Bourbon vs PostCSS

Overview

Bourbon

Stacks131

Followers115

Votes20

GitHub Stars9.0K

Forks871

PostCSS

Stacks2.4K

Followers548

Votes49

GitHub Stars28.9K

Forks1.6K

Bourbon vs PostCSS: What are the differences?

Introduction:

When comparing Bourbon and PostCSS, there are several key differences to consider that can impact how you approach and utilize each tool in web development.

Purpose and Functionality: Bourbon is a Sass mixin library that provides pre-written styles and functions to streamline the CSS coding process, while PostCSS is a tool that processes CSS using JavaScript plugins, allowing for transformations and optimizations to the CSS code.
Dependency Management: Bourbon requires Sass as a dependency to work since it is a Sass library, while PostCSS can be used with any preprocessor or standalone as it does not rely on a specific preprocessor like Sass.
Community Support: Bourbon has a smaller community compared to PostCSS, which has a larger and more active community contributing plugins, tools, and support for a wide range of CSS transformations and optimizations.
Flexibility and Customizability: PostCSS offers more flexibility and customizability due to its plugin-based architecture, allowing developers to choose and combine only the plugins they need for their specific project requirements, while Bourbon provides a set of predefined mixins and functions for more standardized CSS coding practices.
Learning Curve: Bourbon may have a lower learning curve for developers already familiar with Sass, as it primarily extends Sass functionality with pre-written styles and functions, while PostCSS might require more familiarity with JavaScript and CSS transformations due to its plugin-based approach.
Performance: In terms of performance, PostCSS can be more efficient in optimizing and transforming CSS code through its plugin system, potentially leading to faster loading times and improved site performance compared to Bourbon's predefined mixins and functions.

In summary, Bourbon and PostCSS differ in their purpose, dependency management, community support, flexibility, learning curve, and performance, offering developers a choice between a Sass-based mixin library with pre-written styles (Bourbon) or a versatile CSS processing tool with plugin-based optimizations (PostCSS) for their web development projects.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Bourbon, 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

Detailed Comparison

Bourbon	PostCSS
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.	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 9.0K	GitHub Stars 28.9K
GitHub Forks 871	GitHub Forks 1.6K
Stacks 131	Stacks 2.4K
Followers 115	Followers 548
Votes 20	Votes 49
Pros & Cons
Pros 14 Simple mixins 3 No javascript 3 Lightweight	Pros 21 The "babel" of CSS 15 Customizable 8 Autoprefixer 2 Variables 1 Mixins
Integrations
Sass	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Bourbon, PostCSS?

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Bourbon vs PostCSS: What are the differences?

Introduction:

When comparing Bourbon and PostCSS, there are several key differences to consider that can impact how you approach and utilize each tool in web development.

Purpose and Functionality: Bourbon is a Sass mixin library that provides pre-written styles and functions to streamline the CSS coding process, while PostCSS is a tool that processes CSS using JavaScript plugins, allowing for transformations and optimizations to the CSS code.
Dependency Management: Bourbon requires Sass as a dependency to work since it is a Sass library, while PostCSS can be used with any preprocessor or standalone as it does not rely on a specific preprocessor like Sass.
Community Support: Bourbon has a smaller community compared to PostCSS, which has a larger and more active community contributing plugins, tools, and support for a wide range of CSS transformations and optimizations.
Flexibility and Customizability: PostCSS offers more flexibility and customizability due to its plugin-based architecture, allowing developers to choose and combine only the plugins they need for their specific project requirements, while Bourbon provides a set of predefined mixins and functions for more standardized CSS coding practices.
Learning Curve: Bourbon may have a lower learning curve for developers already familiar with Sass, as it primarily extends Sass functionality with pre-written styles and functions, while PostCSS might require more familiarity with JavaScript and CSS transformations due to its plugin-based approach.
Performance: In terms of performance, PostCSS can be more efficient in optimizing and transforming CSS code through its plugin system, potentially leading to faster loading times and improved site performance compared to Bourbon's predefined mixins and functions.

Bourbon vs PostCSS

Overview