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PostCSS vs Sass: What are the differences?
PostCSS: Transform CSS with JS plugins. 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; 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.
PostCSS and Sass can be categorized as "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" tools.
"The "babel" of CSS" is the primary reason why developers consider PostCSS over the competitors, whereas "Variables" was stated as the key factor in picking Sass.
PostCSS and Sass are both open source tools. PostCSS with 21K GitHub stars and 1.15K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular 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 PostCSS, which is listed in 62 company stacks and 47 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?
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 PostCSS
- The "babel" of CSS21
- Customizable15
- Autoprefixer8
- Variables2
- Mixins1
- CSS MQPacker1
- PostCSS Flexbugs Fixes1
Pros of Sass
- Variables613
- Mixins594
- Nested rules466
- Maintainable410
- Functions300
- Modular flexible code149
- Open source143
- Selector inheritance112
- Dynamic107
- Better than cs96
- Used by Bootstrap5
- If and for function3
- Better than less2
- Inheritance (@extend)1
- Custom functions1
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Cons of PostCSS
Cons of Sass
- Needs to be compiled6