing to see recent work all tied to React. I generally prefer Phoenix LiveView (or Rails + Hotwire, etc) over a React/Angular/Vue approach. By tying it to React, they destroy most the value this kit would have otherwise had to me.
They already earned my money, though. I still enthusiastically recommend Tailwind UI to people.
Yeah. I’m also not using React. Vue would be nice and so would Phoenix. I think they might add Vue support, as they do for headless-ui. Phoenix is less likely imo.
The paid nature makes it hard for the community to fill in that gap, which is a shame. I’d love to collaborate on a Phoenix version of Catalyst.
It's also a friggen preview and uncompleted thing. They could have waited for the whole thing to be done and polished but everyone was barking at them "just release it I don't care if it's not done"
Judging by your previous comments, you're not even a customer of theirs and have very misguided views on the product and it's pricing.
I have a feeling you have a competing product and are just trying to drum up negativity about Tailwind.
edit:// yep, I just checked your history, you're the creator of that nue thingy that is trying to compete with next/astro/nuxt/tailwind/etc all at once.
This is an extra thing on top of everything they made. I praise them for not adding any extra costs. It is never enough for some people. They have a one off price for so much stuff. Absolutely no brainer for a lot of people.
There's something I genuinely don't understand in discussions of price, which is that folks seem to want to ignore basic economics.
Something is either worth it to you or it's not. If it is worth it, and you want it, you may buy it. If it's not, then you don't buy it. The world keeps spinning.
The Tailwind folks seem to think this may be worth $150 to some people. Those people might buy it. If you think it's not worth that, it doesn't mean that those people are wrong, it means that you 1) don't understand the value or 2) the value just doesn't exist for you, and it's not for you.
Or maybe people do understand the economics of it, but there's something psychological that's more pressing: because one person doesn't find value, and sees another person that does find value, they must defend or justify their own value assessment and confront the opposition. I'm sure there's a name for this, but I don't know it off-hand.
This is not a general discussion about price. This is about Catalyst and whether it has a good price/quality ratio. I don't think it has. How about you?
I think you're mistaking quality as a proxy for determining value to the purchaser. It might be low quality, and still absolutely worth $150 to folks who buy it.
Even if you can be 100% objective on quality, the only way to make any kind of sweeping price/quality assessment is to compare it to other things on the market. What do other things in this price range give you? What do similar quality products cost? This is where I see some valuable comparisons actually being made in this context.
> I don't think it has. How about you?
I just can't see how this adds to the discussion at all in light of the above. It reads like "this isn't worth $150 to me" and I just think, ok, it's not for you. /shrug
Haven't checked out Catalyst but I have used TailwindUI. The components are really good but if you are not using a JS framework, it's a lot of work to integrate. The regular JS version of TailwindUI uses Alpine which doesn't have a CSP compatible version so you will have to write the Javascript from scratch.
Partially due to these and frustrated by lack of component libraries in Rails, I built and recently released a UI kit for Rails - https://zestui.com
Built with Phlex, styled with Tailwind with custom built Stimulus controllers.
It's got
- 25 themes
- Dark Mode
- Form Builder
- Icons
- Built in Flash Toast
- The components are responsive or have specific mobile views
- All the JS needed (Stimulus controllers) is wired up automatically
Phlex is a game changer. It is simple, powerful, intuitive and performant. I will never ever write a component as a partial/ViewComponent again.
Stimulus is used to sprinkle JS functionality, but why use it when Vue JS and Svelte are available? Those two are very powerful and also lightweight/minimal.
Precisely because it can be used to sprinkle JS functionality :)
Vue and Svelte are great but adopting them means that you are using Rails as just a backend. For the vast majority of apps, the Rails default stack works really well.
For most apps/sites something like Stimulus, htmlx, etc are good enough, also all JS frameworks comes with complexity, now you need a bundler, eslint, prettier, postcss, etc. I can appreciate the simplicity of relying purely on Rails ecosystem or at least very minimum JS that does not require a bundler.
That is planned as an option.i.e the developer decides whether to offer that. Some don't like it because accidental clicks close the sheet/modal which can confuse non tech savvy users.
