sass vs styled-jsx vs styled-components vs emotion: Which is Better CSS-in-JS and Preprocessors?

Package	Downloads	Stars	Size	Issues	Publish	License

sass	14,467,768	3,926	5.65 MB	87	4 days ago	MIT
styled-jsx	6,693,988	7,700	1.03 MB	82	5 months ago	MIT
styled-components	5,570,181	40,444	1.76 MB	291	a month ago	MIT
emotion	619,889	-	-	-	4 years ago	MIT

Package

Downloads

Stars

Size

Issues

Publish

License

sass

14,467,768

3,926

5.65 MB

4 days ago

MIT

styled-jsx

6,693,988

7,700

1.03 MB

5 months ago

MIT

styled-components

5,570,181

40,444

1.76 MB

291

a month ago

MIT

emotion

619,889

4 years ago

MIT

Styling Approach

sass: Sass is a preprocessor that extends CSS with features like variables, nesting, and mixins. It compiles down to standard CSS, allowing you to write more maintainable and organized stylesheets without dynamic capabilities.
styled-jsx: Styled-JSX provides scoped CSS for React components, allowing you to write styles directly in your JSX. It ensures that styles are applied only to the components they are defined in, preventing global style leakage.
styled-components: Styled-Components uses tagged template literals to style components, allowing you to write CSS directly within your JavaScript. It scopes styles to components, preventing style conflicts and enhancing maintainability.
emotion: Emotion allows you to write CSS styles in JavaScript, enabling dynamic styling based on props and state. It supports both styled components and traditional CSS styles, providing flexibility in how you apply styles to your components.

Performance

sass: Sass compiles styles at build time, which means there is no runtime overhead for styling. This can lead to better performance in production, as the compiled CSS is static and does not require additional processing during rendering.
styled-jsx: Styled-JSX has minimal runtime overhead and compiles styles at build time, similar to Sass. This ensures that styles are efficiently applied without impacting the performance of the application.
styled-components: Styled-Components can introduce some runtime overhead due to its dynamic nature, but it includes optimizations like server-side rendering and style caching to mitigate performance issues. The trade-off is often worth it for the benefits of scoped styles.
emotion: Emotion is optimized for performance, with a focus on minimizing the runtime overhead. It generates styles at build time and can also use a cache to avoid recalculating styles unnecessarily, leading to faster render times.

Theming Support

sass: Sass supports theming through the use of variables and mixins, allowing you to define a set of styles that can be reused across your stylesheets. However, it lacks built-in support for dynamic theming as seen in CSS-in-JS solutions.
styled-jsx: Styled-JSX does not have built-in theming support, but you can implement theming by using CSS variables or by passing theme props to your components. This requires more manual setup compared to Emotion or Styled-Components.
styled-components: Styled-Components has excellent theming support through its ThemeProvider component, enabling you to define a theme and access it in your styled components. This makes it easy to create a consistent look and feel across your application.
emotion: Emotion provides robust theming capabilities, allowing you to define a theme object that can be accessed throughout your application. This makes it easy to implement consistent styling and switch themes dynamically.

Learning Curve

sass: Sass is relatively easy to learn for those already familiar with CSS. Its additional features like variables and nesting are intuitive, making it a great choice for developers looking to enhance their CSS skills.
styled-jsx: Styled-JSX is easy to learn, particularly for developers familiar with React. Its syntax is simple and integrates seamlessly with JSX, allowing you to write styles directly alongside your components.
styled-components: Styled-Components has a gentle learning curve, especially for those who are already comfortable with React. The syntax is straightforward, and its integration with React makes it easy to adopt for component-based styling.
emotion: Emotion has a moderate learning curve, especially if you are familiar with CSS-in-JS concepts. Its flexibility can be overwhelming for beginners, but its documentation is comprehensive and helpful for getting started.

Community and Ecosystem

sass: Sass has a large and established community with extensive resources, plugins, and integrations available. It is a mature technology that has been widely used in web development for many years.
styled-jsx: Styled-JSX is primarily used within the Next.js ecosystem, which has a strong community. While it may not have as large a user base as the others, it is well-supported within the context of Next.js applications.
styled-components: Styled-Components has a vast community and strong ecosystem, with numerous tutorials, resources, and third-party libraries available. Its popularity in the React community ensures ongoing support and development.
emotion: Emotion has a growing community and is widely adopted in the React ecosystem. It integrates well with other libraries and tools, making it a popular choice for modern web applications.

sass: Choose Sass if you prefer a traditional CSS preprocessor that enhances your CSS with features like variables, nesting, and mixins. Sass is ideal for larger projects where you need to maintain complex stylesheets and want to leverage its powerful features for better organization.

styled-jsx: Choose Styled-JSX if you are using Next.js and want a simple way to write scoped CSS directly in your components. Styled-JSX is designed for React applications, providing a straightforward API for styling components without the need for additional configuration.

styled-components: Choose Styled-Components if you want a popular CSS-in-JS solution that allows you to write actual CSS code to style your components. It provides a seamless way to manage styles scoped to components, making it easier to avoid style conflicts and improve maintainability.

emotion: Choose Emotion if you want a highly performant CSS-in-JS library that offers flexibility in styling components while maintaining a small bundle size. Emotion provides powerful theming capabilities and supports both styled components and traditional CSS styles.

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.