Overview

Compass

Stacks352

Followers297

Votes12

GitHub Stars6.7K

Forks1.2K

Bourbon

Stacks132

Followers115

Votes20

GitHub Stars9.0K

Forks871

Bourbon vs Compass: What are the differences?

Key differences between Bourbon and Compass

Mixin Library: Bourbon provides a set of mixins that focus on handling CSS3 properties and other commonly used styles, allowing developers to easily apply these styles to their projects. On the other hand, Compass offers a more comprehensive library of mixins that includes a wide range of useful functions, utilities, and CSS resets. This makes Compass a more extensive and versatile tool for CSS development.
Dependency Management: Bourbon does not have any dependencies and can be used independently. It does not require any other frameworks or libraries to function properly. In contrast, Compass relies on Sass, which is a CSS preprocessor. Therefore, Compass requires the installation and setup of Sass in order to be utilized effectively.
Supported Features: Bourbon focuses mainly on CSS3-related features, providing mixins for properties like animation, background, border, and box-shadow. Compass, on the other hand, offers a wider range of features beyond CSS3, such as CSS sprites, grids, typography, and image processing. Compass provides more comprehensive tools to handle various aspects of web development.
Community Support: Bourbon has a smaller community compared to Compass. While Bourbon does have a community of developers who use and contribute to its development, the community support for Compass is much larger and more active. This means that developers using Compass can benefit from a larger pool of resources, tutorials, plugins, and community support.
Customizability: Bourbon encourages developers to write custom CSS based on their specific needs and preferences. It focuses on a minimalistic approach by providing a smaller set of mixins that cover the most commonly used styles. On the other hand, Compass offers a broader range of mixins and components that cater to different design and development scenarios. This makes Compass more suitable for projects that require more specific and customized styles.
Browser Support: Bourbon aims to support all modern browsers and does not focus extensively on ensuring compatibility with older or less commonly used browsers. Compass, on the other hand, provides more comprehensive browser support with built-in features like CSS3 prefix handling and vendor-specific mixins. This makes Compass a better choice for projects that require broader browser compatibility.

In Summary, while Bourbon provides a focused set of CSS3 mixins and minimalistic approach, Compass offers a more extensive library of mixins, better browser support, and a larger community for comprehensive web development.

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Detailed Comparison

Compass	Bourbon
The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 6.7K	GitHub Stars 9.0K
GitHub Forks 1.2K	GitHub Forks 871
Stacks 352	Stacks 132
Followers 297	Followers 115
Votes 12	Votes 20
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 No vendor prefix CSS pain 1 Mixins 1 Compass sprites 1 Variables	Pros 14 Simple mixins 3 Lightweight 3 No javascript
Integrations
Sass	Sass

What are some alternatives to Compass, Bourbon?

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

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.

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.