To make it easier to develop a website using Bootstrap, there are several bootstrap editors available for better and quicker bootstrapping of your website. Hereinbelow we’ll cover the five major tools which are available either completely free or partially.
What is Bootstrap?
Bootstrap is the most popular open-source CSS framework for creating responsive and mobile-first websites. Bootstrap contains CSS- and sometimes JavaScript-based design templates for typography, buttons, navigation, forms, and other interface components. The Bootstrap project is one of the most-starred projects on GitHub, which really kicked off because other libraries and solutions that existed before led to inconsistencies, high maintenance, and inconvenience. Bootstrap was originally developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thorton as an internal design tool at Twitter, which was later open-sourced. The latest Bootstrap version is Bootstrap 4, which was announced back in 2014, however, the first beta version was not released up until 2017, and the final version – up until January 2018. Major changes that happened to Bootstrap 4 (which now supports all major browsers except (unsurprisingly) IE9, for which you have to use Bootstrap 3) include:
- Replacement of Less with Sass
- CSS Flexible Box support
- Addition of Reboot (a collection of element-specific CSS changes in a single file, based on Normalize)
- Addition of navigation customization options
- Addition of responsive spacing and sizing utilities
- Improvement in form styling, buttons, drop-down menus, media objects, image classes
- Switch from pixels in CSS to root ems
In the upcoming years, Bootstrap 5 promises to switch from jQuery library to native JavaScript and move testing infrastructure from QUnit to Jasmine.
TOP 5 FREE Bootstrap Editors and Tools
Bootstrap tool # 1 Pingendo
Price: Free but time-limited usage; unlimited starts from $9/month
Whether you’re a seasoned web pro or just a beginner, Pingendo works for both, making it extremely easy to develop websites using Bootstrap. Pingendo is a desktop app which you can easily add to your regular toolset along with Git clients and your usual stack. Styling is faster with SASS-based theming and features like nesting, variables, mixins, and others. Pingendo features a real-time code editor, so you don’t have to export code to edit HTML or CSS.
Among other cool features that make it stand out from its competition are customizable blocks, meaning every section or component is completely editable, the whole design-coding stuff is intuitive and simple.
There are a number of cool things you can do with Pingendo, starting from static responsive web pages, marketing landings, to wireframing quickly for mockups with an extensive UI kit, and app prototyping for your next Angular or React project.
Thanks to Netlify, you can deploy your project and get a custom URL, share your work with clients and co-workers, collect feedback and collaborate better.
Bootstrap tool # 2 Themestr.app
Price: free
Themestr.app is a Bootstrap builder, themer, and customizer. You might wonder, however, what’s the difference between those three. A theme is a lightweight style layer that is meant to be used along with the standard Bootstrap CSS. The theme here is minified and doesn’t contain Bootstrap grid classes. Customizer is a completely custom version of Bootstrap that is meant to be used in place of the standard Bootstrap CSS. The custom CSS is built using SASS, meaning you can modify any of the Bootstrap SASS variables, including grid layout and default breakpoints.
When you use Themestr (either a Themer or a Customizer), the appropriate SASS variables are set and the SCSS input is generated, which is later compiled using SASS processor, with a customized CSS as the result.
If you want to check other Bootstrap tools and templates from the same developer, go to themes.guides One of the latest creations from Carol Skelly is Forque ($20), a Bootstrap Admin Starter Template and UI Kit with jQuery, React, and Vue 2 included. Moreover, Forque is integrated with Chart.js and DataTables.net. The jQuery version also includes an AngularJS “inbox” app.
Bootstrap tool # 3 Bootstrap Build
Bootstrap BuildPrice: free or $4.90
By signing up for a free version of Bootstrap Build, you’re getting SASS compiler, Variables lookup (which are, of course, customizable and categorized by UI component category available via search), free Bootstrap themes, the possibility to export a maintainable SASS file with variables and your custom code. For five dollars, you’re getting a space in the cloud, where you can save your work, organize your themes into projects and save them in the cloud for future work and collaboration, as well as make changes to your theme and leverage the website’s content delivery network to serve your CSS.
Bootstrap Build was featured at Product Hunt and Stackshare (among the TOP 50 Web Dev Tools and Projects of 2018), so definitely worth checking out.
Bootstrap tool # 4 Bootstrap Magic
Price: free
Bootstrap Magic is another great open source creation that helps you create your Bootstrap 4.0 themes easily. The app features live preview and live HTML coding to help you create Bootstrap 4.0 theme directly in the browser. Among other things are Google Fonts, search for variables, ease of download and export. Another project from the same team at Orson is Orson Website Builder which you can try for free for fifteen days.
Bootstrap tool # 5 Designmodo
Price: free for all features but demo components, or from $89
Startup is a powerful Bootstrap builder to create websites and prototypes. Whatever project you’re working on, you can be absolutely sure that Designmodo Startup got you covered: there are unlimited web elements, pre-designed modules, styles, options, and templates. Sharing and exporting to HTML, an intuitive drag and drop interface, with all components having been created with Figma — it’s totally worth 89 dollars per quarter, but you’re welcome to get full access for free and see if it’s something you might be interested in.
Next time, we’ll cover the Best Bootstrap 4 UI Kits available for download in PSD, HTML, Sketch. So stay tuned.
For easier integration into a framework of your choice, we’ll recommend using the following libraries:
https://github.com/react-bootstrap/react-bootstrap
https://github.com/reactstrap/reactstrap
https://github.com/valor-software/ngx-bootstrap
https://github.com/bootstrap-vue/bootstrap-vue
