CSS Grid vs Flexbox: When to Use What?

The Core Difference: 1D vs 2D

Flexbox is a one-dimensional layout model. It arranges items along a single axis — either a row or a column — and excels at distributing space between items on that axis.

CSS Grid is a two-dimensional layout model. It controls rows and columns simultaneously, letting you place items precisely anywhere on a grid, including overlapping regions. If you find yourself nesting multiple flexboxes to fake a grid, that's usually the sign you should have started with Grid.

When Flexbox Wins

Flexbox is the right tool for: navigation bars where items need to space evenly, a row of buttons that should wrap on small screens, centering a single element both vertically and horizontally, or a card's internal layout (image, title, description, button stacked in a column).

.navbar { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; align-items: center; }

These are all fundamentally "line up items along one direction" problems — exactly what Flexbox was designed for.

When Grid Wins

Grid is the right tool for: an overall page layout (header, sidebar, main content, footer), a photo gallery where images need to align into rows and columns, a dashboard with cards of different sizes, or any layout where you want to define the structure once and place children into named areas.

.page { display: grid; grid-template-columns: 250px 1fr; grid-template-areas: "sidebar header" "sidebar main" "sidebar footer"; }

That grid-template-areas syntax alone replaces what used to take dozens of lines of float and clear hacks.

Using Them Together

In real production code, you'll almost always combine both: Grid defines the page's macro-structure, and Flexbox handles the micro-layout inside each grid cell — like aligning icons and text inside a card, or spacing buttons inside a form footer. Neither replaces the other; they operate at different scales of the same page.