Align content vs Align items in Flexbox (examples)

Use align-content or align-items for centering with Flexbox?

UpdatedJanuary 4, 2025

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Align content vs Align items in Flexbox (examples)

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Wesley (ByteGrad)

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Education for Web Developers

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CSS and JS are crucial skills for any developer. Check out my courses (see links in navbar).

You need to master both Flexbox and CSS Grid in order to professionally build modern websites & web apps. If you haven't mastered both of them yet, I highly recommend going through my CSS Course.

Usually, to center flex items vertically we can use align-items:

CSS-Flexbox-Align-Content-vs-Align-Items-Center-Horizontally-And-Vertically.png

(I'm also using justify-content here to center the flex-items horizontally)

But what if we have more flex-items or flex-items that are much bigger so that they wrap onto a new line?

CSS-Flexbox-Align-Content-vs-Align-Items-Center-Horizontally-And-Vertically-Multiple-Lines (2).png

If you still use align-items then it will look weird. Now we actually need to use align-content.

By the way, if you change the flex-direction to column, the align-items and align-content properties will now center horizontally instead of vertically. And the justify-content property will now center vertically (so they 'flip').

Conclusion: use align-items if you have just 1 row or 1 column of flex-items. Use align-content if you have multiple rows or columns after flex-items wrap onto new lines.

By the way, I think CSS is the 'bottleneck' to most websites & web apps. I believe it's the highest-ROI skill you can master.

Before I mastered CSS, I lost a ton of time & energy fiddling around with CSS.

I was learning about advanced JavaScript topics when I couldn't even implement basic layouts in CSS...

So I created a CSS course to help you avoid the same mistake. Check it out here if you're interested.

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