Foundation vs. Bootstrap: A Case Study

February 3rd, 2014 by Gage Pacifera

ss_engage14_home

The Netscout Engage14 site is another in a series of sites that Harmonic Northwest developed for Opus Events Agency. We have been developing these sites using the Bootstrap framework, but for this particular site I ended up using another responsive framework that I had used on a few other projects earlier in the year: Foundation Framework.

View site at: http://www.netscout.com/engage14/Pages/v2/index.html

In terms of responsiveness, Foundation can’t be beat. I especially love the way it handles sizing of columns between desktop and table sizes: the columns become proportionally narrower as the browser window gets more narrow, all the way until you hit a tablet size when the columns go full width and stack into a single column. In Bootstrap the page container simply has a couple of breakpoints for its width, so there isn’t a proportional growing effect.

When I began using Bootstrap instead of Foundation for more recent projects, I was impressed with Bootstrap’s large library of UI widgets. There are many well-documented and useful chunks of code that greatly speed up my development process. They are easy to style and often tweakable in terms of functionality. It looks like Foundation has done some catching up in this department (their library of widgets has grown considerably in the past several months,) but at the time, their library was nowhere near as robust as Bootstrap’s.

All in all, I’d say the Foundation vs. Bootstrap question is becoming something like the choice between Coke and Pepsi: pick your flavor, they are both pretty much the same.

[thumbnail image credit: createmeaning.com]

 

Posted in Responsive, Web Development

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