This is an unbelievably unfinished UI library. Especially with a price tag. A limited set of components with very little attention to detail. For example, the buttons lack the active state completely. Why would I pay €250 for something I can find easily for free?
Exactly. It’s very inexpensive considering what a lot of us make and how much time it can save when prototyping. It’s paid for itself multiple times over for me.
It's so easy to use! Plug-n-play, CSS technical debt, "production-ready", easy to customise, a single button is ONLY 1932 bytes of information, lean! /s
I was _about_ to praise it for at least being tabbable, but the example of "Team members" does not work with keyboard-only navigation... great stuff.
This is unfortunately the whole space around Tailwind and UI kits. Incomplete kits which look the same and are all priced highly. Just look at Catalyst, Shadcn and Radix UI. I don't know what's new in all of this.
I’m using parts of Shadcn on a real product making real money. It’s really just a combination of cva, radix, and tailwind that you can copy into your app and customize/extend.
Shadcn, radix, and tailwind are all FOSS so they are not “high-priced”.
You are welcome to do it for free. The entire point of an UI library is to save time.. you can technically build anything you want for free if you don't value your time.
This UI library sped up my dev time at least two-fold. The components and sample landing pages provided are really great IMO (and judging by their sales, it's not just me who agrees).
>You are welcome to do it for free. The entire point of an UI library is to save time.. you can technically build anything you want for free if you don't value your time.
the comment seems more about how lousy the product it is, and sure I wouldn't want to spend my time making a lousy product, but if in my technical evaluation something sucks then there is generally a good chance that I can build something better.
So the comparison is between using money to buy something bad or using time to build something good and the phrasing would be something like:
You are welcome to use your time to build something that doesn't have all these problems.
Complaints about TailwindCSS always remind me of this quote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor
Tailwind (and similar, I tend to use https://unocss.dev/) is not good for your frontend architecture BUT they allow you to be so fast, that it negates the benefits.
For a job well done, I'd follow the principles of https://maintainablecss.com/
For throwaway code I need to cram out as fast as I can, Tailwind it is.
I understand agencies using Tailwind, or Bootstrap, their revenue depends on it.
The key differentiator as I understand it, is that they provide simple code for kick-starting your own React component library. You receive a Figma design, and you tweak the components.
But yeah, it is clearly not yet finished, the dark mode has a too low color ratio. Good thing is that this UI library comes bundled with the previously existing Tailwind UI.
To be honest, his comment is more productive than yours. The point is, they expect you to pay for it, no matter how you label it, and the price is hefty for what you get.
As an infrastructure engineer who spends all day in Go and Bash and AWS I gotta say I’m a huge fan of Tailwind. This looks worth buying too. People are blown away by my front end skills, baby I’m just letting Copilot and Tailwind whisper sweet anodyne nothings into my ear. Keep me as far away from design as you can; this helps!
Hah same here. Learned enough tailwind to be effective for my personal website. I’m writing a blog article about it. Gpt4 didn’t produce satisfactory layouts so I learned grid-cols and flex, which is useful for groking existing tailwind layouts.
Not parent, but I do. Go, SSR, vanilla JS, TailwindUI, SQLite, Litestream got us to $20k MRR for a niche CRM product.
TailwindUI provides HTML-only code and includes useful comments about class transitions, so I was able to handle the mobile hamburger menu and some form submission stuff in a tiny JS file, rather than React or Vue (which they also provide code for).
I bought tailwind UI more than a year ago. The lifetime/unlimited product or whatever it was.
It’s generally fine but feels incomplete. Many of the components don’t have any alpine or JS code documented even though the team has clearly built those aspects when building the previews and demos.
I’m not sure what the rationale was there but I hope they’ve fixed it here.
Cause that's not what it's for? It's like the opposite of headless components. It's all head and no component. That's what you're buying. I think that's pretty clear cause that is what Tailwind is. It's CSS, not a component library. That's what this thing is.
> If you'd rather write any necessary JS yourself or want to integrate with a framework other than React or Vue, we also provide every Tailwind UI component example as vanilla HTML that you can adapt yourself.
