StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. CSS Pre Processors Extensions
  5. Compass vs PostCSS

Compass vs PostCSS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Compass
Compass
Stacks352
Followers297
Votes12
GitHub Stars6.7K
Forks1.2K
PostCSS
PostCSS
Stacks2.4K
Followers547
Votes49
GitHub Stars28.9K
Forks1.6K

Compass vs PostCSS: What are the differences?

Compass: A Stylesheet Authoring Environment that makes your website design simpler to implement and easier to maintain. The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions; PostCSS: Transform CSS with JS plugins. PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JS plugins. These plugins can support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.

Compass and PostCSS can be primarily classified as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.

"No vendor prefix CSS pain" is the top reason why over 8 developers like Compass, while over 17 developers mention "The "babel" of CSS" as the leading cause for choosing PostCSS.

Compass and PostCSS are both open source tools. PostCSS with 21.1K GitHub stars and 1.15K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Compass with 6.91K GitHub stars and 1.23K GitHub forks.

Sellsuki, Movielala, and Weebly are some of the popular companies that use Compass, whereas PostCSS is used by Twilio SendGrid, Open Humans, and Rainist. Compass has a broader approval, being mentioned in 88 company stacks & 42 developers stacks; compared to PostCSS, which is listed in 63 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Compass, PostCSS

Anonymous
Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 17, 2020

Needs adviceonSassSassStylusStylusPostCSSPostCSS

Originally, I was going to start using @{Sass}|tool:1171| with Parcel, but then I learned about @{Stylus}|tool:1172|, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and @{PostCSS}|tool:3339|, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?

547k views547k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Compass
Compass
PostCSS
PostCSS

The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions.

PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JS plugins. These plugins can support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
6.7K
GitHub Stars
28.9K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
GitHub Forks
1.6K
Stacks
352
Stacks
2.4K
Followers
297
Followers
547
Votes
12
Votes
49
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 9
    No vendor prefix CSS pain
  • 1
    Variables
  • 1
    Compass sprites
  • 1
    Mixins
Pros
  • 21
    The "babel" of CSS
  • 15
    Customizable
  • 8
    Autoprefixer
  • 2
    Variables
  • 1
    Mixins
Integrations
Sass
Sass
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Compass, PostCSS?

Sass

Sass

Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It's translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.

Less

Less

Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable.

Stylus

Stylus

Stylus is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.

Bourbon

Bourbon

Bourbon is a library of pure sass mixins that are designed to be simple and easy to use. No configuration required. The mixins aim to be as vanilla as possible, meaning they should be as close to the original CSS syntax as possible.

CSS Modules

CSS Modules

It is a CSS file in which all class names and animation names are scoped locally by default. The key words here are scoped locally. With this, your CSS class names become similar to local variables in JavaScript. It goes into the compiler, and CSS comes out the other side.

astroturf

astroturf

It lets you write CSS in your JavaScript files without adding any runtime layer, and with your existing CSS processing pipeline.

PreCSS

PreCSS

It combines Sass-like syntactical sugar — like variables, conditionals, and iterators — with emerging CSS features — like logical and custom properties, media query ranges, and image sets.

Animate.css

Animate.css

It is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness.

Autoprefixer

Autoprefixer

It is a CSS post processor. It combs through compiled CSS files to add or remove vendor prefixes like -webkit and -moz after checking the code.

css-loader

css-loader

The css-loader interprets @import and url() like import/require() and will resolve them.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase