Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Autoprefixer VS CSS Modules

Compare Autoprefixer VS CSS Modules and see what are their differences

Autoprefixer logo Autoprefixer

autoprefixer - Parse CSS and add vendor prefixes to rules by Can I Use

CSS Modules logo CSS Modules

I’ve been intrigued by CSS Modules lately. If you haven't heard of them, this post is for you. We'll be looking at the project and it's goals and aims. If
  • Autoprefixer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01
  • CSS Modules Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-21

Autoprefixer features and specs

  • Automated CSS Vendor Prefixing
    Autoprefixer automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS rules, ensuring compatibility with different browsers without manually writing prefixes.
  • Keep Up with Browser Updates
    Autoprefixer stays updated with the latest information about browser support, allowing developers to focus on writing standard CSS and not worry about changing requirements.
  • Configurable Browsing Target
    Developers can specify the target browsers and versions, making it possible to control the level of backward compatibility needed for a project.
  • Integrates with Build Tools
    It integrates smoothly with various build tools and task runners like webpack, Gulp, and Grunt, streamlining the development workflow.
  • Reduces File Size
    Autoprefixer only applies necessary prefixes based on specified browser support, which can help keep the CSS footprint small compared to manually adding excess prefixes.

Possible disadvantages of Autoprefixer

  • Potential Overhead
    There might be an initial setup time to properly configure Autoprefixer with the desired build tools and browser targets.
  • Dependence on Tools
    Using Autoprefixer requires integration into a build process or toolchain, which might not suit smaller projects or those without a build process.
  • Learning Curve
    For developers who are new to post-processing tools, understanding and correctly applying tool configurations might take some learning time.
  • Not a Silver Bullet
    While Autoprefixer handles vendor prefixing, it doesn't correct other CSS-related issues, which might still require manual adjustments and cross-browser testing.

CSS Modules features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Autoprefixer videos

Stop Worrying about Vendor Prefixes with Autoprefixer | XI to Eye vol 8

CSS Modules videos

Josh Johnston: At Least 6 Ways to Win with CSS Modules

More videos:

  • Review - Styling React Components with CSS Modules | Styling react with CSS Classes | Data Is Good
  • Review - Styling LitElement views part 2: global styles and CSS modules (Vaadin Fusion)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Autoprefixer and CSS Modules)
CSS Framework
73 73%
27% 27
Development Tools
69 69%
31% 31
Developer Tools
59 59%
41% 41
Design Tools
67 67%
33% 33

User comments

Share your experience with using Autoprefixer and CSS Modules. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Autoprefixer should be more popular than CSS Modules. It has been mentiond 22 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Autoprefixer mentions (22)

  • Exploring Tailwind Oxide
    Unlike other frameworks, you can’t just npm install and write code. Take one look at the Tailwind CSS installation page and before you even begin, you need to decide if you want to install it with the CLI or as a PostCSS plugin. Wait, you know CSS, but what is PostCSS? Then, you keep reading and you see something about CSS preprocessor and you might wonder what that is too. Then, you see that you not only have to... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Native CSS nesting now supported by all major browsers!
    Mixins - This allows you to reuse a set of rules inside another rule. I never really found a good use case for mixins. They were available to me when I was still using Bootstrap with LESS, but using them seemed a little complex, because you always need to look up what they do and the resulting CSS output is not always clear. If you're thinking of using them for browser prefixes (e.g. -webkit-transform), I would... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • 23 of the best Eleventy Themes (Starters) for 2023
    Simple, fast, and a little bit opinionated, Eleventy Plus Vite features Eleventy 2.0.0-canary, the new Eleventy 2.0 Dev Server with live reload, Vite 3.0 as Middleware in Eleventy Dev Server (using eleventy-plugin-vite), build output post-processing by Vite (with Rollup), CSS/Sass post-processing with PostCSS including Autoprefixer and cssnano, a custom CSS/Sass structure, basic fluid typography based on Utopia,... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • The Complete Guide for Setting Up React App from Scratch (feat. TypeScript)
    w/ postcss-preset-env(v7.8.3): convert modern CSS into something most browsers can understand, determining the polyfills you need based on your targeted browsers or runtime environments. It takes the support data that comes from MDN and Can I Use and determine from a browserlist whether those transformations are needed. It also packs Autoprefixer within and shares the list with it, so prefixes are only applied... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • How do I deal with CSS for Safari?
    As others have said, you need to normalize. Also, you may need something like autoprefixer if you're using styles that have different vendor prefixes. https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

CSS Modules mentions (12)

  • On why I prefer not to use elm-css
    ..., CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, and Tailwind when I'm not constrained to do so. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Is there really no better way to isolate styles across components than CSS modules?
    From what I read about CSS modules, the style isolation provides some guard rails to prevent things like random bits of global style or having colliding rules all over the place. This makes a lot of sense, but even on huge projects, I never really have those problems. I've disciplined myself to pair a component file with a CSS file (MyComponent.jsx + MyComponent.css) and keep global styles to a minimum. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Components with separate styles - how to do?
    Any time you import CSS files into a module, that CSS becomes active on EVERY component in your entire project, so that's not really a good way to go about it. It essentially creates a tag inside the final rendered html with all of your CSS within it. If you have two CSS files, and they both have a class of .myClass then they will step on each other and cause bad things to happen to your... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Why do bigger websites have the weirdest class and id names?
    They are probably using css modules. Source: over 2 years ago
  • No Caption..
    This may be a little more advanced but I'd also recommend looking into CSS modules. It basically allows you to scope your styles to individual elements preventing unwanted cascading, and simplifies naming conventions a lot (since the class names are now variables). Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Autoprefixer and CSS Modules, you can also consider the following products

PostCSS - Increase code readability. Add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you.

styled-components - styled-components is a visual primitive for the component age that also helps the user to use the ES6 and CSS to style apps.

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

Less - Less extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. Less runs on both the server-side (with Node. js and Rhino) or client-side (modern browsers only).

Bourbon - Bourbon - A simple and lightweight mixin library for Sass / CSS.

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.