Alternatives to Sass logo

Alternatives to Sass

Stylus, styled-components, PostCSS, Bootstrap, and Less are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Sass.
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What is Sass and what are its top alternatives?

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.
Sass is a tool in the CSS Pre-processors / Extensions category of a tech stack.
Sass is an open source tool with 14.7K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Sass's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Sass

  • 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. ...

  • styled-components
    styled-components

    Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps without stress 💅 ...

  • 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. ...

  • Bootstrap
    Bootstrap

    Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. ...

  • Less
    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. ...

  • node-sass
    node-sass

    It is a library that provides binding for Node.js to LibSass, the C version of the popular stylesheet preprocessor, Sass. It allows you to natively compile .scss files to css at incredible speed and automatically via a connect middleware. ...

  • 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. ...

  • css-loader
    css-loader

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

Sass alternatives & related posts

Stylus logo

Stylus

387
407
331
Expressive, robust, feature-rich CSS language built for nodejs
387
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+ 1
331
PROS OF STYLUS
  • 69
    Simple
  • 54
    Indented syntax
  • 38
    Efficient
  • 33
    Built for node.js
  • 32
    Open source
  • 24
    Expressive
  • 21
    Maintainable
  • 17
    Feature-rich
  • 13
    Better than CS
  • 6
    Variables
  • 5
    Functions
  • 3
    @extend directive
  • 2
    Contempt for curly brackets
  • 2
    Very clean
  • 2
    Mixins
  • 2
    Is Easy
  • 2
    No colons, semi-colons or even curly braces
  • 1
    Its unique
  • 1
    Dynamic selectors
  • 1
    Scriptable
  • 1
    Easy Efficiently
  • 1
    Transparent
  • 1
    Supports orthogonal architecture
CONS OF STYLUS
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Stylus posts

    awesomebanana2018
    Shared insights
    on
    PostCSSPostCSSStylusStylusSassSass

    Originally, I was going to start using Sass with Parcel, but then I learned about Stylus, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and PostCSS, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?

    See more
    styled-components logo

    styled-components

    1.5K
    591
    12
    Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps...
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    PROS OF STYLED-COMPONENTS
    • 11
      Very easy to use and integrate
    • 1
      Huihui
    CONS OF STYLED-COMPONENTS
      Be the first to leave a con

      related styled-components posts

      Johnny Bell

      For Stack Decisions I needed to add Markdown in the decision composer to give our users access to some general styling when writing their decisions. We used React & GraphQL on the #Frontend and Ruby & GraphQL on the backend.

      Instead of using Showdown or another tool, We decided to parse the Markdown on the backend so we had more control over what we wanted to render in Markdown because we didn't want to enable all Markdown options, we also wanted to limit any malicious code or images to be embedded into the decisions and Markdown was a fairly large to import into our component so it was going to add a lot of kilobytes that we didn't need.

      We also needed to style how the markdown looked, we are currently using Glamorous so I used that but we are planning to update this to Emotion at some stage as it has a fairly easy upgrade path rather than switching over to styled-components or one of the other cssInJs alternatives.

      Also we used React-Mentions for tagging tools and topics in the decisions. Typing @ will let you tag a tool, and typing # will allow you to tag a topic.

      The Markdown options that we chose to support are tags: a, code, u, b, em, pre, ul, ol, li.

      If there are anymore tags you'd love to see added in the composer leave me a comment below and we will look into adding them.

      #StackDecisionsLaunch

      See more

      ReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.

      ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.

      React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.

      styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.

      React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.

      Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.

      See more
      PostCSS logo

      PostCSS

      609
      525
      49
      Transform CSS with JS plugins
      609
      525
      + 1
      49
      PROS OF POSTCSS
      • 21
        The "babel" of CSS
      • 15
        Customizable
      • 8
        Autoprefixer
      • 2
        Variables
      • 1
        Mixins
      • 1
        CSS MQPacker
      • 1
        PostCSS Flexbugs Fixes
      CONS OF POSTCSS
        Be the first to leave a con

        related PostCSS posts

        ReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.

        ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.

        React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.

        styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.

        React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.

        Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.

        See more
        awesomebanana2018
        Shared insights
        on
        PostCSSPostCSSStylusStylusSassSass

        Originally, I was going to start using Sass with Parcel, but then I learned about Stylus, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and PostCSS, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?

        See more
        Bootstrap logo

        Bootstrap

        54.5K
        12.9K
        7.6K
        Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions
        54.5K
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        PROS OF BOOTSTRAP
        • 1.6K
          Responsiveness
        • 1.2K
          UI components
        • 942
          Consistent
        • 779
          Great docs
        • 676
          Flexible
        • 472
          HTML, CSS, and JS framework
        • 411
          Open source
        • 374
          Widely used
        • 367
          Customizable
        • 242
          HTML framework
        • 77
          Popular
        • 77
          Mobile first
        • 77
          Easy setup
        • 58
          Great grid system
        • 52
          Great community
        • 38
          Future compatibility
        • 34
          Integration
        • 28
          Very powerful foundational front-end framework
        • 24
          Standard
        • 23
          Javascript plugins
        • 19
          Build faster prototypes
        • 18
          Preprocessors
        • 14
          Grids
        • 9
          Good for a person who hates CSS
        • 8
          Clean
        • 4
          Easy to setup and learn
        • 4
          Love it
        • 4
          Rapid development
        • 3
          Great and easy to use
        • 2
          Community
        • 2
          Provide angular wrapper
        • 2
          Great and easy
        • 2
          Boostrap
        • 2
          Powerful grid system, Rapid development, Customization
        • 2
          Great customer support
        • 2
          Popularity
        • 2
          Clean and quick frontend development
        • 2
          Great and easy to make a responsive website
        • 2
          Sprzedam opla
        • 2
          Easy to use
        • 1
          Responsive design
        • 1
          Geo
        • 1
          Painless front end development
        • 1
          Design Agnostic
        • 1
          So clean and simple
        • 1
          Numerous components
        • 1
          Recognizable
        • 1
          Intuitive
        • 1
          Material-ui
        • 1
          Love the classes?
        • 1
          Pre-Defined components
        • 1
          It's fast
        • 1
          Felxible, comfortable, user-friendly
        • 1
          The fame
        • 1
          Easy setup2
        • 1
          Not tied to jQuery
        CONS OF BOOTSTRAP
        • 26
          Javascript is tied to jquery
        • 16
          Every site uses the defaults
        • 15
          Grid system break points aren't ideal
        • 14
          Too much heavy decoration in default look
        • 8
          Verbose styles
        • 1
          Super heavy

        related Bootstrap posts

        Ganesa Vijayakumar
        Full Stack Coder | Technical Lead · | 19 upvotes · 4.2M views

        I'm planning to create a web application and also a mobile application to provide a very good shopping experience to the end customers. Shortly, my application will be aggregate the product details from difference sources and giving a clear picture to the user that when and where to buy that product with best in Quality and cost.

        I have planned to develop this in many milestones for adding N number of features and I have picked my first part to complete the core part (aggregate the product details from different sources).

        As per my work experience and knowledge, I have chosen the followings stacks to this mission.

        UI: I would like to develop this application using React, React Router and React Native since I'm a little bit familiar on this and also most importantly these will help on developing both web and mobile apps. In addition, I'm gonna use the stacks JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Bootstrap wherever required.

        Service: I have planned to use Java as the main business layer language as I have 7+ years of experience on this I believe I can do better work using Java than other languages. In addition, I'm thinking to use the stacks Node.js.

        Database and ORM: I'm gonna pick MySQL as DB and Hibernate as ORM since I have a piece of good knowledge and also work experience on this combination.

