Bourbon vs CSS Modules

Overview

Bourbon

Stacks131

Followers115

Votes20

GitHub Stars9.0K

Forks871

CSS Modules

Stacks132

Followers161

Votes2

Bourbon vs CSS Modules: What are the differences?

Developers describe Bourbon as "A lightweight mixin library for Sass". 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. On the other hand, CSS Modules is detailed as "A CSS file in which all class names and animation names are scoped locally by default". 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.

Bourbon and CSS Modules belong to "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" category of the tech stack.

Bourbon is an open source tool with 8.86K GitHub stars and 917 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bourbon's open source repository on GitHub.

Helpful, Nexway, and nclud are some of the popular companies that use Bourbon, whereas CSS Modules is used by Getaround, Discord, and Kriasoft. Bourbon has a broader approval, being mentioned in 31 company stacks & 84 developers stacks; compared to CSS Modules, which is listed in 17 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Bourbon	CSS Modules
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 9.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 871	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 131	Stacks 132
Followers 115	Followers 161
Votes 20	Votes 2
Pros & Cons
Pros 14 Simple mixins 3 Lightweight 3 No javascript	Pros 2 Static rather than compiled at runtime
Integrations
Sass	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Bourbon, CSS Modules?

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.

Compass

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

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.