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Bourbon vs Sass: 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, Sass is detailed as "Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets". 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.
Bourbon and Sass belong to "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" category of the tech stack.
"Simple mixins" is the primary reason why developers consider Bourbon over the competitors, whereas "Variables" was stated as the key factor in picking Sass.
Bourbon and Sass are both open source tools. It seems that Sass with 12K GitHub stars and 1.93K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Bourbon with 8.84K GitHub stars and 916 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Sass has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2082 company stacks & 1446 developers stacks; compared to Bourbon, which is listed in 25 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.
Originally, I was going to start using Sass with Parcel, but then I learned about Stylus, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and PostCSS, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?
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.
We know that Sass
is not a replace for CSS
, but in my mind there is no CSS with no Sass.
One of the first complement/plugins I add to the environment, are the Sass processing files/demons.
I couldn't imagine going back to pure CSS. Sass is even the way to go, regarding Styled Components, CSS Modules, and all the other options.
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.
Pros of Bourbon
- Simple mixins14
- Lightweight3
- No javascript3
Pros of Sass
- Variables613
- Mixins593
- Nested rules466
- Maintainable410
- Functions299
- Modular flexible code149
- Open source143
- Selector inheritance112
- Dynamic107
- Better than cs96
- Used by Bootstrap5
- If and for function3
- Better than less2
- Inheritance (@extend)1
- Custom functions1
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Cons of Bourbon
Cons of Sass
- Needs to be compiled6