Software Alternatives & Reviews

Less VS BEM

Compare Less VS BEM and see what are their differences

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).

BEM logo BEM

BEM — Block Element Modifier is a methodology, that helps you to achieve reusable components and code sharing in the front-end.
  • Less Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-19
  • BEM Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21

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

BEM videos

BEM REVIEW! is Bem worth watching?

More videos:

  • Review - BEM - First Impressions
  • Review - Bem Episode 1 Discussion/ Review BEM HAS THE MUSIC!!!!!

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Less and BEM)
CSS Framework
52 52%
48% 48
Developer Tools
45 45%
55% 55
Design Tools
39 39%
61% 61
Health And Fitness
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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

Based on our record, BEM seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 43 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.

Less mentions (0)

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

BEM mentions (43)

  • Earth rescue - A CSS only game
    After I had created space, the code was as spaghetti as it can get. I decided to switch to SCSS and finally read into the BEM Pattern for CSS and after wasting another 4 hours, I decided that I could not decide wether the HUD is an element of the game and the button is an element of the HUD and the text is an element of the button and someone else also thought about this and called it the BEM grandchildren... - Source: dev.to / 6 days ago
  • Upgrading and Refactoring a Slightly Outdated Web Project
    There are some conceptual requirements to clean code that I always found hard to achieve in a traditional web project, but that's one more reason to use tools like static site generators and follow design patterns like Atomic Design, (A)BEM CSS, and a modular file structure. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • 21 Resources to Learn And Practice Your CSS Skills
    BEM is a methodology for organizing and naming CSS classes in a scalable and maintainable way. Learning the principles of BEM can improve the structure of your stylesheets drastically. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • StyleX – Meta's Styling Library
    It always surprises me the lengths people are willing to go to avoid writing CSS. If organization is the issue, there's BEM (https://getbem.com/). This just looks like another layer of complexity on top of an already convoluted front-end stack that just slows everything it touches to a crawl and only works moderately well on the developers beefed up latest MacBook Pro's, and sucks horribly on any regular person's... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS
    I am a reluctant convert to tailwind. I've been doing HTML since the 90s, before CSS was even really usable for things like page layout. I mean, we didn't even use div in those days - it was table based layouts and spacer gifs. CSS appeals to a programmers mindset. Cascading seems like a good idea. Having classes that are reusable seems like a good idea. Complex selectors seem like a good idea. These are all forms... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Less and BEM, 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.

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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

Stylus - EXPRESSIVE, DYNAMIC, ROBUST CSS

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 Next - Use tomorrow’s CSS syntax, today.