I bought Tailwind UI when it first came out, and have been thrilled. I view it as essentially I paid for a high quality template to build off of. You are still expected to know tailwind, or at least that's how I took it, I am not sure how its advertised now, but I am pretty sure its not advertised as a batteries included OOTB solution, but more as a starting point. From that perspective, I have been pleased.
Even though the discord said they refund with no issues I haven't asked for a refund but tailwind ui was not worth the money unless react is being used.
Such a massive disappointment there isn't any JS with the "vanilla" components.
I’ve been really happy with my tailwind ui purchase. I’m weaker on the design side so having a consistent and decent look and feel is great. Writing up a little bit of js to make them dance is no big deal, and I like that I don’t have to buy into another build process or toolchain for it.
I’ve gotten into the habit of using “Inspect Source” in my browser when copying and pasting, because it tends to have almost fully-built Alpine transitions embedded.
I paid for DivMagic extension which lets me select elements on a page and it generates tailwind styled html code. It was quite useful for the first month but will probably cancel soon.
Tailwind UI is a set of prebuilt components for building applications. And catalyst is built from those but is also a "template" which is also an "application UI Kit" which is what I thought Tailwind UI was....
Yeah the link posted here as if it’s the home page might be confusing people: this is one of many templates, which happens to be for people looking to publish their web application, as opposed to their other templates like blogs, marketing pages, SaaS pages, etc
If you click around the site, you can see that “components” are separate from (and comprise) the templates
Oh man, if this is more or less tailwind ui but already turned into thoughtful react components, I’m all in. Tailwind ui has been useful as a reference of a non-trivial implementation of tailwind css that you buy, which is great. Try to drop the examples into a real application and you’ll have a bad time, it just feels like something should exist already… and here it is! Hopefully, anyway, will definitely try it out!
Yea, before this, I had been creating my own components based on the examples provided. It will be nice to just have premade components, now I won't have to implement all the components myself.
Readit News
The Tailwind team created one of the most used CSS frameworks ever and charge nothing for it. The framework needs a revenue stream to enable continued investment. Rails has basecamp. Bootstrap had twitter. React has meta. Tailwind has Tailwind UI.
I find it great value. It's a one-off cost comparable to hiring a designer or front-end developer for a day, and you get a bunch of usable components + future upgrades.
Usually HN isn't as negative about revenue streams for open-source developers.
That said, it is disappointing to see recent work all tied to React. I generally prefer Phoenix LiveView (or Rails + Hotwire, etc) over a React/Angular/Vue approach. By tying it to React, they destroy most the value this kit would have otherwise had to me.
They already earned my money, though. I still enthusiastically recommend Tailwind UI to people.
The paid nature makes it hard for the community to fill in that gap, which is a shame. I’d love to collaborate on a Phoenix version of Catalyst.
It's also a friggen preview and uncompleted thing. They could have waited for the whole thing to be done and polished but everyone was barking at them "just release it I don't care if it's not done"
Judging by your previous comments, you're not even a customer of theirs and have very misguided views on the product and it's pricing.
I have a feeling you have a competing product and are just trying to drum up negativity about Tailwind.
edit:// yep, I just checked your history, you're the creator of that nue thingy that is trying to compete with next/astro/nuxt/tailwind/etc all at once.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Any evidence for this claim?
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss
[1]: https://npmcharts.com/compare/bulma,tailwindcss,bootstrap,ui...
Dead Comment
Something is either worth it to you or it's not. If it is worth it, and you want it, you may buy it. If it's not, then you don't buy it. The world keeps spinning.
The Tailwind folks seem to think this may be worth $150 to some people. Those people might buy it. If you think it's not worth that, it doesn't mean that those people are wrong, it means that you 1) don't understand the value or 2) the value just doesn't exist for you, and it's not for you.
Or maybe people do understand the economics of it, but there's something psychological that's more pressing: because one person doesn't find value, and sees another person that does find value, they must defend or justify their own value assessment and confront the opposition. I'm sure there's a name for this, but I don't know it off-hand.
