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Add to SafariWhen comparing Foundation vs mini.css, the Slant community recommends mini.css for most people. In the question“What is the best CSS framework?” mini.css is ranked 4th while Foundation is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose mini.css is:
The whole framework is built on flexbox and works really well on most platforms.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Responsive design philosophy
Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit.
Pro Uses REMs instead of pixels
Foundation uses REMs instead of pixels, meaning you don't have to state an explicit height, width, padding, etc, for every device. Simply put, using REMs means you can just state font-size: 80%; and have the whole component (and its nested elements) shrink by 20%.
This is great for making your site mobile friendly. There is also a Sass function in Zurb that converts pixels to REMs so if you're used to thinking in pixels, you don't have to learn a different system.
Pro No style lock-in
Styles are purposefully undeveloped to encourage differentiation between different sites using Foundation.
Pro Block grid
Foundation has a feature called block grid. Block grid gives designers the power to divide the contents of an unordered list into a grid that is evenly spaced. Furthermore, Foundation also takes care of collapsing columns as well as removing gutters.
Pro Easy customization
Just by looking at the name, Foundation merely provides designers with a foundation of sorts on which they can build their design. It can be customized easily through SASS, a powerful CSS pre-processor or by overriding the default CSS styles.
Pro Easily extensible with a selection of add-ons
There's a variety of front-end templates, icon fonts, responsive table examples, SVG icons and stencils that help you quick-start or easily improve on your site.
Pro Support for off-canvas navigation
Foundation comes with an easy way of creating off-canvas menus.
Pro Uses Interchange to load responsive content
Foundation comes with Interchange, it makes use of media queries to load images responsively and create content that's suited to different browsers and devices.
Pro RTL support
Allows easily changing text direction.
<html class="no-js" lang="ar" dir="rtl">Pro Built-in form validation
Foundation comes with Abide plugin, an HTML5 form validation library.
Pro Good mobile support
Foundation was one of the first frameworks to adopt a mobile-first philosophy. By focusing on mobile design first, Foundation makes designers think on what kind of content is important, relevant and interesting to the users without thinking too much on the space.
Pro Flexbox-based
The whole framework is built on flexbox and works really well on most platforms.
Pro Active developer
The developer is actively maintaining the project and responding to any issues and questions.
Pro Minimal
The framework is really tiny, under 7KB gzipped.
This is what makes mini.css stand out, because it looks like a pretty powerful library and it still is under 10KB.
Pro Responsive
It works great on all devices, mobile websites are really easy to develop and view.
Pro Style-agnostic
Few flavours so far, but there is a lot of space for customization.
Pro Great documentation
From basic syntax, templates, examples, customization to-dos and don'ts. The documentation is pretty great.
Pro Supports CSS custom properties (var)
No other framework supports CSS variables right now (as of November 2017). The latest alpha of mini.css supports this feature, making customization even easier.
Pro Accessible
ARIA rules are a priority and it works very well for all users.
Works really well with screenreaders.
Cons
Con Can be hard for beginners to grasp
Since Foundation is built to be customizable, it's default style may not be very appealing for most. While it's true that most production-ready websites shouldn't be using the default style of a css framework (they would all end up looking the same), this is even more true for Foundation.
Con Needs more pre-built components
Example would be a scroll-spy not only for one cell, but cell to cell.
Con Not UMD pattern in core
This problem will bring attention when used with Angular, React and other JS framework. It is important to know that they create app version of this framework.
Con Documentation is a bit better than average
Documentation could be written better and clearer, with many more example than they currently have. Sometimes hard to find solutions for detailed css problems.
Con Archived
Git repo has been archived so it's pretty unlikely to receive bug fixes or new features.
Con Not widely used
A large community is always an advantage especially for open source projects. It means better documentation, continued development, and lowers the possibility for the project to be abandoned in the future since the probability for someone from the community to keep maintaining it is larger if the community is larger.
Con Single developer
There is no team developing this framework, except one guy.
