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Bourbon

130
115
+ 1
20
Less

2.5K
1.2K
+ 1
930
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Bourbon vs Less: What are the differences?

Developers describe Bourbon as "A lightweight mixin library for Sass". 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. On the other hand, Less is detailed as "The dynamic stylesheet language". 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 and Less can be categorized as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.

"Simple mixins" is the top reason why over 13 developers like Bourbon, while over 213 developers mention "Better than css" as the leading cause for choosing Less.

Bourbon and Less are both open source tools. Less with 16.1K GitHub stars and 3.45K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Bourbon with 8.86K GitHub stars and 916 GitHub forks.

GoSquared, Weebly, and eTobb are some of the popular companies that use Less, whereas Bourbon is used by DeveloperTown, Helpful, and devbase.io. Less has a broader approval, being mentioned in 498 company stacks & 169 developers stacks; compared to Bourbon, which is listed in 25 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.

Decisions about Bourbon and Less
Cory Bell

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.

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Pros of Bourbon
Pros of Less
  • 14
    Simple mixins
  • 3
    Lightweight
  • 3
    No javascript
  • 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

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What is 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.

What is 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.

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What companies use Bourbon?
What companies use Less?
See which teams inside your own company are using Bourbon or Less.
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What tools integrate with Bourbon?
What tools integrate with Less?

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What are some alternatives to Bourbon and Less?
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.
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
The css-loader interprets @import and url() like import/require() and will resolve them.
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.
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.
See all alternatives