When comparing CSS-On-Diet vs Stylecow, the Slant community recommends Stylecow for most people. In the question“What are the best CSS preprocessors/postprocessors?” Stylecow is ranked 7th while CSS-On-Diet is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Stylecow is:
It's written in node, so you can install it with npm. All available plugins are installed by default and include some development tools like a watcher and a browser live-reload so it don't need more than few seconds to be ready to start to work.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast to read and write CSS
Works like Emmet, shorting CSS keywords, but it's not limited only to writing. Also modifying and reading COD(CSS-On-Diet) files is faster.
Pro Easy to learn and use
Doesn't require programming skill to work with variables, mixins, media breakpoints
Pro Easy to install and use
It's written in node, so you can install it with npm. All available plugins are installed by default and include some development tools like a watcher and a browser live-reload so it don't need more than few seconds to be ready to start to work.
Pro Advanced API and parser
The parser detects any CSS syntax error found. The output code can be customized to follow your own code style rules (indentation, spaces, string quotes, etc). It has a clean and powerfull API, which make easy to create new plugins.
Pro No need to learn a new syntax
Since Stylecow allows developers to write simple, vanilla CSS, there's no need to learn a whole new language.
Cons
Con It's difficult adjusting to different keywords
The keywords are shortened to 3 letters. For example, "background-color" becomes "bac" and "max-width" becomes "maw". These keywords are far less intuitive than their original form and make the CSS much less readable for those who don't know CSS-On-Diet.
Con Extremely limited adoption
CSS-On-Diet has just 7 stars on Github and a very small adoption rate. For an open source project this usually means less bugs reported, lesser documentation and few third-party learning resources.
Con May be merged with PostCSS in the future
Since Stylecow is pretty small and hasn't gained a lot of traction in the past 5 or so years since it was first released but also because it serves kind of the same purpose as PostCSS which is much more popular, there have been discussions on merging the two projects together.
Con Small community
Stylecow doesn't have a very large community. This can make it difficult to find answers and increases the risk of the project being abandoned.