Difference between Width:100% and width:100vw?

vw and vh stand for viewport width and viewport height respectively.

The difference between using width: 100vw instead of width: 100% is that while 100% will make the element fit all the space available, the viewport width has a specific measure, in this case the width of the available screen, including the document margin.

If you set the style body { margin: 0 }, 100vw should behave the same as 100%.

Additional notes

Using vw as unit for everything in your website, including font sizes and heights, will make it so that the site is always displayed proportionally to the device's screen width regardless of it's resolution. This makes it super easy to ensure your website is displayed properly in both workstation and mobile.

You can set font-size: 1vw (or whatever size suits your project) in your body CSS and everything specified in rem units will automatically scale according to the device screen, so it's easy to port existing projects and even frameworks (such as Bootstrap) to this concept.

Havengard's answer doesn't seem to be strictly true. I've found that vw fills the viewport width, but doesn't account for the scrollbars. So, if your content is taller than the viewport (so that your site has a vertical scrollbar), then using vw results in a small horizontal scrollbar. I had to switch out width: 100vw for width: 100% to get rid of the horizontal scrollbar.