CSS Modules vs PreCSS

Overview

CSS Modules

Stacks132

Followers161

Votes2

PreCSS

Stacks1

Followers5

Votes1

CSS Modules vs PreCSS: What are the differences?

Developers describe CSS Modules as "A CSS file in which all class names and animation names are scoped locally by default". 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. On the other hand, PreCSS is detailed as "Use Sass-like markup in your CSS". 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.

CSS Modules and PreCSS can be categorized as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.

PreCSS is an open source tool with 1.54K GitHub stars and 83 GitHub forks. Here's a link to PreCSS's open source repository on GitHub.

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

Detailed Comparison

CSS Modules	PreCSS
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.	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.
-	Sass-like; Variables, conditionals, and iterators; Emerging CSS features
Statistics
Stacks 132	Stacks 1
Followers 161	Followers 5
Votes 2	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
Pros 2 Static rather than compiled at runtime	Pros 1 Sass in PostCSS

What are some alternatives to CSS Modules, PreCSS?

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 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.

Compass

The compass core framework is a design-agnostic framework that provides common code that would otherwise be duplicated across other frameworks and extensions.

astroturf

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

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.