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  1. Stackups
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  5. CSS Modules vs Stitches

CSS Modules vs Stitches

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CSS Modules
CSS Modules
Stacks132
Followers161
Votes2
Stitches
Stitches
Stacks18
Followers8
Votes0

CSS Modules vs Stitches: What are the differences?

# Introduction
CSS Modules and Stitches are two popular styling solutions in the world of web development. While they both aim to provide better styling organization and scoping, they have key differences that set them apart.

1. **Global vs Local Scope**: CSS Modules generate unique class names at build time, ensuring styles are locally scoped to avoid naming collisions. In contrast, Stitches uses a single, global stylesheet with atomic styles that are applied dynamically at runtime, offering a more global styling approach.
  
2. **Runtime vs Build Time**: Stitches applies styles dynamically at runtime, allowing for more flexibility and faster updates without the need to rebuild the entire application. On the other hand, CSS Modules generate static CSS files at build time, which can improve performance but may require a rebuild for every style update.
  
3. **API vs Webpack Plugin**: Stitches provides an API for defining styles, breakpoints, and themes programmatically, offering more control and flexibility over the styling process. CSS Modules, on the other hand, require a separate Webpack plugin to handle the scoping and transforming of class names in the CSS files.

4. **Composition Capability**: Stitches excels in the composition of styles by allowing developers to combine style utilities easily, creating a more efficient and reusable styling system. CSS Modules, while offering modularity, may require more effort to achieve the same level of composition.

5. **Bundle Size**: Stitches generates highly optimized CSS outputs tailored to the specific components used in the application, potentially reducing the overall bundle size by eliminating unused styles. In comparison, CSS Modules create separate CSS files for each module, which may lead to larger bundle sizes depending on the number of modules and styles used.

6. **Community and Ecosystem**: CSS Modules have been around longer and have a more extensive community and ecosystem of tools and resources available for developers. Stitches, being a newer solution, is rapidly growing but may have a smaller community and fewer integrations compared to CSS Modules.

In Summary, CSS Modules and Stitches offer distinct approaches to styling in web development, with differences in scope isolation, styling application, API usage, composition capabilities, bundle size optimization, and community support and ecosystem size.

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Detailed Comparison

CSS Modules
CSS Modules
Stitches
Stitches

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 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
Stacks
132
Stacks
18
Followers
161
Followers
8
Votes
2
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    Static rather than compiled at runtime
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
React
React
PostCSS
PostCSS

What are some alternatives to CSS Modules, 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.

Bourbon

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

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

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.

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