        Search Engine: I need to deal with a large amount of product data and it's in-detailed info to provide enough details to end user at the same time I need to focus on the performance area too. so I have decided to use Solr as a search engine for product search and suggestions. In addition, I'm thinking to replace Solr by Elasticsearch once explored/reviewed enough about Elasticsearch.

        Host: As of now, my plan to complete the application with decent features first and deploy it in a free hosting environment like Docker and Heroku and then once it is stable then I have planned to use the AWS products Amazon S3, EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53. I'm not sure about Microsoft Azure that what is the specialty in it than Heroku and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Anyhow, I will do explore these once again and pick the best suite one for my requirement once I reached this level.

        Build and Repositories: I have decided to choose Apache Maven and Git as these are my favorites and also so popular on respectively build and repositories.

        Additional Utilities :) - I would like to choose Codacy for code review as their Startup plan will be very helpful to this application. I'm already experienced with Google CheckStyle and SonarQube even I'm looking something on Codacy.

        Happy Coding! Suggestions are welcome! :)

        Thanks, Ganesa

        See more
        Francisco Quintero
        Tech Lead at Dev As Pros · | 13 upvotes · 1.5M views

        For Etom, a side project. We wanted to test an idea for a future and bigger project.

        What Etom does is searching places. Right now, it leverages the Google Maps API. For that, we found a React component that makes this integration easy because using Google Maps API is not possible via normal API requests.

        You kind of need a map to work as a proxy between the software and Google Maps API.

        We hate configuration(coming from Rails world) so also decided to use Create React App because setting up a React app, with all the toys, it's a hard job.

        Thanks to all the people behind Create React App it's easier to start any React application.

        We also chose a module called Reactstrap which is Bootstrap UI in React components.

        An important thing in this side project(and in the bigger project plan) is to measure visitor through out the app. For that we researched and found that Keen was a good choice(very good free tier limits) and also it is very simple to setup and real simple to send data to

        Slack and Trello are our defaults tools to comunicate ideas and discuss topics, so, no brainer using them as well for this project.

        See more
        Less logo

        Less

        2.3K
        1.2K
        930
        The dynamic stylesheet language
        2.3K
        1.2K
        + 1
        930
        PROS OF LESS
        • 215
          Better than css
        • 177
          Variables
        • 141
          Mixins
        • 99
          Maintainable
        • 79
          Used by bootstrap
        • 55
          Open source
        • 50
          Extendable
        • 43
          Functions
        • 39
          Dynamic
        • 30
          Fast
        • 2
          CSS is valid LESS, very easy to pick up
        CONS OF LESS
          Be the first to leave a con

          related Less posts

          ReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.

          ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.

          React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.

          styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.

          React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.

          Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.

          See more
          Julien DeFrance
          Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter · | 6 upvotes · 120.5K views
          Shared insights
          on
          BootstrapBootstrapLessLessSassSass
          at

          Which #GridFramework to use? My team and I closed on Bootstrap !

          On a related note and as far as stylesheets go, we had to chose between #CSS, #SCSS, #Sass , Less Finally opted for Sass

          As syntactically awesome as the name announces it.

          See more
          node-sass logo

          node-sass

          88
          143
          0
          Node.js bindings to libsass
          88
          143
          + 1
          0
          PROS OF NODE-SASS
            Be the first to leave a pro
            CONS OF NODE-SASS
            • 1
              Needs Microsoft BuildTools and Python 2.7 to install

            related node-sass posts

            Animate.css  logo

            Animate.css

            10.6K
            2.6K
            0
            A library of CSS animations
            10.6K
            2.6K
            + 1
            0
            PROS OF ANIMATE.CSS
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              CONS OF ANIMATE.CSS
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                related Animate.css posts

                css-loader logo

                css-loader

                1.4K
                0
                0
                Helps webpack to collect CSS from all the css files
                1.4K
                0
                + 1
                0
                PROS OF CSS-LOADER
                  Be the first to leave a pro
                  CONS OF CSS-LOADER
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                    related css-loader posts