Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS lets you style a page by stacking small utility classes right in your markup instead of writing a separate stylesheet. class="flex items-center gap-4 p-6 rounded-lg" is the styling, right in the HTML. It's one of the most common ways modern frontends get styled, it's MIT licensed, and it's free at every size.

There's nothing to host. Tailwind is a build-time dependency: a first-party Vite plugin, a PostCSS plugin or the CLI. Version 4 rewrote the engine, finds your template files automatically, and moved configuration out of a JavaScript file and into your CSS. You maintain upgrades, nothing else.

There's no paid tier to weigh anymore. Tailwind Labs joined Shopify in September 2026 and closed sign-ups for Tailwind Plus, its paid component and template kit, though existing customers keep access. For ready-made components, shadcn/ui and DaisyUI are free. Solo, small teams, larger teams: free.

The catch: your HTML gets long, and long class strings are polarizing. v4 needs Safari 16.4, Chrome 111 or Firefox 128 and up, so anyone supporting older browsers stays on v3.4. And the framework now gets built in service of Shopify's product, which is a stable home but not a neutral one.