Bootstrap fights you when you move away from its built-in look-and-feel.
Tailwind is pretty close to neutral. You get the tailwind look by copy-pasting the tailwind components directly and straightforward use of the built-in palette and fonts. But it’s pretty easy to use customized palettes, not that bad to use different fonts (well, the hairy parts are due to HTML, browsers and the web, not tailwind), and it’s probably easier to skip the tailwind components if you know HTML (not a trivial skill but one well worth developing).
What about the components on Blendful[0]? I agree that everything themed with Tailwind looks the same—but I think it's because the starter templates that are popularly used basically have the same look and feel, which is what this site is trying to escape from. Tailwind also has it's predefined color schemes, which enhance the stylistic lock-in.
Of course it's possible to break from the fray with Tailwind, but—I think generally speaking, it's fairly easy to build something that looks decently good, decently easy with Tailwind; and that's why people like it.
UI libraries and websites all end up converging on a common set of ideas because of usability and readability, perhaps you're conflating Tailwind UI libraries with Tailwind itself. Tailwind doesn't inherently force a website to look a certain way any more than flexbox or CSS grids might.
I do agree in that if you're using Tailwind you're unlikely to be reaching deep into the full functionality of CSS for animation etc. but most websites aren't doing that whether they're using Tailwind or not.
I accidentally mixed up Tailwind and DaisyUI in my brain. The commenter above me is talking about Tailwind and my "Previous Comment" is responding by talking about DaisyUI but accidentally also using the word Tailwind.
For previous versions of DaisyUI my main complaint was that it looked childish. V5 fixed this. I misread the parent comment as if they were talking about this same issue. My bad.
Previous comment:
I'm not sure when you most recently used Tailwind, but V5 is a big improvement on V4. 4 definitely looked somewhat childish. 5 corrected most/all of this.
How does the version of Tailwind itself make difference? The look depends on what styles are applied using Tailwind, not the ability to specify styles. Think the problem is the most tailwind sites have a similar set of styles applied, most likely copies of the docs or examples. TailwindUI is a paid system, but yeah, could be a case of most of the defaults copying that.
I'm sorry. Brain fart. Replace Tailwind V4/V5 with DaisyUI V4/V5.
After re-reading double brain fart.
I misread the comment as complaining about DaisyUI. I then responded as if they were complaining about DaisyUI but ALSO accidentally used "Tailwind" in my comment.
It depends on how much effort you put into it vs. just using any of the base templates/components that Tailwind Plus (previously Tailwind UI) has to offer.
If you look at their Showcase section[1], you can't tell it's using TailwindCSS for most of them (imo).
Tailwind is pretty close to neutral. You get the tailwind look by copy-pasting the tailwind components directly and straightforward use of the built-in palette and fonts. But it’s pretty easy to use customized palettes, not that bad to use different fonts (well, the hairy parts are due to HTML, browsers and the web, not tailwind), and it’s probably easier to skip the tailwind components if you know HTML (not a trivial skill but one well worth developing).