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Add to SafariWhen comparing PostCSS vs Stylecow, the Slant community recommends PostCSS for most people. In the question“What are the best CSS preprocessors/postprocessors?” PostCSS is ranked 4th while Stylecow is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose PostCSS is:
PostCSS is 3-30 times faster than Sass (including libsass), Less, and Stylus
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast
PostCSS is 3-30 times faster than Sass (including libsass), Less, and Stylus
Pro Flexible
PostCSS allows you to opt-in to the features you need with plugins. This allows you to set it up to behave exactly like Sass, with nesting, mixing, extends, and more. On the other hand, it allows you to use plugins by themselves for things like auto-prefixing, minification, and more. You can even set up your own custom "stack" of plugins to do exactly what you like.
Pro Doesn't force designers to learn a new syntax
Rather than learn a different syntax, PostCSS allows you to write in pure CSS.
Pro JavaScript-based out of the box
Since it's basically CSS extended through JavaScript it works in the browser directly without the need to compile it beforehand.
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 Harder to install and keep working
The immense flexibility of PostCSS plus its current rapid evolution makes it harder to install, configure and keep running than the more monolithic and mature preprocessors.
Con Outdatet, plugins are often based on different postcss versions and don't work together properly
Con Some plugins need to run in a certain order
Some plugins can only work if initialized after some other plugins. For example, transforming and applying CSS variables needs to run before running a plugin which uses these variables inside conditional transformations.
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.
