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PostCSS VS Shoelace.css

Compare PostCSS VS Shoelace.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.

Shoelace.css logo Shoelace.css

A back to the basics CSS starter kit.
  • PostCSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19
  • Shoelace.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-03

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    The quality and maintenance of available plugins can vary, with some plugins being outdated or less reliable than others.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.

Shoelace.css features and specs

  • Customizable
    Shoelace.css is built using modern Web Components, allowing for easy customization and theming with CSS Variables, ensuring that developers can tailor components to their specific needs.
  • Compatibility
    Shoelace.css is designed to be framework-agnostic and works seamlessly with various JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, providing flexibility in integration.
  • Responsive Design
    The library provides components that are inherently responsive, which helps in building applications that look good on both desktop and mobile devices without additional effort.
  • Accessibility
    Components in Shoelace.css are designed with accessibility in mind, ensuring that applications are usable by people with disabilities and compliant with accessibility standards.
  • Modern Standards
    Being based on Web Components, Shoelace.css makes use of modern web standards, which promotes future-proofing and compatibility with upcoming web technologies.

Possible disadvantages of Shoelace.css

  • Size
    As a component library, Shoelace.css might introduce additional size to your project, which can be a concern for applications where performance and load times are critical.
  • Browser Support
    Since it uses Web Components, Shoelace.css may require polyfills for older browsers that do not fully support these technologies, potentially increasing the complexity of deployments.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers unfamiliar with Web Components or the concept of using framework-agnostic components might need some time to understand and effectively use Shoelace.css.
  • Community and Support
    Compared to more established component libraries, Shoelace.css might have a smaller community and fewer third-party resources, which could make finding support and solutions to issues more challenging.
  • Limited Built-in Functionality
    While highly customizable, Shoelace.css might lack some of the advanced, built-in functionalities found in larger, more comprehensive UI frameworks.

Analysis of PostCSS

Overall verdict

  • Yes, PostCSS is considered a good tool, particularly praised for its adaptability and extensive plugin ecosystem that caters to various CSS processing needs. Its ability to integrate with a wide range of plugins makes it a versatile choice for developers who want to customize their CSS build process.

Why this product is good

  • PostCSS is highly regarded for its flexibility and powerful ecosystem. It serves as a tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript plugins, allowing developers to add custom processing steps and automate repetitive tasks in their CSS workflows. It supports features like CSS variables, nesting, and autoprefixing, which enhance productivity and code maintainability. PostCSS is also valued for its speed and performance, often providing faster processing times compared to other CSS preprocessors.

Recommended for

    Developers looking for a modular and flexible CSS processing tool, teams who want to integrate custom plugins into their build process, projects that require modern CSS features and optimizations, and anyone seeking to enhance their CSS workflow with additional functionality beyond what standard preprocessors offer.

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

Shoelace.css videos

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

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PostCSS and Shoelace.css)
Developer Tools
74 74%
26% 26
Design Tools
78 78%
22% 22
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Gradient Generator
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, PostCSS should be more popular than Shoelace.css. It has been mentiond 45 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.

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 / 4 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 / 8 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 / 10 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 / 11 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 / 11 months ago
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Shoelace.css mentions (25)

  • Show HN: Cs16.css – CSS library based on CS 1.6 UI
    Dashboards, tabs, trees, ... Usually require at least some JavaScript to work properly. For some components, you may be able to use hacks around that. But I would generally not recommend that outside of experimentation. So a pure CSS framework is not going to work. It seems that you are not using a frontend framework like Vue.js. So I would recommend a library using web components for the interactivity. One good... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • React v19 has been released
    Can webcomponents be trivially used with HTMX? Like for example: https://shoelace.style/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Do You Need to SSR Your Web Components?
    I created a simple example with a bunch of Shoelace components where they are being lazy-loaded from a CDN. I loaded the components this way to show worst-case-scenario loading performance. As you can see, it still loads quite quickly. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • You Should Be Shipping a Manifest with Your Web Components
    A recent example of this was when I was helping a team get up and running with Shoelace in a Next.js application. Shoelace provides react wrappers, but they were throwing an error when Next.js tried to server-side render them. Fortunately, Shoelace ships their CEM, so I was able to use it to generate new wrappers that were SSR-safe. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Web Components Are Okay
    I've yet to see this go wrong in practice. The kinds of components that are worth publishing as web components are often large, non-trivial components. Eg media libraries, emoji pickers (like the one made by this article's author), chatbox interfaces, and so on. They are the kinds of things you only have a limited number of on your page. If a component is small and focused in scope, it's likely either written in... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing PostCSS and Shoelace.css, 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.

DaisyUI - Free UI components plugin for Tailwind CSS

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

CSSGradient.io - As a free css gradient generator tool, this website lets you create a colorful gradient background for your website, blog, or social media profile.

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).