When comparing Stylecow vs Garden (Clojure), the Slant community recommends Stylecow for most people. In the question“What are the best CSS preprocessors/postprocessors?” Stylecow is ranked 7th while Garden (Clojure) is ranked 9th. 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.
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Pros
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.
Pro Style webpages with a full programming language
With Garden, you have access to all the core features of a powerful programming language to build your scripts, including functions, variables, namespaces, and data manipulation like map merging or concatenation.
Pro Full-stack Clojure with ClojureScript for front-end + Clojure for backend
Garden finishes the full Clojure stack experience — you can have the entire codebase in a single language with ClojureScript on the front-end, Clojure on the backend, and Garden for CSS.
Pro Hot loading
Using the core Garden auto loader or the excellent Garden Gnome plugin, watch your style changes take effect in the browser as soon as you save the code — no reload required.
Pro Styles as data-nesting are obvious
Clojure is a data-oriented programming language with strong emphasis on simple, clear inline data structures. Garden models styles using these same structures, making the cascade visually obvious.
Pro Clean syntax
Other options listed include various pain-points like use of @ symbols or too much cruft; because Garden is just Clojure, and Clojure is a very well-designed language aimed to emphasize simplicity and positive developer experience (without semantic whitespace problems), you have the full benefit of a well-designed and general-purpose syntax.
Pro CSS-engine accessible from front-end
Because Garden is also Clojurescript friendly, this means that you can dynamically effect styles based on app state.
Cons
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.
Con Harder to apply shared styles
Because you are working in Clojure, you can't just paste in raw css style snippets shared elsewhere.
