Overview

Sass

Stacks44.8K

Followers32.2K

Votes3.0K

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.2K

PostCSS

Stacks2.4K

Followers547

Votes49

GitHub Stars28.9K

Forks1.6K

PostCSS vs Sass: What are the differences?

PostCSS and Sass are two popular CSS preprocessors. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Modularity and Flexibility: PostCSS allows for the creation of custom plugins, making it highly modular and flexible. This means that developers can choose and configure only the features they need, resulting in a more lightweight and optimized development environment. On the other hand, Sass has a more opinionated and comprehensive feature set, which may provide more convenience for developers who prefer an all-in-one solution.
Syntax: PostCSS follows the standard CSS syntax, making it easier for developers already familiar with CSS to adopt and work with. It allows for gradual adoption, as existing CSS files can be processed incrementally with PostCSS. In contrast, Sass introduces its own syntax, which includes nesting, variables, mixins, and other additional features. While this provides a more concise and expressive syntax, it requires developers to learn and adapt to a new set of rules.
Compilation: PostCSS operates on a plugin-based architecture, allowing it to parse and modify CSS files. It can be integrated directly into build pipelines, enabling real-time processing of CSS. Sass, on the other hand, requires compilation, as it is a separate preprocessor language. It needs to be compiled into standard CSS before it can be used in a web page. This additional compilation step introduces a slight delay in the development process compared to PostCSS.
Community and Ecosystem: Sass has been around for a longer time and, as a result, has a larger and more established community. This means more resources, such as tutorials, documentation, and community support, are available for Sass users. PostCSS, however, has gained popularity in recent years and has an active and growing community. It has a wide range of plugins and integrations, allowing developers to extend its functionality as needed.
CSS Support: PostCSS focuses on enhancing and extending CSS capabilities. It provides features like automatic vendor prefixing, custom property sets, and future CSS syntax compatibility. It ensures that developers can write modern CSS without worrying about browser support. In comparison, Sass mainly focuses on providing syntactical improvements and reusable code patterns. While Sass also supports vendor prefixing through libraries like Autoprefixer, it is not as comprehensive as the PostCSS implementation.
Learning Curve: Due to its closer resemblance to the standard CSS syntax, PostCSS has a relatively lower learning curve for developers familiar with CSS. It allows for an incremental adoption approach, where developers can start using PostCSS features gradually. In contrast, Sass introduces a new syntax and additional concepts like nesting and mixins, which may take more time for developers to learn and get used to.

In summary, PostCSS offers modularity and flexibility, follows standard CSS syntax, operates without the need for compilation, has an active community and ecosystem, focuses on enhancing CSS support, and has a relatively lower learning curve. In comparison, Sass provides an opinionated and comprehensive feature set, introduces its own syntax, requires separate compilation, has a larger and more established community, focuses on syntactical improvements and code patterns, and may require more time to learn.

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Advice on Sass, PostCSS

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

Sass	PostCSS
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 is a tool for transforming CSS with JS plugins. These plugins can support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 15.3K	GitHub Stars 28.9K
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks 1.6K
Stacks 44.8K	Stacks 2.4K
Followers 32.2K	Followers 547
Votes 3.0K	Votes 49
Pros & Cons
Pros 613 Variables 594 Mixins 466 Nested rules 410 Maintainable 300 Functions Cons 6 Needs to be compiled	Pros 21 The "babel" of CSS 15 Customizable 8 Autoprefixer 2 Variables 1 PostCSS Flexbugs Fixes

What are some alternatives to Sass, PostCSS?

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 is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.

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.