Compass vs Sass

Overview

Sass

Stacks44.8K

Followers32.2K

Votes3.0K

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.2K

Compass

Stacks352

Followers297

Votes12

GitHub Stars6.7K

Forks1.2K

Compass vs Sass: What are the differences?

What is Compass? 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.

What is Sass? 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.

Compass and Sass can be categorized as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.

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

Compass and Sass are both open source tools. Sass with 12K GitHub stars and 1.93K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Compass with 6.91K GitHub stars and 1.23K GitHub forks.

Airbnb, Square, and Pandora are some of the popular companies that use Sass, whereas Compass is used by Weebly, Movielala, and Custora. Sass has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2098 company stacks & 1484 developers stacks; compared to Compass, which is listed in 88 company stacks and 42 developer stacks.

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Manual

Advice on Sass, Compass

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 17, 2020

Needs adviceon

Sass

Stylus

PostCSS

Originally, I was going to start using @{Sass}|tool:1171| with Parcel, but then I learned about @{Stylus}|tool:1172|, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and @{PostCSS}|tool:3339|, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?

547k views547k

Comments

Saulius

Engineering Manager at Vinted

Jun 6, 2022

Needs advice

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.

22.9k views22.9k

Comments

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

Sass	Compass
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.	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 15.3K	GitHub Stars 6.7K
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 44.8K	Stacks 352
Followers 32.2K	Followers 297
Votes 3.0K	Votes 12
Pros & Cons
Pros 613 Variables 594 Mixins 466 Nested rules 410 Maintainable 300 Functions Cons 6 Needs to be compiled	Pros 9 No vendor prefix CSS pain 1 Compass sprites 1 Mixins 1 Variables

What are some alternatives to Sass, Compass?

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 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 "Variables" was stated as the key factor in picking Sass.

Compass vs Sass