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Purgecss VS Handlebars

Compare Purgecss VS Handlebars and see what are their differences

Purgecss logo Purgecss

Easily remove unused CSS

Handlebars logo Handlebars

Handlebars is a JavaScript template library that is, more or less, based on ...
  • Purgecss Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-28
  • Handlebars Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-06-28

Purgecss features and specs

  • Reduced File Size
    PurgeCSS analyzes your CSS files and removes unused selectors, significantly reducing the size of your CSS files, leading to faster load times.
  • Performance Improvement
    By eliminating unnecessary CSS, PurgeCSS can improve the performance of your website, as there is less CSS for the browser to parse and execute.
  • Enhanced Maintainability
    With PurgeCSS, your CSS becomes cleaner and more manageable, making it easier for developers to maintain and update.
  • Integration
    PurgeCSS can be easily integrated into build tools like Webpack, Gulp, and Grunt, allowing seamless automation in the development workflow.
  • Customizability
    PurgeCSS offers configuration options that allow developers to specify content sources, safelisting of selectors, and more, making it highly customizable.

Possible disadvantages of Purgecss

  • Configuration Complexity
    Setting up PurgeCSS may require a detailed configuration to correctly identify which CSS selectors are in use, which can be complex for larger projects.
  • Potential Removal of Used Styles
    If not configured properly, PurgeCSS might accidentally remove dynamic classes generated by JavaScript or conditional rendering, affecting the functionality of the site.
  • Initial Setup Time
    The initial setup and integration process can be time-consuming, especially for projects with a large codebase or complex structure.
  • Limited Dynamic Content Handling
    PurgeCSS may struggle with highly dynamic sites where CSS classes are generated at runtime, requiring careful management or additional tools to ensure accuracy.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers may need to spend additional time learning how to effectively use PurgeCSS, especially if they are new to the tool or similar CSS management solutions.

Handlebars features and specs

  • Simplicity
    Handlebars provides a straightforward and easy-to-learn syntax for templating, making it accessible for developers with varying levels of experience.
  • Logic-less Templates
    Encourages the separation of logic and design by only allowing minimal logic in templates. This promotes a cleaner code base and separation of concerns.
  • Extensibility
    Handlebars allows for custom helpers and partials which enable extending the templating functionality as needed.
  • Precompilation
    Templates can be precompiled, improving performance by reducing client-side parsing and rendering time.
  • Wide Adoption and Community Support
    As a popular templating engine, Handlebars has a large community of users and contributors, which provides abundant resources, plugins, and support.

Possible disadvantages of Handlebars

  • Limited Logic
    The logic-less nature of Handlebars means it supports only very basic conditionals and loops, which can be limiting for complex scenarios.
  • Verbosity
    Handlebars templates can become verbose, especially when using custom helpers or partials extensively.
  • Initial Learning Curve
    For developers coming from more logic-oriented templating engines, adjusting to Handlebars' logic-less paradigm can take some effort.
  • Dependency Management
    In larger projects, managing dependencies between templates, partials, and helpers can become complex and cumbersome.
  • Lack of Reactivity
    Handlebars does not include built-in support for data reactivity, making it less suitable for dynamic, real-time updates compared to modern frameworks like React or Vue.

Analysis of Purgecss

Overall verdict

  • Purgecss is a valuable tool for developers looking to optimize their CSS for production environments. It is especially useful for projects where CSS can become bloated due to unused styles. However, users should be cautious when configuring Purgecss to ensure that essential styles are not accidentally removed.

Why this product is good

  • Purgecss is designed to remove unused CSS, which can reduce the file size of your stylesheets, improve loading times, and ensure more efficient use of resources. It scans your HTML, JavaScript, and other files to determine which CSS classes are actually used, and eliminates the rest. This is particularly beneficial in large projects or when using CSS frameworks that include many utility classes.

Recommended for

    Purgecss is recommended for web developers working on projects with significant CSS codebases, especially when using CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS. It's also ideal for teams focused on performance optimization and efficient resource management in web applications.

Purgecss videos

How to use PurgeCSS to Remove Unused CSS Classes from Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, and more!

More videos:

  • Review - Gatsby.js with Tailwind CSS and PurgeCSS

Handlebars videos

MTB Handlebars: Our Top 5 Picks for 2018!

More videos:

  • Review - Roland Sands Handlebars Review at RevZilla.com
  • Review - KST Kustoms Handlebars Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Purgecss and Handlebars)
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Development
22 22%
78% 78

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Handlebars should be more popular than Purgecss. It has been mentiond 65 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.

Purgecss mentions (36)

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Handlebars mentions (65)

  • Chapter 7: HTML part two
    For a more robust approach, we'd probably need to install a templating language of some kind, such as Twig, EJS, Handlebars, Pug or Mustache (this is not a complete list!). Reading the documentation for posthtml-modules, you'll notice it doesn't mention package.json or any of the approaches we've used in this guide. Instead, the examples are in JavaScript and we've advised to add this to our Node application. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to send emails using Express and NodeJS
    As suggested by a teammate, I found out that I'll need to create the template in a different file and then replace the variables in it using some utility. So, again after searching for some packages, I figured that Handlebars would be the best solution for our problem. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • The Features of Front-end UI Components
    In dynamic web pages, especially when using template engines such as Mustache and Handlebars or libraries/frameworks such as React and Vue, the final content structure is basically generated by JS, which strengthens JS and weakens the control of HTML over the content structure. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Make Custom Handlebar Helpers in Ghost!
    In this variable, we have the response from the Ghost instance as the full HTML of the page. Imagine that this response is the homepage of your Ghost instance. The HTML content will also include our plain text {{hello_world}}, which is displayed as plain text. If our custom helper is in this form, we can compile it using Handlebars.js (https://handlebarsjs.com/) in our middleware. Remember to install the library... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • htmx and ExpressJS
    It is a novel experience to say the least for me. I mean yes I have been using Handlebars, pug, and other templating engines but this is novel in how it changed my perspective about HTML (Just read their motivation in htmx.org). - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Purgecss and Handlebars, you can also consider the following products

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

EJS - An open source JavaScript Template library.

CSS Peeper - Smart CSS viewer tailored for Designers.

Pug - Pug is a robust, elegant, feature rich template engine for Node.js

Unused CSS - Easily find and remove unused CSS rules

Jinja2 - Jinja2 is a template engine written in Python.