Emotion vs Styled Components

Choosing the right CSS-in-JS library can make a significant difference in your development workflow and application performance. In this post, we’ll dive into the comparison between Emotion and styled-components, two of the most popular libraries for handling CSS in JavaScript. Whether you're looking to improve your styling process or enhance your app's performance, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools is crucial. By the end, you should have a clear idea of which library best suits your needs. So let’s explore Emotion vs Styled Components to help you make an informed decision.

And in case you want to learn more, don't miss the comparison of Styled Components vs CSS Modules.

Understanding the Features of Styled Components

Styled-components is one of the most popular CSS-in-JS libraries. It focuses the developer experience and providing unique ways to style your components. One significant feature is the ability to use props in your component styles, allowing for dynamic changes in rendered tags without having to call any JavaScript logic operations. This feature provides a high level of component reusability.

In terms of syntax, styled-components favor a more traditional CSS-like styling syntax. Here's a simple example:

const StyledButton = styled.button`
    color: ${props => props.primary ? "white" : "palevioletred"};
    background-color: ${props => props.primary ? "palevioletred" : "white"};
`;

Styled-components also support theming, allowing for consistent design across your app.

Exploring the Capabilities of Emotion

Emotion, on the other hand, provides a flexible and performant alternative for CSS-in-JS. It offers a developer-friendly approach with various ways to style your components. Emotion is very flexible as it supports both string and object styles:

const { css } = require('@emotion/core')

const dynamicStyle = props => css`
  color: ${props.color};
`

render(<div css={dynamicStyle({ color: 'hotpink' })}>This is hotpink.</div>)

Emotion is faster than styled-components, ready for React Concurrent mode, and has a smaller bundle size. This results in better performance and faster load times. Moreover, Emotion supports out-of-the-box server-side rendering, labelling, and important selectors.

Performance Comparison

When comparing the performance of Emotion and styled-components, there are several key factors to consider: bundle size, runtime performance, and server-side rendering (SSR).

Bundle Size: Emotion generally has a smaller bundle size compared to styled-components. This smaller bundle size can significantly reduce the initial load time of your application. For example, a study showed that using Emotion resulted in a smaller increase in bundle size compared to styled-components when adding the same styled component to a project ​(DEV Community)​. This smaller bundle size can lead to faster page loads and better overall performance.

Runtime Performance: Emotion is known for its superior runtime performance. Benchmarks have shown that Emotion can be up to 25 times faster than styled-components in some scenarios due to its efficient style processing and caching mechanisms​ (CloudDevs)​. However, styled-components has improved its performance significantly since version 5, closing the gap in many cases. Despite these improvements, Emotion still tends to have the edge in terms of runtime efficiency.

Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Both Emotion and styled-components support SSR, which is essential for many modern web applications. Emotion offers a highly performant SSR solution through its extractCritical utility, which extracts and inlines critical styles during server-side rendering. This approach can significantly improve page load times and performance metrics. Styled-components also provides a robust SSR solution with its ServerStyleSheet component, ensuring that styles are correctly applied during the initial page load​.

Learning Curve and Developer Experience: Styled-components are often praised for their intuitive API and ease of use, particularly for developers familiar with React. The ability to write plain CSS within JavaScript without a steep learning curve makes styled-components accessible and straightforward. Additionally, the integration with React’s props system allows for dynamic styling based on component props, which enhances the developer experience​​.

Emotion, while highly flexible, can have a slightly steeper learning curve due to its support for both string and object styles. This flexibility can be powerful but might require more effort to master, especially for developers new to CSS-in-JS libraries. Despite this, many developers appreciate Emotion’s versatility and performance benefits, making it a popular choice for more complex projects.

Theming

Styled-Components: Styled-components offers robust theming support through its ThemeProvider. This allows developers to define a theme object that can be accessed throughout the application, making it easy to implement consistent design systems. Theming with styled-components is straightforward and integrates seamlessly with its other features​​.

Emotion: Emotion also provides excellent theming capabilities via the ThemeProvider from the emotion-themingpackage. One of the standout features of Emotion’s theming is its deep integration with the css prop, allowing for highly dynamic and responsive theming solutions. This flexibility makes Emotion a strong choice for projects requiring complex theming​ ​.

Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

Styled-Components: Styled-components supports SSR out of the box with its ServerStyleSheet component, ensuring that styles are correctly applied during the initial page load. This feature is crucial for applications that rely on server-side rendering to improve SEO and performance metrics​.

Emotion: Emotion excels in SSR with its extractCritical utility, which extracts and inlines critical styles during server-side rendering. This approach not only improves page load times but also enhances the performance and responsiveness of the application. Emotion’s efficient handling of SSR makes it a preferred choice for performance-critical applications​.

By addressing these aspects— performance, ease of use, and flexibility —developers can make an informed decision about whether Emotion or styled-components is the best fit for their project needs. Each library offers unique advantages, and the choice often depends on specific project requirements and personal preference.

How Does An Increasing Number of Styled Components Affects Performance

Lastly, as your project expands, you might wonder how an increasing number of Styled Components affects performance. The truth is, an increase in the number of styled components affects both libraries. However, with efficient coding practices and component structuring, these performance hits can be minimized.

On one hand, Styled Components maintain a constant rendering time despite the increase in component count but at the same time, it results in more JavaScript computation and a slight memory increase. Emotion, conversely, has more linear performance characteristics, i.e., an increase in component count could start to impact your rendering performance more compared to Styled Components but at a slower rate.

Remember both libraries have their own trade-offs and their performance is impacted based on project-specific needs, structure, and usage. Therefore, take into account these parameters before making a choice between Styled Components and Emotion for your project.

In this section, we'll look at how Styled Components and Emotion are used in real projects. We'll see how these libraries can affect the quality of your code, productivity, and user experience.

Styled-Components excels in encapsulating styles within individual components, making it an excellent choice for large-scale projects where maintainability and reusability are paramount. This approach not only improves code organization but also prevents style conflicts, which can be a common issue in complex applications.

For example, consider a button component styled using Styled-Components:

import styled from 'styled-components';

const Button = styled.button`
    background: papayawhip;
    color: palevioletred;
    font-size: 1em;
    padding: 0.25em 1em;
    border: 2px solid palevioletred;
    border-radius: 3px;
`;

<Button>Click me!</Button> 

In this example, the styles are directly tied to the Button component, making it self-contained and reusable. This encapsulation ensures that the styles won’t accidentally affect other parts of the application, which is especially beneficial in large teams where multiple developers might be working on different components simultaneously​​.

As we already know, Styled-Components also support theming. Here's an example of how to use the ThemeProvider:

import { ThemeProvider } from 'styled-components';

const theme = {
    colors: {
        primary: 'palevioletred',
        secondary: 'papayawhip'
    }
};

const App = () => (
    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
        <Button>Click me!</Button>
    </ThemeProvider>
);

Using Emotion in Real-World Projects

Emotion is particularly well-suited for projects that require highly dynamic themes and extensive customization. Its smaller bundle size can also enhance performance, making it a great choice for performance-critical application​.

One of the key advantages of Emotion is its ability to write CSS directly within JavaScript, allowing for dynamic styling based on props or the global theme. Here’s an example of how to style a div using Emotion:

/** @jsxImportSource @emotion/react */
import { css } from '@emotion/react';

const style = css`
    color: hotpink;
    font-size: 24px;
    &:hover {
        color: darkorchid;
    }
`;

<div css={style}>Hover to change color!</div>

In this example, the css function from Emotion is used to create a style object, which can then be applied directly to the div element via the css prop. This approach allows for highly dynamic and conditional styling, making it easy to adapt styles based on component props or state​ (LogRocket Blog)​​ (CloudDevs)​.

Emotion also offers robust theming capabilities. By using the ThemeProvider from the @emotion/react package, you can define and apply themes across your application:

import { ThemeProvider } from '@emotion/react';

const theme = {
    colors: {
        primary: 'hotpink',
        secondary: 'darkorchid'
    }
};

const App = () => (
    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
        <div css={theme => ({ color: theme.colors.primary })}>
            This text is styled with Emotion!
        </div>
    </ThemeProvider>
);

Both Emotion and Styled-Components have vibrant communities and are widely used in the React ecosystem, ensuring that you’ll find plenty of resources and support.

Emotion Community Support and Popularity

Emotion is known for its performance and flexibility, which has made it popular among developers who need a highly performant and customizable solution. The library has a robust community on platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow, where developers actively share tips, solutions, and best practices. You can find Emotion's GitHub repository here​​.

