CSS Styling Solutions: SASS vs Styled-Components
Both packages help developers write and manage CSS styles in web applications, but they use different approaches. SASS is a CSS preprocessor that extends regular CSS with extra features like variables and nesting, working with .scss or .sass files. Styled-components, on the other hand, is a CSS-in-JS solution that lets you write CSS directly in your JavaScript/React components, creating styled elements with their styles attached to them.
CSS Styling Toolsstylingcssfrontendreactpreprocessor
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Similar Packages
emotion
95%
A CSS-in-JS library that lets you write styles directly in your JavaScript. It works great with React and has excellent performance.
Emotion is very similar to styled-components in functionality but offers better performance and a slightly different API. It's especially good if you're working with React and want something fast.
CSS-in-JSless
90%
A CSS pre-processor, like SASS, that lets you write better CSS with variables and nesting. It's easier to learn than SASS and has been around for a long time.
Less is a great alternative to SASS because it does almost the same things but with simpler syntax. It's particularly good for beginners who want to start using a CSS pre-processor.
CSS Pre-processorstylus
80%
A flexible CSS pre-processor that lets you write styles with or without punctuation. It's like SASS but with more freedom in how you write your code.
Stylus is great for developers who want something like SASS but with more flexibility in syntax. It's particularly good if you like writing clean, minimal code.
CSS Pre-processorcss-modules
70%
A system that lets you write normal CSS files but keeps the styles local to specific components. It's simpler than CSS-in-JS but still gives you component-based styling.
CSS Modules is a great alternative to styled-components if you want to keep writing regular CSS but need the benefits of component-scoped styles. It's easier to learn and works well with any framework.
CSS Scoping Solutiontailwind-css
60%
A utility-first CSS framework that lets you build designs directly in your HTML using pre-made classes. It's a different approach to styling but very popular.
While not exactly like SASS or styled-components, Tailwind offers a modern alternative to traditional CSS styling. It's great for rapid development and maintaining consistent designs.
CSS FrameworkA pure JavaScript implementation of Sass. Sass makes CSS fun again.
<table> <tr> <td> <img width="118px" alt="Sass logo" src="https://rawgit.com/sass/sass-site/master/source/assets/img/logos/logo.svg" /> </td> <td valign="middle"> <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/sass"><img width="100%" alt="npm statistics" src="https://nodei.co/npm/sass.png?downloads=true"></a> </td> <td valign="middle"> <a href="https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/actions"><img alt="GitHub actions build status" src="https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/workflows/CI/badge.svg"></a> <br> <a href="https://ci.appveyor.com/project/nex3/dart-sass"><img alt="Appveyor build status" src="https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/status/84rl9hvu8uoecgef?svg=true"></a> </td> </tr> </table>This package is a distribution of Dart Sass, compiled to pure JavaScript
with no native code or external dependencies. It provides a command-line sass
executable and a Node.js API.
Usage
You can install Sass globally using npm install -g sass which will provide
access to the sass executable. You can also add it to your project using
npm install --save-dev sass. This provides the executable as well as a
library:
const sass = require('sass'); const result = sass.compile(scssFilename); // OR // Note that `compileAsync()` is substantially slower than `compile()`. const result = await sass.compileAsync(scssFilename);
See the Sass website for full API documentation.
Legacy API
Dart Sass also supports an older JavaScript API that's fully compatible with
Node Sass (with a few exceptions listed below), with support for both the
render() and renderSync() functions. This API is considered deprecated
and will be removed in Dart Sass 2.0.0, so it should be avoided in new projects.
Sass's support for the legacy JavaScript API has the following limitations:
-
Only the
"expanded"and"compressed"values ofoutputStyleare supported. -
Dart Sass doesn't support the
precisionoption. Dart Sass defaults to a sufficiently high precision for all existing browsers, and making this customizable would make the code substantially less efficient. -
Dart Sass doesn't support the
sourceCommentsoption. Source maps are the recommended way of locating the origin of generated selectors.
See Also
-
Dart Sass, from which this package is compiled, can be used either as a stand-alone executable or as a Dart library. Running Dart Sass on the Dart VM is substantially faster than running the pure JavaScript version, so this may be appropriate for performance-sensitive applications. The Dart API is also (currently) more user-friendly than the JavaScript API. See the Dart Sass README for details on how to use it.
-
Node Sass, which is a wrapper around LibSass, the C++ implementation of Sass. Node Sass supports the same API as this package and is also faster (although it's usually a little slower than Dart Sass). However, it requires a native library which may be difficult to install, and it's generally slower to add features and fix bugs.
Behavioral Differences from Ruby Sass
There are a few intentional behavioral differences between Dart Sass and Ruby Sass. These are generally places where Ruby Sass has an undesired behavior, and it's substantially easier to implement the correct behavior than it would be to implement compatible behavior. These should all have tracking bugs against Ruby Sass to update the reference behavior.
-
@extendonly accepts simple selectors, as does the second argument ofselector-extend(). See issue 1599. -
Subject selectors are not supported. See issue 1126.
-
Pseudo selector arguments are parsed as
<declaration-value>s rather than having a more limited custom parsing. See issue 2120. -
The numeric precision is set to 10. See issue 1122.
-
The indented syntax parser is more flexible: it doesn't require consistent indentation across the whole document. See issue 2176.
-
Colors do not support channel-by-channel arithmetic. See issue 2144.
-
Unitless numbers aren't
==to unit numbers with the same value. In addition, map keys follow the same logic as==-equality. See issue 1496. -
rgba()andhsla()alpha values with percentage units are interpreted as percentages. Other units are forbidden. See issue 1525. -
Too many variable arguments passed to a function is an error. See issue 1408.
-
Allow
@extendto reach outside a media query if there's an identical@extenddefined outside that query. This isn't tracked explicitly, because it'll be irrelevant when issue 1050 is fixed. -
Some selector pseudos containing placeholder selectors will be compiled where they wouldn't be in Ruby Sass. This better matches the semantics of the selectors in question, and is more efficient. See issue 2228.
-
The old-style
:property valuesyntax is not supported in the indented syntax. See issue 2245. -
The reference combinator is not supported. See issue 303.
-
Universal selector unification is symmetrical. See issue 2247.
-
@extenddoesn't produce an error if it matches but fails to unify. See issue 2250. -
Dart Sass currently only supports UTF-8 documents. We'd like to support more, but Dart currently doesn't support them. See dart-lang/sdk#11744, for example.
Disclaimer: this is not an official Google product.
