PostCSS vs Sass vs Stylus

Overview

Sass

Stacks44.8K

Followers32.2K

Votes3.0K

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.2K

Stylus

Stacks447

Followers411

Votes331

GitHub Stars11.3K

Forks1.1K

PostCSS

Stacks2.4K

Followers547

Votes49

GitHub Stars28.9K

Forks1.6K

PostCSS vs Sass vs Stylus: What are the differences?

# Introduction

PostCSS, Sass, and Stylus are popular preprocessor tools used to enhance the capabilities of CSS for web development. Each tool offers unique features and benefits, making them suitable for various projects. In this Markdown code, we will highlight key differences between PostCSS, Sass, and Stylus.

1. **Syntax**:
PostCSS is a tool that allows you to transform CSS using JavaScript plugins, providing a flexible and customizable approach to processing styles. Sass uses a strict indentation-based syntax with a significant focus on nesting and mixins. Stylus, on the other hand, has a minimalistic and clean syntax with no braces or semicolons, making it easy to write and read.

2. **Architecture**:
PostCSS is more of a modular tool, allowing developers to choose specific plugins based on their project requirements. Sass follows a traditional architecture with features like variables, nesting, and inheritance built into its core. Stylus is known for its simplicity and power, offering a wide range of features with minimal code.

3. **Browser Support**:
PostCSS offers better compatibility with all major browsers due to its modern CSS features and plugin-driven architecture. Sass has been around longer and has a larger community, ensuring good browser support. Stylus, although powerful, may require additional processing for optimal browser compatibility.

4. **Learning Curve**:
PostCSS may have a steeper learning curve compared to Sass and Stylus, as it requires an understanding of JavaScript plugins and configuration. Sass, with its familiar syntax and extensive documentation, is relatively easier to pick up for beginners. Stylus, with its concise and intuitive syntax, offers a gentle learning curve for those new to preprocessors.

5. **Community and Ecosystem**:
Sass has a large and active community with plenty of resources, plugins, and frameworks to support developers. PostCSS, being a newer tool, is gaining popularity and has a growing ecosystem of plugins and tools. Stylus, although not as widely used as Sass or PostCSS, has a dedicated community that continues to develop and maintain the tool.

6. **Performance**:
PostCSS is known for its fast processing speed due to its modular architecture, allowing developers to optimize performance based on project requirements. Sass can sometimes be slower, especially in larger projects, due to its feature-rich architecture. Stylus offers good performance with its lean syntax, making it a lightweight option for efficient CSS preprocessing.

In Summary, PostCSS, Sass, and Stylus each have unique features, syntaxes, and performance characteristics that cater to different development needs, making them valuable tools in the world of CSS preprocessing.

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Advice on Sass, Stylus, 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	Stylus	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.	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 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 11.3K	GitHub Stars 28.9K
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks 1.1K	GitHub Forks 1.6K
Stacks 44.8K	Stacks 447	Stacks 2.4K
Followers 32.2K	Followers 411	Followers 547
Votes 3.0K	Votes 331	Votes 49
Pros & Cons
Pros 613 Variables 594 Mixins 466 Nested rules 410 Maintainable 300 Functions Cons 6 Needs to be compiled	Pros 69 Simple 54 Indented syntax 38 Efficient 33 Built for node.js 32 Open source	Pros 21 The "babel" of CSS 15 Customizable 8 Autoprefixer 2 Variables 1 PostCSS Flexbugs Fixes
Integrations
No integrations available	Node.js	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sass, Stylus, 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.

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.

Normalize.css

It makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. It precisely targets only the styles that need normalizing.

Related Comparisons

PostCSS vs Sass vs Stylus: What are the differences?

# Introduction

PostCSS, Sass, and Stylus are popular preprocessor tools used to enhance the capabilities of CSS for web development. Each tool offers unique features and benefits, making them suitable for various projects. In this Markdown code, we will highlight key differences between PostCSS, Sass, and Stylus.

1. **Syntax**:
PostCSS is a tool that allows you to transform CSS using JavaScript plugins, providing a flexible and customizable approach to processing styles. Sass uses a strict indentation-based syntax with a significant focus on nesting and mixins. Stylus, on the other hand, has a minimalistic and clean syntax with no braces or semicolons, making it easy to write and read.

2. **Architecture**:
PostCSS is more of a modular tool, allowing developers to choose specific plugins based on their project requirements. Sass follows a traditional architecture with features like variables, nesting, and inheritance built into its core. Stylus is known for its simplicity and power, offering a wide range of features with minimal code.

3. **Browser Support**:
PostCSS offers better compatibility with all major browsers due to its modern CSS features and plugin-driven architecture. Sass has been around longer and has a larger community, ensuring good browser support. Stylus, although powerful, may require additional processing for optimal browser compatibility.

4. **Learning Curve**:
PostCSS may have a steeper learning curve compared to Sass and Stylus, as it requires an understanding of JavaScript plugins and configuration. Sass, with its familiar syntax and extensive documentation, is relatively easier to pick up for beginners. Stylus, with its concise and intuitive syntax, offers a gentle learning curve for those new to preprocessors.

5. **Community and Ecosystem**:
Sass has a large and active community with plenty of resources, plugins, and frameworks to support developers. PostCSS, being a newer tool, is gaining popularity and has a growing ecosystem of plugins and tools. Stylus, although not as widely used as Sass or PostCSS, has a dedicated community that continues to develop and maintain the tool.

6. **Performance**:
PostCSS is known for its fast processing speed due to its modular architecture, allowing developers to optimize performance based on project requirements. Sass can sometimes be slower, especially in larger projects, due to its feature-rich architecture. Stylus offers good performance with its lean syntax, making it a lightweight option for efficient CSS preprocessing.

In Summary, PostCSS, Sass, and Stylus each have unique features, syntaxes, and performance characteristics that cater to different development needs, making them valuable tools in the world of CSS preprocessing.

PostCSS vs Sass vs Stylus

Overview