Styled-Components Community

Styled-Components has a larger user base, partly due to its longer existence and intuitive API. The community is very active, with numerous tutorials, articles, and tools available to help developers. The Styled-Components GitHub repository is also a great place to find updates and community discussions. Check out their repository here​​.

Both libraries are well-supported with extensive documentation, and many developers contribute to their continued development and improvement. Whether you choose Emotion or Styled-Components, you'll have access to a wealth of community knowledge and resources to help you succeed in your projects.

Developing a comprehensive understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of any tool is pivotal in making an informed decision about its utility. In line with this, the following section will delve into the pros and cons of Styled Components and Emotion based on real-world use cases and performance benchmarks.

Advantages of Styled Components

Styled Components has numerous strengths making it a popular choice among developers.

• The Restyling feature enables the reusability of existing components with different styles, thereby promoting reusability.

• The Theming functionality allows the provisioning of themes without passing props manually, a huge convenience.

• With Styled Components, you can utilize CSS frameworks in your components seamlessly. It can also eliminate class name bugs as each CSS module gets a unique class.

• Lastly, it has a larger community and ecosystem which can be beneficial in terms of support and resource availability.

const Button = styled.button`
  color: ${props => props.theme.primary};
`;

Drawbacks of Styled Components

Despite the appealing features, Styled Components does exhibit some cons.

• The library has a larger bundle size compared to Emotion, which can hamper load times.

• Profiling and debugging can be challenging as component names often get replaced with class names in DevTools.

• Performance is slightly lower compared to Emotion, especially in the case of server-side rendering.

Don't miss the comparison of Styled Components vs Tailwind CSS.

Benefits of Using Emotion

Emotion has gained traction due to its beneficial features.

• One key advantage is its small bundle size, contributing to better load times and overall performance.

• Its developer-friendly approach enables you to write regular React components and work with object styles, increasing flexibility and productivity.

• Emotion also supports the 'css' prop allowing for easier code composition and cleaner syntax.

/** @jsx jsx */
import { css, jsx } from '@emotion/core'

<div css={{ color: 'hotpink' }}>Some text</div>

Cons of Emotion

While Emotion has many additions and advantages over Styled Components, it comes with its share of drawbacks.

• It has a smaller community, which may limit availability of resources and support.

• Certain Emotion features, such as extracting critical CSS on the server, does require additional setup.

• There are instances where Emotion might not be the best fit, especially if you're looking for more unique and complex styling options that Styled Components provides.

Having dissected the pros and cons of both Styled Components and Emotion, it is essential to understand that the choice between these libraries strictly depends on the requirements of your project and your personal preference.

Finally, let's navigate the decision-making process when it comes to choosing between Styled Components/ Emotion. To be sure you make the right choice, also read Vanilla Extract vs Styled Components.

Impact of Project Requirements and Personal Preference

There is no definitive answer when choosing between Styled Components and Emotion as both libraries offer robust options for styling in React. However, project requirements and personal preference often tip the balance one way or the other.

For instance, if your project does not require heavy theming or complex CSS, then the better performance and smaller size of Emotion might be the more suitable choice. Alternatively, if you are working on a project that necessitates unique and complex styling, then the theming capabilities and ability to restyle existing components offered by Styled Components might be more beneficial.

In terms of personal preference, some developers appreciate Emotion's developer-friendliness and flexibility in writing styles. Others, on the other hand, might lean towards Styled Components due to its larger community and the resources available.

At the end of the day, the right choice will heavily depend on the specific requirements of your project and your personal preference as a developer.

Choosing the perfect tech stack

In conclusion, choosing a CSS-in-JS library requires balancing various factors such as performance, project requirements, and personal preferences. Both Styled Components and Emotion have their own strengths and limitations, making them suitable for different scenarios in real-world applications.

Now that we've walked through working with Styled Components and Emotion, it's clear they're both powerful tools for styling your React components, offering an insightful approach to creating compelling, reusable design systems.

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This makes caisy a great Headless CMS choice to manage your web development projects - from creating complex designs to effectively handling multiple clients within the same workspace. Caisy's developer-first approach ensures you experience the advantages of the latest web technologies with efficiency or usability.

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