sass vs styled-jsx vs @emotion/react vs styled-components
CSS-in-JS and Styling Solutions Comparison
3 Years
sassstyled-jsx@emotion/reactstyled-componentsSimilar Packages:
What's CSS-in-JS and Styling Solutions?

CSS-in-JS and styling solutions are libraries that enable developers to write CSS directly within JavaScript files. This approach allows for dynamic styling, scoped styles, and better integration with JavaScript logic. These libraries often provide features like theming, automatic vendor prefixing, and support for CSS variables, making it easier to manage styles in modern web applications. Popular CSS-in-JS libraries include styled-components, @emotion/react, and styled-jsx, each offering unique features and APIs for styling components in a more modular and maintainable way.

Package Weekly Downloads Trend
Github Stars Ranking
Stat Detail
Package
Downloads
Stars
Size
Issues
Publish
License
sass16,763,452
4,1205.71 MB8115 days agoMIT
styled-jsx13,158,535
7,7771.03 MB834 months agoMIT
@emotion/react10,658,241
17,851817 kB3618 months agoMIT
styled-components6,619,210
40,8821.77 MB3262 months agoMIT
Feature Comparison: sass vs styled-jsx vs @emotion/react vs styled-components

Styling Approach

  • sass:

    sass is a CSS preprocessor that extends the capabilities of CSS by adding features like variables, nesting, mixins, and more. It compiles .scss or .sass files into standard CSS, making it compatible with all browsers while providing a more powerful syntax for writing styles.

  • styled-jsx:

    styled-jsx is a CSS-in-JS library developed by Vercel for scoped styles in React components. It allows you to write CSS directly within your JSX, ensuring styles are scoped to the component, which helps prevent conflicts and makes it easier to manage styles in large applications.

  • @emotion/react:

    @emotion/react supports both CSS-in-JS and traditional CSS class styling, allowing for greater flexibility in how styles are applied. It enables dynamic styling, theming, and supports media queries and pseudo-classes directly within JavaScript.

  • styled-components:

    styled-components is a CSS-in-JS library that allows you to write actual CSS within your JavaScript files. It automatically scopes styles to components, preventing conflicts and enabling dynamic styling based on props. It also supports theming and global styles.

Theming Support

  • sass:

    sass does not provide built-in theming support, but you can create themes using variables and mixins. By defining a set of variables for each theme, you can switch themes by changing the variable values in your stylesheets.

  • styled-jsx:

    styled-jsx does not have built-in theming support, but you can implement theming by passing props to your components and using them in your styles. This requires a more manual approach compared to other libraries.

  • @emotion/react:

    @emotion/react provides robust theming support out of the box. It allows you to create a theme object and use it throughout your styled components, making it easy to implement consistent styling across your application.

  • styled-components:

    styled-components has excellent theming support. It provides a ThemeProvider component that allows you to define a theme and access it within your styled components using the props argument, enabling dynamic theming with minimal effort.

Bundle Size

  • sass:

    sass is a preprocessor that compiles to CSS, so it does not add any runtime overhead to your application. However, the size of the generated CSS files depends on how you structure your styles and the features you use.

  • styled-jsx:

    styled-jsx is lightweight and adds minimal overhead to your application. It is designed to be efficient, especially for projects using Next.js, where it can take advantage of server-side rendering to optimize style delivery.

  • @emotion/react:

    @emotion/react is known for its small bundle size, especially when using the @emotion/react package alone. It is designed to be performant and lightweight, making it a great choice for applications where load time is a concern.

  • styled-components:

    styled-components has a larger bundle size compared to some other CSS-in-JS libraries due to its runtime styling capabilities. However, the size is justified by its features, such as automatic style scoping and theming support.

Code Example

  • sass:
    // styles.scss
    $primary-color: blue;
    $secondary-color: green;
    
    .button {
      background-color: $primary-color;
      color: white;
      &:hover {
        background-color: $secondary-color;
      }
    }
    
  • styled-jsx:
    const Component = () => (
      <div>
        <p>Styled with styled-jsx</p>
        <style jsx>{`
          p {
            color: blue;
            &:hover {
              color: green;
            }
          }
        `}</style>
      </div>
    );
    
  • @emotion/react:
    /** @jsxImportSource @emotion/react */
    import { css } from '@emotion/react';
    
    const style = css`
      color: hotpink;
      &:hover {
        color: blue;
      }
    `;
    
    const Component = () => <div css={style}>Hover me!</div>;
    
  • styled-components:

    import styled from 'styled-components';

    const Button = styled.button background-color: blue; color: white; &:hover { background-color: green; };

    const App = () => ;

How to Choose: sass vs styled-jsx vs @emotion/react vs styled-components
  • sass:

    Choose sass if you prefer a preprocessor that extends CSS with features like variables, nesting, and mixins. It’s great for large projects where you want to maintain a clear separation between styles and JavaScript, and it integrates well with existing CSS workflows.

