Emotion vs Glamorous vs styled-components

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Emotion

291
239
+ 1
3
Glamorous

17
34
+ 1
0
styled-components

1.8K
603
+ 1
12

Emotion vs Glamorous vs styled-components: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In the realm of CSS-in-JS libraries, Emotion, Glamorous, and styled-components are popular choices for styling React components.

  1. Syntax: Emotion uses a lower-level API that allows for greater control and customization, making it a good choice for advanced users who want more flexibility in their styling. On the other hand, Glamorous and styled-components provide more user-friendly APIs that abstract away some of the complexities, making them easier to use for beginners or those looking for a simpler solution.

  2. Performance: In terms of performance, Emotion generally performs better than Glamorous and styled-components due to its optimized rendering approach. Emotion's dynamic styles allow for efficient updates and minimal re-renders, contributing to a smoother user experience.

  3. Server-side rendering: Emotion has built-in server-side rendering support, making it a seamless choice for server-rendered applications. Glamorous also offers server-side rendering capabilities, but styled-components require additional setup and configuration for server-side rendering.

  4. Community and ecosystem: Styled-components boasts a large and active community, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and support available. While Emotion and Glamorous also have dedicated communities, styled-components' extensive ecosystem makes it easier to find solutions to common issues and access a wide range of third-party tools and plugins.

  5. Theming: Both Emotion and styled-components handle theming well, providing easy ways to create and manage themes for consistent styling across an application. However, Glamorous does not have built-in theming capabilities, requiring manual implementation for theme management.

In summary, Emotion offers more control and performance optimizations, styled-components has a strong community and ecosystem, and Glamorous is beginner-friendly.

Decisions about Emotion, Glamorous, and styled-components
Luca Restagno
Co-Founder at iterspace · | 5 upvotes · 23.4K views

Storybook, along with React, styled-components, and Atomic Design, is the perfect tool to boost your front end development productivity. It helps you develop isolated presentational components with a super fast hot reload. It allows to test your props with knobs. Finally you compose, and reuse your components in your app.

You can host your storybook as a static website and share it with the other devs, so they are aware of the components already available in your library, and how to use them.

You can share the same with your UI/UX team, and converge towards a common design system.

You can even run visual regression tests on your library, with storyshots.

Which stack do you use on the Front End?

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Pros of Emotion
Pros of Glamorous
Pros of styled-components
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    Easy to use
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 11
      Very easy to use and integrate
    • 1
      Huihui

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    What is Emotion?

    Emotion is a performant and flexible CSS-in-JS library. Building on many other CSS-in-JS libraries, it allows you to style apps quickly with string or object styles. It has predictable composition to avoid specificity issues with CSS. With source maps and labels, Emotion has a great developer experience and great performance with heavy caching in production.

    What is Glamorous?

    Glamorous is React component styling solved with an elegant (inspired) API, small footprint (<5kb gzipped), and great performance (via glamor). It has a very similar API to styled-components and uses similar tools under the hood (glamor).

    What is styled-components?

    Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps without stress 💅

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    What companies use Emotion?
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    What tools integrate with Emotion?
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    What are some alternatives to Emotion, Glamorous, and styled-components?
    JavaScript
    JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
    Git
    Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
    GitHub
    GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
    Python
    Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
    jQuery
    jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
    See all alternatives