Bourbon vs Less

Overview

Less

Stacks2.9K

Followers1.2K

Votes929

GitHub Stars17.0K

Forks3.4K

Bourbon

Stacks131

Followers115

Votes20

GitHub Stars9.0K

Forks871

Bourbon vs Less: 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, Less is detailed as "The dynamic stylesheet language". 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.

Bourbon and Less can be categorized as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.

"Simple mixins" is the top reason why over 13 developers like Bourbon, while over 213 developers mention "Better than css" as the leading cause for choosing Less.

Bourbon and Less are both open source tools. Less with 16.1K GitHub stars and 3.45K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Bourbon with 8.86K GitHub stars and 916 GitHub forks.

GoSquared, Weebly, and eTobb are some of the popular companies that use Less, whereas Bourbon is used by DeveloperTown, Helpful, and devbase.io. Less has a broader approval, being mentioned in 498 company stacks & 169 developers stacks; compared to Bourbon, which is listed in 25 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on Less, Bourbon

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

Less	Bourbon
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.	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 17.0K	GitHub Stars 9.0K
GitHub Forks 3.4K	GitHub Forks 871
Stacks 2.9K	Stacks 131
Followers 1.2K	Followers 115
Votes 929	Votes 20
Pros & Cons
Pros 214 Better than css 177 Variables 141 Mixins 99 Maintainable 79 Used by bootstrap	Pros 14 Simple mixins 3 Lightweight 3 No javascript
Integrations
No integrations available	Sass

What are some alternatives to Less, 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Related Comparisons

"Simple mixins" is the top reason why over 13 developers like Bourbon, while over 213 developers mention "Better than css" as the leading cause for choosing Less.

Bourbon vs Less