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Stylus VS CSS Modules

Compare Stylus VS CSS Modules and see what are their differences

Stylus logo Stylus

EXPRESSIVE, DYNAMIC, ROBUST CSS

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
  • Stylus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-20

Stylus is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.

  • CSS Modules Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-21

Stylus features and specs

  • Simplified Syntax
    Stylus provides an optional semicolon-free and curly-brace-free syntax, making the code cleaner and easier to write.
  • Extensive Feature Set
    Stylus offers a wide range of features like mixins, nesting, variables, functions, and built-in functions, which increase its flexibility and power.
  • Preprocessor Enhancements
    Stylus includes advanced features that are not available in CSS alone, such as mathematical operations, conditionals, and loops, which can make stylesheets more dynamic and maintainable.
  • JavaScript Interoperability
    Stylus allows embedding of JavaScript expressions and logic directly within the stylesheets, providing developers with additional functionality and control.

Possible disadvantages of Stylus

  • Learning Curve
    The flexibility and multitude of features in Stylus can introduce complexity, making it harder for beginners to grasp quickly compared to more straightforward CSS preprocessors.
  • Less Popularity
    Stylus is less popular than other preprocessors like Sass or LESS, which might result in fewer learning resources, community support, and third-party tools.
  • Potential for Overuse
    The advanced features could lead developers to overuse them, resulting in overly complex code that is difficult to maintain and understand.
  • Build Tool Dependencies
    Integration of Stylus into a project generally requires additional build tools and configurations, which can add to the setup and maintenance overhead.

CSS Modules features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Stylus videos

Best stylus for iPhone! Don't waste your money!

More videos:

  • Review - What is the best iPad stylus?
  • Review - Review: MEKO 2-in-1 Stylus (2nd Gen)

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)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Stylus and CSS Modules)
Developer Tools
81 81%
19% 19
CSS Framework
0 0%
100% 100
Browser Extension
100 100%
0% 0
Design Tools
71 71%
29% 29

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Stylus and CSS Modules

Stylus Reviews

112 Best Chrome Extensions You Should Try (2021 List)
Stylus offers functionality to install and write themes. It is an open-source community-driven extension that makes it much better than its counterparts. Using Stylus, you can install themes from popular repositories, backup your installed styles, and much more. Watch the above video to learn more about Stylus.

CSS Modules Reviews

We have no reviews of CSS Modules yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Stylus might be a bit more popular than CSS Modules. We know about 14 links to it since March 2021 and only 12 links to 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.

Stylus mentions (14)

  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    Stylus: Provides a more efficient and elegant way to generate CSS. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • 33 front-end development tools developers use in 2024
    Sass, Less and Stylus, extends CSS by adding variables, nesting mixins, and other features. It's an excellent solution for organizing huge and complex stylesheets. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • BEM Modifiers in Pure CSS Nesting
    I hate preprocessors. Be it SASS, SCSS, LESS, Stylus, or any other. Really, without any exceptions. Though, I think my hatred for preprocessors is not because of the technology itself, but because of how other people use them. Throughout my development career, I have often encountered tickets where a seemingly simple task, like changing the text size, which should take minutes, ended up taking me hours. This is... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Future of CSS: Functions and Mixins
    Traditionally CSS lacked features such as variables, nesting, mixins, and functions. This was frustrating for Developers as it often led to CSS quickly becoming complex and cumbersome. In an attempt to make code easier and less repetitive CSS pre-processors were born. You would write CSS in the format the pre-processor understood and, at build time, you'd have some nice CSS. The most common pre-processors these... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Quick Guide To CSS Preprocessors
    The Stylus is built on Node.js. It differs from Sass and Less, which are more opinionated to the syntax; the stylus allows you to omit semicolons, colons, and braces if you want at any time. Another cool feature is that the stylus has a property lookup feature. You can do that easily if you set property X relative to property Y's value. The stylus can be more concise because of its flexibility, but it depends on... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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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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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Stylus and CSS Modules, you can also consider the following products

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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.

Dark Reader - Reduce eye strain in your browser with this extension that provides a dark theme for browsing.

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.

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

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).