Head-to-Head: Linaria vs styled-components Analysis
@linaria/core
v6.2.0(3 months ago)
@linaria/core is a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS library that offers a seamless way to style your components using JavaScript. It allows you to write CSS directly in your JavaScript files, eliminating the need for a build step or runtime CSS processing. Linaria provides excellent performance by extracting styles at build time and generating minimal CSS output.
Styled-components is a popular CSS-in-JS library for styling React components. It allows you to write actual CSS code to style your components directly within your JavaScript files, providing a more maintainable and scalable styling solution. With styled-components, you can easily create dynamic styles based on props, use nested components, and leverage the full power of CSS features like media queries and keyframes.
Styled-components is one of the most popular CSS-in-JS libraries in the React ecosystem, with a large and active community. On the other hand, @linaria/core is a relatively newer library and has gained some popularity, but it is not as widely used as styled-components.
Size
Styled-components has a larger bundle size compared to @linaria/core. Styled-components includes a runtime library that adds some overhead to the bundle size. @linaria/core, on the other hand, generates minimal CSS at build time, resulting in smaller bundle sizes.
Developer Experience
Styled-components provides a convenient and intuitive API for styling React components. It allows writing CSS directly within JavaScript code, providing a seamless development experience. @linaria/core also offers a similar developer experience, allowing you to write CSS-in-JS with a familiar syntax. However, @linaria/core takes a different approach by extracting the CSS at build time, which can be advantageous for performance and debugging.
Performance
In terms of runtime performance, @linaria/core has an advantage over styled-components. Since @linaria/core extracts the CSS at build time, it eliminates the need for a runtime library, resulting in faster rendering and smaller bundle sizes. Styled-components, on the other hand, requires the runtime library to apply styles at runtime, which can have a slight impact on performance.
Features
Styled-components provides a rich set of features, including support for theming, media queries, and server-side rendering. It also has excellent tooling and integration with popular frameworks like Next.js. @linaria/core focuses on providing a minimalistic API for styling components and does not offer as many advanced features as styled-components. However, @linaria/core can be easily integrated into any build setup and works well with TypeScript.
Community and Support
Styled-components has a large and active community, which means there are plenty of resources, tutorials, and community support available. It also has good documentation and is well-maintained. @linaria/core, being a newer library, has a smaller community and fewer resources available. However, it is actively maintained and has a growing community.
