Overview

Sass

Stacks44.8K

Followers32.2K

Votes3.0K

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.2K

Stylus

Stacks447

Followers411

Votes331

GitHub Stars11.3K

Forks1.1K

Sass vs Stylus: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Sass and Stylus are popular preprocessor scripting languages that extend the capabilities of CSS. While they both serve the same purpose, there are key differences between the two that developers should be aware of. 

1. **Syntax**: Sass follows a strict indentation-based syntax similar to Python, while Stylus uses a concise and minimalistic syntax with fewer symbols and punctuation.
2. **Language features**: Sass offers a wider range of language features such as loops, conditionals, and mixins, making it more versatile but also more complex for beginners. Stylus, on the other hand, emphasizes brevity and simplicity, which can lead to more concise code.
3. **Installation**: Sass requires Ruby to be installed on the system as it is written in Ruby, whereas Stylus is written in Node.js and can be installed using npm, making it easier to set up for Node.js developers.
4. **Community and Support**: Sass has a larger and more established community with extensive documentation and support, making it easier to find resources and solutions to common problems. Stylus, while recognized for its efficiency, has a smaller user base and may have limited resources available.
5. **Vendor Prefixing**: Sass does not have built-in support for vendor prefixing, requiring the use of additional tools or plugins, whereas Stylus includes automatic vendor prefixing functionality, simplifying the process of ensuring cross-browser compatibility.
6. **File Extensions**: Sass traditionally uses the .sass file extension for its syntax, while Stylus uses the .styl extension, allowing developers to easily distinguish between the two languages based on the file type.

In Summary, Sass and Stylus differ in syntax, language features, installation process, community support, vendor prefixing capabilities, and file extensions.

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Advice on Sass, Stylus

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 17, 2020

Needs adviceon

Sass

Stylus

PostCSS

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

Saulius

Engineering Manager at Vinted

Jun 6, 2022

Needs advice

We extensively use Sass and CSS Modules as our styling solution at Vinted. Even though we considered adopting a CSS-in-JS library, we ultimately leaned towards the flexibility that Sass and CSS Modules offer.

Vinted also has an internal design system where Storybook is used for development and documentation.

22.9k views22.9k

Comments

Cory

Mar 28, 2021

Decided

JSS is makes a lot of sense when styling React components and styled-components is a really nice implementation of JSS. I still get to write pure CSS, but in a more componentized way. With CSS post-processors like SASS and LESS, you spend a lot of time deciding where your .scss or .less files belong, which classes should be shared, and generally fighting the component nature of React. With styled-components, you get the best of CSS and React. In this project, I have ZERO CSS files or global CSS classes and I leverage mixins quite a bit.

40.3k views40.3k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sass	Stylus
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 15.3K	GitHub Stars 11.3K
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 44.8K	Stacks 447
Followers 32.2K	Followers 411
Votes 3.0K	Votes 331
Pros & Cons
Pros 613 Variables 594 Mixins 466 Nested rules 410 Maintainable 300 Functions Cons 6 Needs to be compiled	Pros 69 Simple 54 Indented syntax 38 Efficient 33 Built for node.js 32 Open source
Integrations
No integrations available	Node.js

What are some alternatives to Sass, Stylus?

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.

PostCSS

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.

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.

Compass

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

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

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

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

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.