  • styled-jsx:

    Choose styled-jsx if you are using Next.js and want a zero-config solution for scoped styles. It’s designed for server-side rendering and provides a straightforward way to write CSS directly in your components without worrying about global style conflicts.

  • @emotion/react:

    Choose @emotion/react if you need a highly flexible and performant CSS-in-JS solution that supports both styled components and traditional CSS classes. It’s ideal for projects that require theming and dynamic styles with a small bundle size.

  • styled-components:

    Choose styled-components if you want a popular and well-established CSS-in-JS library that allows you to write actual CSS within your JavaScript files. It’s perfect for projects that need scoped styles, theming, and dynamic styling with a simple and intuitive API.

README for sass

A pure JavaScript implementation of Sass. Sass makes CSS fun again.

Sass logo npm statistics GitHub actions build status
Appveyor build status

This package is a distribution of Dart Sass, compiled to pure JavaScript with no native code or external dependencies. It provides a command-line sass executable and a Node.js API.

Usage

You can install Sass globally using npm install -g sass which will provide access to the sass executable. You can also add it to your project using npm install --save-dev sass. This provides the executable as well as a library:

const sass = require('sass');

const result = sass.compile(scssFilename);

// OR

// Note that `compileAsync()` is substantially slower than `compile()`.
const result = await sass.compileAsync(scssFilename);

See the Sass website for full API documentation.

Legacy API

Dart Sass also supports an older JavaScript API that's fully compatible with Node Sass (with a few exceptions listed below), with support for both the render() and renderSync() functions. This API is considered deprecated and will be removed in Dart Sass 2.0.0, so it should be avoided in new projects.

Sass's support for the legacy JavaScript API has the following limitations:

  • Only the "expanded" and "compressed" values of outputStyle are supported.

  • Dart Sass doesn't support the precision option. Dart Sass defaults to a sufficiently high precision for all existing browsers, and making this customizable would make the code substantially less efficient.

  • Dart Sass doesn't support the sourceComments option. Source maps are the recommended way of locating the origin of generated selectors.

See Also

  • Dart Sass, from which this package is compiled, can be used either as a stand-alone executable or as a Dart library. Running Dart Sass on the Dart VM is substantially faster than running the pure JavaScript version, so this may be appropriate for performance-sensitive applications. The Dart API is also (currently) more user-friendly than the JavaScript API. See the Dart Sass README for details on how to use it.

  • Node Sass, which is a wrapper around LibSass, the C++ implementation of Sass. Node Sass supports the same API as this package and is also faster (although it's usually a little slower than Dart Sass). However, it requires a native library which may be difficult to install, and it's generally slower to add features and fix bugs.

Behavioral Differences from Ruby Sass

There are a few intentional behavioral differences between Dart Sass and Ruby Sass. These are generally places where Ruby Sass has an undesired behavior, and it's substantially easier to implement the correct behavior than it would be to implement compatible behavior. These should all have tracking bugs against Ruby Sass to update the reference behavior.

  1. @extend only accepts simple selectors, as does the second argument of selector-extend(). See issue 1599.

  2. Subject selectors are not supported. See issue 1126.

  3. Pseudo selector arguments are parsed as <declaration-value>s rather than having a more limited custom parsing. See issue 2120.

  4. The numeric precision is set to 10. See issue 1122.

  5. The indented syntax parser is more flexible: it doesn't require consistent indentation across the whole document. See issue 2176.

  6. Colors do not support channel-by-channel arithmetic. See issue 2144.

  7. Unitless numbers aren't == to unit numbers with the same value. In addition, map keys follow the same logic as ==-equality. See issue 1496.

  8. rgba() and hsla() alpha values with percentage units are interpreted as percentages. Other units are forbidden. See issue 1525.

  9. Too many variable arguments passed to a function is an error. See issue 1408.

  10. Allow @extend to reach outside a media query if there's an identical @extend defined outside that query. This isn't tracked explicitly, because it'll be irrelevant when issue 1050 is fixed.

  11. Some selector pseudos containing placeholder selectors will be compiled where they wouldn't be in Ruby Sass. This better matches the semantics of the selectors in question, and is more efficient. See issue 2228.

  12. The old-style :property value syntax is not supported in the indented syntax. See issue 2245.

  13. The reference combinator is not supported. See issue 303.

  14. Universal selector unification is symmetrical. See issue 2247.

  15. @extend doesn't produce an error if it matches but fails to unify. See issue 2250.

  16. Dart Sass currently only supports UTF-8 documents. We'd like to support more, but Dart currently doesn't support them. See dart-lang/sdk#11744, for example.

Disclaimer: this is not an official Google product.