stitches VS styled-components

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

Radix has some great ideas that challenge the way components are usually built. I'd love to use it, but am somewhat burned by how Stitches stopped being maintained due to the changes in React 18. Context: https://github.com/stitchesjs/stitches/discussions/1149#disc...

To be clear, it's not so much that they decided to not spend time, energy and money into maintaining it, but that there's seemingly been very little (if any) interest in letting others maintain it despite several people expressing interest. I'm sure it's scare handing over commit access, but if you're giving it up anyway then why not just do it, see what happens? Instead it's just dead in the water.

I'd happily pay license fees to use Radix and/or Stitches, if that guarantees maintenance. Sadly that's not an option it seems.

I work on a lot of more "creative" projects where frameworks like TailwindCSS or Bootstrap just don't cut it. My approach has always been to use some kind of library to ease the process of creating my own CSS framework that can then be used by other people. I find that Stitches does it pretty well. You set your design tokens, then you have IntelliSense to help people understand the design system.

Some libraries, such as Stitches, claim near-zero runtime performance overhead by tackling the first issue (parsing JavaScript CSS objects). Nevertheless, they still inject the parsed CSS into the DOM at runtime, which means they haven’t entirely eliminated the performance concerns.

Stitches allows you to map your design system

Define strict system of colors, spaces, etc then attempt to synchronize usage of it in both design and code (tools like https://vanilla-extract.style/ or https://stitches.dev/ can help with enforcing system on software side)

Curious to understand what is trending. We've been big fans of Stitches, however, unfortunately the project is no longer maintained.

There are some issues with SSR and NextJS in React 18: https://github.com/stitchesjs/stitches/issues/863

According to the docs, NextUI is a React UI library that allows you to make beautiful, modern, and fast websites/applications regardless of your design experience. It is created with React and Stitches, based on React Aria, and inspired by Vuesax.

Stitches CSS customization

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.

You can use Media Queries in Styled-Components similar to how you would use them in CSS, other than the fact that you can define custom screen sizes in your theme and access them inside your Media Queries: