Semantic UI vs UiKit
When comparing Semantic UI vs UiKit, the Slant community recommends Semantic UI for most people. In the question“What is the best CSS framework?” Semantic UI is ranked 7th while UiKit is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Semantic UI is:
Uses semantic class names for its styling, making it easier to grasp and understand even for beginners looking to jump right in.
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Pros
Pro It's semantic
Uses semantic class names for its styling, making it easier to grasp and understand even for beginners looking to jump right in.
Pro Load only the components you need
The whole Semantic-UI package is well organized, with every component neatly set up with it's own stylesheet and JavaScript file. This way you can load only the components you need for each page, minimizing the load time and file size.
Pro The elements offer a huge amount of customization, far beyond a framework like bootstrap
Pro Beautifully designed
Semantic UI has a futuristic and beautiful design. Many will satisfied with the design, especially when Semantic UI is used as a CSS framework.
Pro It'll have almost any UI component/element you may think of for your project
It includes tons of UI components that you may need for almost any type of project you may work on; And of course, you can always only pick what you need.
Pro Well documented
The documentation is easy to use, well written and has lots of examples each with their source codes.
Pro Easy to use
Just start code from the beginning of the journey, from first page of documentation.
Pro Well architected
The code is pretty clean and follows well-defined conventions.
Pro Ready to use themes available
There are plenty of ready to use themes available from the official website. You can choose the theme that you want to use from the dropdown menu and then download the CSS, LESS or SASS file for that theme to use for the website.
Pro Easy to use.
When using UIKit classes, it is used with the ui- prefix which is very good. Components are explained straight-forward.
Pro Built-in animation capabilities
UiKit has some built-in animation features which can be used to animate various components.
Pro Great style even out of the box
UiKit has a pretty good and clean style even out of the box without any customization needed.
Pro Very customizable
UiKit's rather minimal style can be easily customizable to create an entirely new look to fit the needs of the designer.
Pro Extremely modular
Every aspect of the framework is designed to be modular, this way designers can easily choose which components to add to their stylesheet without risking to damage the overall style.
Cons
Con Large file size
Packages are much bigger when comparing to Twitter Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation. Semantic UI is really extremely large and it would be better to use specific modules and components, rather than the whole thing.
Con Not maintained anymore
Use Fomantic-UI instead.
Con Buggy
Contains a lot of UI inaccuracies, like wrong positioning, cannot mix classes, etc.
Con Not for beginner developer/unfamiliar with Javascript
Many features in Semantic UI uses Javascript customization such as for Modal. This is unlike Bootstrap that can add Modal just with customizing the HTML attributes. Developers who plan to using Semantic UI must be familiar with Javascript or JQuery to get the most out of it.
Con Small number of classes
Once you wanna do something that is not mentioned in the doc - prepare to spend an hour, then give up and implement a custom "workaround".
Con Messy code classes
Nested classes become complicated to read to obtain desired result.
Con Not very popular
UiKit is not a very popular framework, especially compared to other options. As such it may be hard to find learning resources other than the official documentation or it may be more likely for development of UiKit to be dropped than for another more popular framework
Con Slow development
New features and updates trickle out over 6-12 month development cycles, bug fixes are more frequent but very slow and selective as well.
Con Pre-built starter templates are now behind a paywall
Easier to use Joomla! or Wordpress starter templates without paying money for it.
Con Closed development
Development is mostly done in-house and not publicly available.