Overview

Less

Stacks2.9K

Followers1.2K

Votes929

GitHub Stars17.0K

Forks3.4K

Sass

Stacks44.8K

Followers32.2K

Votes3.0K

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.2K

Less vs Sass: What are the differences?

Introduction: This Markdown code presents the key differences between Less and Sass, two popular CSS preprocessor languages.

Syntax: Less uses a CSS-like syntax with some additional features, while Sass has a more concise and flexible syntax with powerful features like mixins and variables.
Compilation: Less is compiled using JavaScript in the browser or server-side, whereas Sass has a Ruby-based command-line tool that compiles the code.
Inheritance: Less does not support native inheritance, while Sass allows for robust inheritance capabilities through the use of @extend.
Functions: Sass offers a robust set of functions for manipulating colors, strings, lists, and other data types, while Less has a limited set of built-in functions.
Community Support: Sass has a larger and more active community contributing to its development, documentation, and tooling, making it more widely adopted in the industry compared to Less.
Variables: In Less, variables are defined using the @ symbol, while in Sass, variables are defined using the $ symbol.

In Summary, the key differences between Less and Sass lie in their syntax, compilation methods, inheritance capabilities, functions, community support, and variable declaration syntax.

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Advice on Less, Sass

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

Less	Sass
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.0K	GitHub Stars 15.3K
GitHub Forks 3.4K	GitHub Forks 2.2K
Stacks 2.9K	Stacks 44.8K
Followers 1.2K	Followers 32.2K
Votes 929	Votes 3.0K
Pros & Cons
Pros 214 Better than css 177 Variables 141 Mixins 99 Maintainable 79 Used by bootstrap	Pros 613 Variables 594 Mixins 466 Nested rules 410 Maintainable 300 Functions Cons 6 Needs to be compiled

What are some alternatives to Less, Sass?

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.

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.