I have used this on occasion to figure out where it makes the most sense for me to exchange money for services.
https://programs.clearerthinking.org/what_is_your_time_reall...
Even if you can be 100% objective on quality, the only way to make any kind of sweeping price/quality assessment is to compare it to other things on the market. What do other things in this price range give you? What do similar quality products cost? This is where I see some valuable comparisons actually being made in this context.
> I don't think it has. How about you?
I just can't see how this adds to the discussion at all in light of the above. It reads like "this isn't worth $150 to me" and I just think, ok, it's not for you. /shrug
Partially due to these and frustrated by lack of component libraries in Rails, I built and recently released a UI kit for Rails - https://zestui.com
Built with Phlex, styled with Tailwind with custom built Stimulus controllers.
It's got
- 25 themes
- Dark Mode
- Form Builder
- Icons
- Built in Flash Toast
- The components are responsive or have specific mobile views
- All the JS needed (Stimulus controllers) is wired up automatically
Phlex is a game changer. It is simple, powerful, intuitive and performant. I will never ever write a component as a partial/ViewComponent again.
A short video (50 seconds) showing it off: https://youtu.be/OQmDZddLtR8
Vue and Svelte are great but adopting them means that you are using Rails as just a backend. For the vast majority of apps, the Rails default stack works really well.
It'd be nice if clicking the blurred background area on a Sheet closed the sheet like the x button does.
What do you mean?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34366454
In 10 years time I've used a decent share of templates, but these I've enjoyed most by far and gotten the best user reactions from.
I was _about_ to praise it for at least being tabbable, but the example of "Team members" does not work with keyboard-only navigation... great stuff.
Now something you can definitely complain about is the dialog not submitting with Enter.
These are used by "agencies".
Shadcn, radix, and tailwind are all FOSS so they are not “high-priced”.
Your analysis is shallow and unfounded.
Oh my word, the horror! What's wrong with agencies?
Is this recent?
This UI library sped up my dev time at least two-fold. The components and sample landing pages provided are really great IMO (and judging by their sales, it's not just me who agrees).
the comment seems more about how lousy the product it is, and sure I wouldn't want to spend my time making a lousy product, but if in my technical evaluation something sucks then there is generally a good chance that I can build something better.
So the comparison is between using money to buy something bad or using time to build something good and the phrasing would be something like:
You are welcome to use your time to build something that doesn't have all these problems.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
Tailwind (and similar, I tend to use https://unocss.dev/) is not good for your frontend architecture BUT they allow you to be so fast, that it negates the benefits.
For a job well done, I'd follow the principles of https://maintainablecss.com/ For throwaway code I need to cram out as fast as I can, Tailwind it is.
I understand agencies using Tailwind, or Bootstrap, their revenue depends on it.
It's definitely worth the one-off price tag, and the fact they include future updates (like Catalyst) is incredible.
But yeah, it is clearly not yet finished, the dark mode has a too low color ratio. Good thing is that this UI library comes bundled with the previously existing Tailwind UI.
Deleted Comment
Weird unproductive comment tbh.
TailwindUI provides HTML-only code and includes useful comments about class transitions, so I was able to handle the mobile hamburger menu and some form submission stuff in a tiny JS file, rather than React or Vue (which they also provide code for).
Deleted Comment
It’s generally fine but feels incomplete. Many of the components don’t have any alpine or JS code documented even though the team has clearly built those aspects when building the previews and demos.
I’m not sure what the rationale was there but I hope they’ve fixed it here.
> If you'd rather write any necessary JS yourself or want to integrate with a framework other than React or Vue, we also provide every Tailwind UI component example as vanilla HTML that you can adapt yourself.
Such a massive disappointment there isn't any JS with the "vanilla" components.
Kind of inconvenient and strange.
It’s weird that they don’t just provide the alpine code that they’ve already built.
You’ve done the work guys.
That’s my only complaint. It’s been good otherwise.
Tailwind UI is a set of prebuilt components for building applications. And catalyst is built from those but is also a "template" which is also an "application UI Kit" which is what I thought Tailwind UI was....
If you click around the site, you can see that “components” are separate from (and comprise) the templates