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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. CSS Pre Processors Extensions
  5. Bourbon vs Sass

Bourbon vs Sass

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Sass
Sass
Stacks44.8K
Followers32.2K
Votes3.0K
GitHub Stars15.3K
Forks2.2K
Bourbon
Bourbon
Stacks131
Followers115
Votes20
GitHub Stars9.0K
Forks871

Bourbon vs Sass: What are the differences?

## Introduction
Bourbon and Sass are popular tools used in web development for creating style sheets. Both tools have their strengths and differences which make them unique in their own way.

1. **Syntax**: Sass is a CSS preprocessor that extends CSS with variables, mixins, and functions, allowing for more dynamic stylesheets. Bourbon, on the other hand, is a lightweight mixin library for Sass, providing a set of handy mixins to accelerate development.
   
2. **Functionality**: Sass provides more overall functionality as it allows for the creation of variables, functions, and control structures, whereas Bourbon primarily offers mixins for common CSS properties like gradients and transitions.

3. **Customizability**: Sass allows for greater customization as developers can create their own functions and mixins, tailor-made for specific projects. Bourbon, on the other hand, is less customizable as it offers a fixed set of mixins that cannot be easily extended.

4. **Compatibility**: Sass is compatible with various frameworks and libraries, making it a versatile choice for front-end developers. Bourbon, while being a useful tool, may have limitations in terms of compatibility with certain frameworks or architectures.

5. **Learning Curve**: Sass might have a steeper learning curve for beginners due to its extensive features and functionality, while Bourbon can be easier to grasp for those looking for a more straightforward approach to CSS preprocessing.

6. **Community Support**: Sass has a larger community base and more extensive documentation, making it easier to find resources and assistance when working with the tool, while Bourbon, although well-supported, may have a smaller community compared to Sass. 

In Summary, Bourbon and Sass offer different approaches to CSS preprocessing, with Sass providing more extensive functionality and customization options, while Bourbon focuses on simplicity and speed for common CSS tasks.

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Advice on Sass, Bourbon

Anonymous
Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 17, 2020

Needs adviceonSassSassStylusStylusPostCSSPostCSS

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
Saulius
Saulius

Engineering Manager at Vinted

Jun 6, 2022

Needs advice

We extensively use Sass and CSS Modules as our styling solution at Vinted. Even though we considered adopting a CSS-in-JS library, we ultimately leaned towards the flexibility that Sass and CSS Modules offer.

Vinted also has an internal design system where Storybook is used for development and documentation.

22.9k views22.9k
Comments
Cory
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
Sass
Bourbon
Bourbon

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.

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
15.3K
GitHub Stars
9.0K
GitHub Forks
2.2K
GitHub Forks
871
Stacks
44.8K
Stacks
131
Followers
32.2K
Followers
115
Votes
3.0K
Votes
20
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 613
    Variables
  • 594
    Mixins
  • 466
    Nested rules
  • 410
    Maintainable
  • 300
    Functions
Cons
  • 6
    Needs to be compiled
Pros
  • 14
    Simple mixins
  • 3
    Lightweight
  • 3
    No javascript

What are some alternatives to Sass, Bourbon?

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.

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.

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.

Compass

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

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

astroturf

It lets you write CSS in your JavaScript files without adding any runtime layer, and with your existing CSS processing pipeline.

PreCSS

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

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

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

css-loader

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

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