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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.
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 Compass
- No vendor prefix CSS pain9
- Mixins1
- Variables1
- Compass sprites1
Pros of Less
- Better than css215
- Variables177
- Mixins141
- Maintainable99
- Used by bootstrap79
- Open source55
- Extendable50
- Functions43
- Dynamic39
- Fast30
- CSS is valid LESS, very easy to pick up2
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What is Compass?
What is Less?
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