Software Alternatives & Reviews

CSS Modules VS Less

Compare CSS Modules VS Less and see what are their differences

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

Less logo 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).
  • CSS Modules Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-21
  • Less Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-19

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)

Less videos

'Less' author Andrew Sean Greer answers your questions

More videos:

  • Review - Book Review: Less by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed by Smriti
  • Review - Book Review - Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CSS Modules and Less)
CSS Framework
34 34%
66% 66
Developer Tools
31 31%
69% 69
Design Tools
37 37%
63% 63
Health And Fitness
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using CSS Modules and Less. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CSS Modules seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 11 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.

CSS Modules mentions (11)

  • 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
  • Why do bigger websites have the weirdest class and id names?
    They are probably using css modules. Source: over 1 year 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 1 year ago
  • Styling in React.js
    Another interesting way to organize you css is using css modules. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

Less mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Less yet. Tracking of Less recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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.

Stylus - EXPRESSIVE, DYNAMIC, ROBUST CSS

CSS Next - Use tomorrow’s CSS syntax, today.

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