Less vs Stylus

Overview

Less

Stacks2.9K

Followers1.2K

Votes929

GitHub Stars17.0K

Forks3.4K

Stylus

Stacks447

Followers411

Votes331

GitHub Stars11.3K

Forks1.1K

Less vs Stylus: What are the differences?

Less: The dynamic stylesheet language. 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: Expressive, robust, feature-rich CSS language built for nodejs. 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.

Less and Stylus belong to "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" category of the tech stack.

"Better than css" is the primary reason why developers consider Less over the competitors, whereas "Simple" was stated as the key factor in picking Stylus.

Less is an open source tool with 16K GitHub stars and 3.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Less's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Less has a broader approval, being mentioned in 496 company stacks & 168 developers stacks; compared to Stylus, which is listed in 69 company stacks and 45 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Less, Stylus

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

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	Stylus
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 is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.0K	GitHub Stars 11.3K
GitHub Forks 3.4K	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 2.9K	Stacks 447
Followers 1.2K	Followers 411
Votes 929	Votes 331
Pros & Cons
Pros 214 Better than css 177 Variables 141 Mixins 99 Maintainable 79 Used by bootstrap	Pros 69 Simple 54 Indented syntax 38 Efficient 33 Built for node.js 32 Open source
Integrations
No integrations available	Node.js

What are some alternatives to Less, Stylus?

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.

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.

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.

css-loader

The css-loader interprets @import and url() like import/require() and will resolve them.

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Less vs Stylus: What are the differences?

Less and Stylus belong to "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" category of the tech stack.

"Better than css" is the primary reason why developers consider Less over the competitors, whereas "Simple" was stated as the key factor in picking Stylus.

Less is an open source tool with 16K GitHub stars and 3.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Less's open source repository on GitHub.