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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. CSS Pre Processors Extensions
  5. Less vs Stitches

Less vs Stitches

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Less
Less
Stacks2.9K
Followers1.2K
Votes929
GitHub Stars17.0K
Forks3.4K
Stitches
Stitches
Stacks18
Followers8
Votes0

Less vs Stitches: What are the differences?

# The Key Differences Between Less and Stitches

<Write introduction here>

1. **Syntax Differences**: Less uses a syntax similar to CSS with features like nested rules, variables, and mixins, while Stitches uses a JavaScript-based API to generate style rules, making it more dynamic and flexible.
2. **Language Implementation**: Less is a preprocessor that compiles into regular CSS, allowing for use in any project setup, whereas Stitches is a runtime CSS-in-JS library that generates styles on-demand, reducing the need for additional build steps.
3. **Performance Variance**: Less can lead to larger file sizes as all styles are generated upfront, while Stitches only delivers the styles that are actually used, resulting in smaller bundles and improved performance.
4. **Browser Compatibility**: Less generates CSS that is fully supported by all browsers, but Stitches relies on CSS variables which may not be fully supported in older browsers without polyfills.
5. **Dynamic Styling**: Stitches allows for creating dynamic style variations at runtime through its JavaScript API, whereas Less requires predefined mixins or variables for achieving similar dynamic effects.
6. **Tooling Support**: Less has robust tooling support with a wide range of IDE plugins and build system integrations, while Stitches being a newer tool may have limited tooling options available for developers.

In Summary, understanding the differences between Less and Stitches can help developers choose the right tool for their specific needs in terms of syntax, performance, compatibility, and dynamic styling capabilities.

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Detailed Comparison

Less
Less
Stitches
Stitches

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.

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
GitHub Stars
17.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
3.4K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
2.9K
Stacks
18
Followers
1.2K
Followers
8
Votes
929
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 214
    Better than css
  • 177
    Variables
  • 141
    Mixins
  • 99
    Maintainable
  • 79
    Used by bootstrap
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
React
React
PostCSS
PostCSS

What are some alternatives to Less, 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.

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.

CSS Modules

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

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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