styled-components VS vanilla-extract

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

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.

In our experience, the best testing strategy for modern frontends is a combination of E2E testing (using Playwright+NextJS), and unit testing. Visual regression testing is not worth the effort in our opinion, especially with the advent of better CSS tooling like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract.

For building component libraries I’ve been a big fan of vanilla extract. Apparently it’s from the same people who made css modules

This sounds exactly like Vanilla Extract. https://vanilla-extract.style/

KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue

The components are styled with CSS modules. When building the library, these styles will get transformed to normal CSS style sheets. This means that the consuming application will not even be required to support CSS modules. (In the future I want to extend this tutorial to use vanilla-extract instead.)

I do a lot of UI work and have never understood the appeal of Tailwind. It’s like relearning a new language. Tailwind was released in 2017. Maybe the CSS landscape wasn’t as good back then? Modern CSS is pretty awesome.

I’ve enjoyed using Vanilla Extract https://vanilla-extract.style/. It’s like css-in-js with none of the downsides as everything gets compiled to css.

Nah, I used enough Tailwind to know it becomes a spaghetti mess. I stick with CSS now, and in React I use https://vanilla-extract.style, compile time CSS in TypeScript.

Vanilla Extract is my current choice for the next greenfield project. I would also recommend checking out how and why this team integrated it with Tailwind.

I'm not trying to call a particular org or library out, because I think the ones I've been digging through (and prompted me to write this) are very high quality. It's vanilla-extract (a build-time CSS-in-JS library) and Braid Design System (built on vanilla-extract).

Apart from what has been suggested, there is also https://vanilla-extract.style/.