Tailwind VS Sass

Given how vast the web development world is, It will be a shame if you haven’t used tailwind CSS or SASS on your project.

I have been using Sass/Scss for a long time now and have recently opted to try out something new for my styling.

I couldn’t resist trying the new CSS framework that has been causing quite a stir in the styling community.

Although I was excited by what this new framework is offering. I decided to practice caution and do a little digging before switching to another shining thing.

Today I intend to share all I have discovered and the difference between Tailwind CSS and Sass. You might ask why you need to know their difference.

One of the reasons will be to enable you to implement them better for your projects.

Table of content

• What is Tailwind CSS
• What is SASS/SCSS
• Difference between Tailwind CSS and SASS/SCSS

What is Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is a solution to all the troubles traditional CSS imposes on building the user interface. Being a utility-first CSS framework, it makes building the user interface faster and easier.

Tailwind CSS is highly customizable and has all the building blocks necessary to build any design you wish. It is the utility-first framework that allows you to use utility classes to build your applications.

What makes this Tailwind CSS so unique is that it does not impose design specifications. It allows you to combine components to create designs without any opinionated styles to override.

What is SASS/SCSS

Being an extension of CSS serves as a preprocessor that is compiled into Cascading style sheets. Every front-end developer should learn this first before trying out the tailwind CSS.

This is only my opinion. SASS gives developers some advanced features for writing CSS such as variables, loops, and nesting. Which allows them to create better-styled components for their applications. We are going to look at the tailwind vs Sass.

Difference between Tailwind CSS and SASS/SCSS

Special features

SASS (Syntactically Awesome Sheets) has powerful features that are not available in vanilla CSS. These features allow you to use tools such as variables, mathematical operations, loops, functions, imports, and many other functionalities.

We won’t go into details about what all these functionalities can do in this article. However, Tailwind CSS doesn’t have these features.

Context Switching

There have been instances you will be working on your markup, creating headers or p’s and you will need to add some styling.

You will likely forget the class name you gave your element when you switch to your style sheet. The continuous switching from one file to the other makes it inefficient for your work and wastes time.

The markup and styles are necessary for our project development one can’t do without the other.

In using SASS, this inconvenience is constantly witnessed. While in tailwind CSS everything you need is in one file. This enables you to work faster and much more efficiently.

Naming

One of the hardest things we developers face when building stuff is naming them. It gets frustrating when we have to name every single class of every element you need to style. Which makes naming the styling components a bit tricky.

We may not want to mix inline styling and stylesheet. This may result in us coming up with names for almost every class we create.

When working with SASS we face this problem constantly. This causes the clashing of class names and will result in our layout coming out wrong.

This means we cannot reuse classes which makes it frustrating to work with. However, in using Tailwind CSS you don’t need to worry about classes clashing or coming up with your Classes.

You can now focus on building the elements with the utility classes provided by the framework. This saves time and increases efficiency.

Difficulty reading markup

Although Tailwind CSS saves us time and makes it easier to make changes to our markup file, it is difficult to read. This is especially noticeable when there are so many different classes used in the markup file.

However, SASS has a feature called bundlers. This helps to split your SASS into files. It makes your SASS files more organized and maintains CSS.

Performance Another difference is the performance. Tailwind is a much faster framework compared to SASS, because it does not require the compilation of code, which can take a long time with SASS.

Community Support

Both Tailwind CSS and SASS have active communities and provide good documentation and resources for learning and troubleshooting. However, Tailwind CSS has gained more popularity in recent years and has a larger user base.

Browser Compatibility

Both Tailwind CSS and SASS are compatible with all modern browsers. However, if you need to support older browsers, SASS may be a better choice due to its ability to generate vendor prefixes automatically.

Conclusion

Tailwind CSS and SASS are both popular CSS frameworks used for web development, and each framework has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Tailwind is a utility-first framework that offers a low-level of customization, making it a great choice for developers who need to quickly build a website. SASS is a more powerful preprocessor that enables developers to write much more complex stylesheets. Ultimately, it is important to understand the differences between Tailwind CSS and SASS before deciding which one to use in your projects.