StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. CSS Pre Processors Extensions
  5. Bourbon vs Stitches

Bourbon vs Stitches

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Bourbon
Bourbon
Stacks131
Followers115
Votes20
GitHub Stars9.0K
Forks871
Stitches
Stitches
Stacks18
Followers8
Votes0

Bourbon vs Stitches: What are the differences?

Introduction

Bourbon and Stitches are two popular libraries used in web development for styling. Here are key differences between Bourbon and Stitches.

  1. Template Support: Bourbon provides a collection of mixins and functions for Sass, focusing on providing a lightweight set of tools for styling. In contrast, Stitches is a utility-first CSS-in-JS library that generates atomic CSS, allowing for highly customizable designs with a smaller bundle size.

  2. Build Process: When using Bourbon, the styles need to be precompiled using Sass before being served to the browser. On the other hand, Stitches generates styles at runtime, eliminating the need for a build step and making it easier to work with dynamic content.

  3. Developer Experience: Bourbon requires developers to write CSS rules using Sass syntax, which may be familiar to those with experience in the language. Stitches, on the other hand, provides a more ergonomic API for defining styles, making it easier for developers to create and maintain a consistent design system.

  4. Performance: Due to its atomic CSS approach, Stitches generates minimal styles that are only applied when needed, leading to smaller bundle sizes and improved loading times compared to Bourbon, which includes a larger set of mixins and functions that may result in more code being sent to the client.

  5. Community Support: Bourbon has been around for a longer period of time and has a larger community of users contributing to its development. Stitches, being a newer library, may have a smaller community but offers more modern approaches to styling and design in web development.

In Summary, Bourbon offers a set of Sass mixins for styling, while Stitches is a utility-first CSS-in-JS library that generates atomic CSS with better developer experience and performance benefits.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Bourbon
Bourbon
Stitches
Stitches

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 fully-typed CSS-in-JS library featuring near-zero runtime, server-side rendering, multi-variant support, and a best-in-class developer experience.

-
Avoids unnecessary prop interpolations at runtime, making it significantly more performant than other styling libraries; Both @stitches/core and @stitches/react libraries combined weigh in at ~8.0kb gzipped; Supports cross-browser server-side rendering, even for responsive styles and variants; Variants are a first-class citizen, so you can design composable component APIs which are typed automatically; Define multiple themes with CSS variables, then expose them to any part of your app; With a fully-typed API, token-aware properties, and custom utils, it provides a fun and intuitive DX; No more specificity issues due to the atomic output. Even extended components (via the as prop) won't contain duplicate CSS properties
Statistics
GitHub Stars
9.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
871
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
131
Stacks
18
Followers
115
Followers
8
Votes
20
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 14
    Simple mixins
  • 3
    Lightweight
  • 3
    No javascript
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Sass
Sass
React
React
PostCSS
PostCSS

What are some alternatives to Bourbon, Stitches?

Sass

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

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

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

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

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

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

astroturf

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

PreCSS

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

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase