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Add to SafariWhen comparing Foundation vs Bootstrap, the Slant community recommends Bootstrap for most people. In the question“What is the best CSS framework?” Bootstrap is ranked 2nd while Foundation is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Bootstrap is:
The grid layout with the predefined CSS elements and JavaScript components make it easier to have consistency across different browser versions and even different devices.
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 Consistency across browsers
The grid layout with the predefined CSS elements and JavaScript components make it easier to have consistency across different browser versions and even different devices.
Pro Responsive design philosophy
Bootstrap is developed to be instantly compatible with all sizes of screens, so you don't have to worry about which device the user is accessing your site from. Yet if you prefer, you can disable responsiveness of Bootstrap.
Pro Well documented
Documentation is thorough, well organized and full of live examples and templates ready for use. Every component and every part of the framework is explained and covered in depth.
Pro Custom builds
If you don't want to download the full Bootstrap framework. Custom builds of Bootstrap can be created, including only the desired CSS, CSS components, and JavaScript components. This can be done directly from the Bootstrap website by simply choosing what components to download.
Pro Designed to get a site running quickly
Bootstrap is designed to get a site up and running quickly. Each of it's components is pre-configured to help with getting a site up and running quickly.
Pro Great community
Bootstrap is very popular and has a large community. As a result of this it is much easier to find help with anything you might need. This also gives you a treasure trove of prebuilt components to use and add to your site.
Pro Supports responsive embeds
Allows easily adding responsiveness to <iframe>, <embed>, and <object> elements.
Pro Easily make professional looking websites
Bootstrap makes it easy to learn how to make professional looking websites. It can even make code junkies semi-enjoy design.
Pro Customizable
Bootstrap can be customized in a variety of ways. Either by overriding the default CSS styles with new CSS styles or by editing the .scss Bootstrap files.
Pro A wide variety of themes available
To help you avoid the "Bootstrap look", there are many resources that provide a great selection of themes and templates for Bootstrap.
Pro One of the most popular ones
Ranked on GitHub as the most starred CSS repository.
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 Large file size out of the box
Bootstrap has an out-of-the box filesize of ~276K, which is pretty large considering it's just CSS. Most of those styles aren't even used in 90% of web pages built with Bootstrap. By only including the required styles it can be trimmed by 70%-75%.
Con Too many classes
Bootstrap's over-reliance on HTML classes for styling can get very messy very quickly. There's also an overabundance of DOM elements which have a lot of classes and are more often than not nested inside DOM elements with even more classes. This gets problematic down the line because the maintainability of the project gets harder when the project starts to get large.
Con Websites can start to look the same
If the initial Bootstrap colors and styles are not changed or edited, different websites start looking the same even if they have nothing to do with each other and they are made by different developers.
Con Hard to customise
It's quite hard to customise Bootstrap using pre-processors like SASS and LESS, the only real flexibility is with typography and colours.
Con Large font sizes
