Compass vs Less

Overview

Less

Stacks2.9K

Followers1.2K

Votes929

GitHub Stars17.0K

Forks3.4K

Compass

Stacks352

Followers297

Votes12

GitHub Stars6.7K

Forks1.2K

Compass vs Less: What are the differences?

Developers describe Compass as "A Stylesheet Authoring Environment that makes your website design simpler to implement and easier to maintain". The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions. 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.

Compass and Less can be primarily classified as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.

"No vendor prefix CSS pain" is the primary reason why developers consider Compass over the competitors, whereas "Better than css" was stated as the key factor in picking Less.

Compass and Less are both open source tools. It seems that Less with 16.1K GitHub stars and 3.45K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Compass with 6.91K GitHub stars and 1.23K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Less has a broader approval, being mentioned in 498 company stacks & 169 developers stacks; compared to Compass, which is listed in 88 company stacks and 42 developer stacks.

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)

Manual

Advice on Less, Compass

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	Compass
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.	The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.0K	GitHub Stars 6.7K
GitHub Forks 3.4K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 2.9K	Stacks 352
Followers 1.2K	Followers 297
Votes 929	Votes 12
Pros & Cons
Pros 214 Better than css 177 Variables 141 Mixins 99 Maintainable 79 Used by bootstrap	Pros 9 No vendor prefix CSS pain 1 Variables 1 Compass sprites 1 Mixins
Integrations
No integrations available	Sass

What are some alternatives to Less, Compass?

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.

Bourbon

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.

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

"No vendor prefix CSS pain" is the primary reason why developers consider Compass over the competitors, whereas "Better than css" was stated as the key factor in picking Less.

Compass vs Less