Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

PostCSS VS Animate.css

Compare PostCSS VS Animate.css and see what are their differences

PostCSS logo 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.

Animate.css logo Animate.css

Animate.css is a cross-browser library of CSS animations.
  • PostCSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19
  • Animate.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-06

PostCSS features and specs

  • Modularity
    PostCSS is built around plugins, which means you can choose the exact features you need and avoid bloat. This modularity offers high customizability.
  • Performance
    PostCSS is known for its fast performance owing to its efficient processing and the ability to use only required plugins.
  • Large ecosystem
    With a vast set of available plugins, PostCSS can achieve a wide range of functionality, from linting and vendor prefixing to advanced CSS transformations.
  • Active community
    An active open-source community continuously maintains and updates PostCSS and its plugins, ensuring long-term support and innovation.
  • Integration
    PostCSS can be easily integrated into various build systems such as Webpack, Gulp, and Grunt, making it highly versatile in different development environments.

Possible disadvantages of PostCSS

  • Learning curve
    Given its flexibility and the need to configure and choose among many plugins, PostCSS can have a steeper learning curve for beginners.
  • Plugin dependencies
    Relying on multiple plugins can lead to dependency management issues, and possible conflicts between plugins if not carefully handled.
  • Configuration overhead
    Setting up PostCSS might require more initial configuration effort compared to some integrated solutions which provide out-of-the-box functionality.
  • Plugin quality variance
    The quality and maintenance of available plugins can vary, with some plugins being outdated or less reliable than others.
  • Lack of opinionation
    PostCSS's unopinionated nature means it requires developers to have a clear understanding of their needs, potentially leading to inconsistencies in plugin choices if used across different projects.

Animate.css features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Animate.css provides a wide range of preset animations that can be easily implemented by adding class names to HTML elements. This eliminates the need for custom CSS animations or JavaScript, thus saving time and effort.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    The animations in Animate.css work across all modern browsers, ensuring a consistent and reliable experience for users regardless of the browser they use.
  • Open Source
    Animate.css is an open-source library, meaning it's free to use and contributions from the community help keep it updated and improve its functionality over time.
  • Lightweight
    The library is relatively lightweight, especially if you only include the specific animations you need, which helps keep page load times low.
  • Customizable
    Although it comes with a wide range of preset animations, Animate.css allows for customization. Developers can easily modify the CSS to fit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Animate.css

  • Limited to CSS Animations
    Animate.css only includes CSS-based animations. For more complex interactions or animations that require JavaScript, another library or custom code would be necessary.
  • Overhead for Unused Animations
    By importing the entire library, you might include many animations that are not used, leading to unnecessary overhead. Selective imports or custom builds are required to avoid this.
  • Performance
    Frequent or complex animations can lead to performance issues, especially on lower-end devices. Developers need to be mindful of how often animations are triggered and their impact on performance.
  • Limited Control
    Using pre-defined animations means less control over specific nuances of the animations. For more intricate or highly customized animations, a more flexible solution may be needed.
  • Potential Conflicts
    There can be potential conflicts with existing CSS in your project, especially if the same class names are used, leading to unintended side effects.

PostCSS videos

UnCSS your CSS! Removing Unused CSS with PostCSS & Parcel

More videos:

  • Review - Terry Smith – Keep your CSS simple with postcss and tailwind
  • Review - #1 PostCSS Обзор

Animate.css videos

No Animate.css videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PostCSS and Animate.css)
Developer Tools
65 65%
35% 35
Design Tools
64 64%
36% 36
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, PostCSS seems to be a lot more popular than Animate.css. While we know about 45 links to PostCSS, we've tracked only 1 mention of Animate.css. 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.

PostCSS mentions (45)

  • Desktop apps for Windows XP in 2025
    Fortunately we have tools like PostCSS and Babel, that let you target your specific Browser version, and they'll do their best to transpile and polyfill your code to work with that version. This alone will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you if you are working with a lot of code. However, if you are just writing out a few HTML, CSS, and JS files, then that would be overkill and you can just figure out what code... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Improving Code Quality with Linting
    For example, linting CSS can be beneficial in cases where you need to support legacy browsers. Downgrading JavaScript is pretty common, but it's not always as simple for CSS. Using a linter allows you to be honest with yourself by flagging problematic lines that won't work in older environments, ensuring your pages look as good as possible for everyone. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • 30+ CSS libraries and frameworks help you style your applications efficiently.
    PostCSS PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript plugins. These plugins can lint your CSS, support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Webpack Performance Tuning: Minimizing Build Times for Large Projects
    PostCSS is essential to the frontend ecosystem, with 69,473,603 downloads per week, it is bigger than all the above libraries mentioned, and has many features other than polyfilling, it is used by all the frameworks like Next.js, Svelte, Vue, and Tailwind under the hood. LightningCSS, created by the maintainer of another bundler Parcel, and written in Rust, is an excellent alternative. It provides all the... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • CSS Variable Naming: Best Practices and Approaches
    Stylelint: A modern, flexible linter for CSS that can be configured to check variable consistency. PostCSS: A tool that transforms CSS with plugins, including variable checks. CSS Linter: A specific tool to ensure correct and consistent use of CSS variables. Conclusion 🔗. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
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Animate.css mentions (1)

  • 3 Easy Ways to Add Animation to your Angular Applications
    An advantage of this approach is that it lets us utilize any CSS animation library that works off of the same concept of adding and removing classes. Some of the more popular libraries that work this way are animate.css and magic.css. Chris Coyier has an amazing article on CSS Tricks that lists more of these if you are interested. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing PostCSS and Animate.css, you can also consider the following products

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

Material UI - A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design

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

Bootstrap - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

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).

Anime.js - Lightweight JavaScript animation library