In a flex container, you might use justify-content to space the child items from each other. With a certain number of child items, the layout will look okay. However, when they increase or decrease, the layout will look odd.

Consider the following example.

We have a flex container with four items. The spacing between each item isn’t a gap or margin, it’s there because the container has justify-content: space-between.

.wrapper {
    display: flex;
    flex-wrap: wrap;
    justify-content: space-between;
}

When the number of items is less than four, here is what will happen.

This isn’t good. There are different solutions to this:

• Margin
• Flexbox gap (Use with caution)
• Padding (Can be applied to the parent of each child element)
• Adding empty elements to act as a spacer.

For simplicity, I will use gap.

.wrapper {
    display: flex;
    flex-wrap: wrap;
    gap: 1rem;
}

Examples and use cases