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CSS Modules VS styled-components

Compare CSS Modules VS styled-components 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

styled-components logo 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.
  • CSS Modules Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-21
  • styled-components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27

CSS Modules features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

styled-components features and specs

  • Component-Scoped Styling
    Styles are encapsulated within components, ensuring that styles do not leak or conflict with other parts of the application.
  • Dynamic Styling
    Enables dynamic styling with the help of JavaScript variables and props, allowing for highly customizable components.
  • CSS Syntax
    Allows developers to write actual CSS code within JavaScript, making it easier for those familiar with CSS to adapt.
  • Automatic Vendor Prefixing
    Automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS properties, ensuring cross-browser compatibility without additional configuration.
  • Theming Support
    Provides a built-in theming solution, making it easier to implement and switch between different themes in the application.
  • Server-Side Rendering
    Supports server-side rendering, improving initial page load times and SEO.

Possible disadvantages of styled-components

  • Bundle Size
    Styled-components can add to the overall bundle size, potentially affecting performance, especially in large projects.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires developers to learn the styled-components library and its API, which can be a hurdle for new team members or those unfamiliar with CSS-in-JS.
  • Performance Overhead
    The runtime cost of parsing and injecting styles can impact performance, particularly in larger applications or with frequent style changes.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While improving, the ecosystem around styled-components (e.g., linting, debugging) is not as mature as traditional CSS or CSS preprocessor tools.
  • CSS-in-JS Limitations
    Some CSS features, like advanced selectors or cascading, may be more cumbersome or less intuitive to implement compared to traditional CSS approaches.

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)

styled-components videos

No styled-components videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CSS Modules and styled-components)
CSS Framework
27 27%
73% 73
Developer Tools
9 9%
91% 91
Design Tools
10 10%
90% 90
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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

Based on our record, styled-components seems to be a lot more popular than CSS Modules. While we know about 169 links to styled-components, we've tracked only 12 mentions of CSS Modules. 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 (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
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styled-components mentions (169)

  • 11 Interview Questions You Should Know as a React Native Developer in 2025 📈🚀
    Using the same CSS-in-JS approach as React, you can use libraries like Styled Components to style your components. This allows you to write CSS directly in your JavaScript files (personally not a fan of using these). - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • CSS-in-JS: Pros and cons
    The 2016 release of styled-components popularized the approach, offering a clean syntax and React integration. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Woovi monorepos best practices
    This detail implies if any dependencies can be resolved correctly and if not have a version conflict. As the example we have the styled-components lib, it can have a problem with type Symbol reference where the library doesn´t find your properties of themes because, in your internal code, it uses the symbolObject which is a unique object that refers your set configs. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: Styled Components Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to Use Styled-Components for Elegant React UI Design
    Styled-Components is a library that allows you to write CSS directly within your JavaScript files (CSS-in-JS), ensuring that your styles are scoped to individual components. Rather than managing separate CSS files, you define your styles alongside your component logic. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CSS Modules and styled-components, you can also consider the following products

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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

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

Ant Design - An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best React UI library for enterprises

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).

Storybook - Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.