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Less vs Sass: What are the differences?
What is Less? 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.
What is Sass? Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets. 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 and Sass can be categorized as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.
"Better than css", "Variables" and "Mixins" are the key factors why developers consider Less; whereas "Variables", "Mixins" and "Nested rules" are the primary reasons why Sass is favored.
Less and Sass are both open source tools. It seems that Less with 16K GitHub stars and 3.46K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Sass with 12K GitHub stars and 1.93K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Sass has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2082 company stacks & 1445 developers stacks; compared to Less, which is listed in 496 company stacks and 168 developer stacks.
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?
We know that Sass is not a replace for CSS, but in my mind there is no CSS with no Sass.
One of the first complement/plugins I add to the environment, are the Sass processing files/demons.
I couldn't imagine going back to pure CSS. Sass is even the way to go, regarding Styled Components, CSS Modules, and all the other options.
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.
Pros of Less
- Better than css215
- Variables177
- Mixins141
- Maintainable99
- Used by bootstrap79
- Open source56
- Extendable50
- Functions43
- Dynamic39
- Fast30
- CSS is valid LESS, very easy to pick up2
Pros of Sass
- Variables609
- Mixins593
- Nested rules467
- Maintainable410
- Functions299
- Modular flexible code150
- Open source142
- Selector inheritance112
- Dynamic107
- Better than cs96
- Used by Bootstrap5
- If and for function3
- Better than less2
- Custom functions1
- Inheritance (@extend)1
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Cons of Less
Cons of Sass
- Needs to be compiled3
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What is Less?
What is Sass?
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