styled-components VS vanilla-extract

Compare styled-components vs vanilla-extract and see what are their differences.

styled-components

Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps without stress 💅 (by styled-components)

vanilla-extract

Zero-runtime Stylesheets-in-TypeScript (by vanilla-extract-css)
Our great sponsors
  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
styled-components vanilla-extract
221 89
39,992 9,201
0.4% 1.5%
8.7 8.8
28 days ago 7 days ago
TypeScript TypeScript
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

styled-components

Posts with mentions or reviews of styled-components. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-25.

vanilla-extract

Posts with mentions or reviews of vanilla-extract. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-07.
  • Is there really anything better than Css Modules?
    2 projects | /r/Frontend | 7 Dec 2023
    For building component libraries I’ve been a big fan of vanilla extract. Apparently it’s from the same people who made css modules
  • An Overview of 25+ UI Component Libraries in 2023
    40 projects | dev.to | 10 Sep 2023
    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
  • Creating a Component Library Fast🚀(using Vite's library mode)
    7 projects | dev.to | 11 Aug 2023
    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.)
  • Tailwind CSS and the death of web craftsmanship
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Aug 2023
    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.

  • PSA: Rust web frontend with Tailwind is easy!
    3 projects | /r/rust | 1 Jul 2023
    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.
  • What's the best option these days for CSS in JS?
    10 projects | /r/reactjs | 18 Jun 2023
    https://github.com/vanilla-extract-css/vanilla-extract and https://github.com/callstack/linaria
    10 projects | /r/reactjs | 18 Jun 2023
    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.
  • Feeling lost on grokking large libraries
    2 projects | /r/node | 13 Jun 2023
    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).
  • Coming here from svelteland... is there a way to put CSS module inside JS?
    4 projects | /r/solidjs | 3 Jun 2023
    Apart from what has been suggested, there is also https://vanilla-extract.style/.
  • What am I missing out about Tailwind?
    2 projects | /r/reactjs | 2 May 2023
    To be fair, I don't like Tailwind either but styled-components is runtime CSS, Tailwind is compile time. You can achieve the same thing via CSS modules or vanilla-extract though.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing styled-components and vanilla-extract you can also consider the following projects:

styled-jsx - Full CSS support for JSX without compromises

chakra-ui - ⚡️ Simple, Modular & Accessible UI Components for your React Applications

emotion - 👩‍🎤 CSS-in-JS library designed for high performance style composition

styletron - :zap: Toolkit for component-oriented styling

JSS - JSS is an authoring tool for CSS which uses JavaScript as a host language.

stitches - [Not Actively Maintained] CSS-in-JS with near-zero runtime, SSR, multi-variant support, and a best-in-class developer experience.

PostCSS - Transforming styles with JS plugins

panda - 🐼 Universal, Type-Safe, CSS-in-JS Framework for Product Teams ⚡️

Material UI - Ready-to-use foundational React components, free forever. It includes Material UI, which implements Google's Material Design.

Aphrodite - Framework-agnostic CSS-in-JS with support for server-side rendering, browser prefixing, and minimum CSS generation

react-bootstrap - Bootstrap components built with React

classnames - A simple javascript utility for conditionally joining classNames together