At the risk of being an "old man yelling at cloud", I'll start with the bottom line- As enterprise developers, stick with what works.
For enterprises building large-scale applications with long lifespans, Sass modules is the gold standard for styling. They offer perfect balance of performance, scalability, and maintainability—qualities that trendy solutions struggle to match when scaled up.
While it’s tempting to jump on the latest styling trend, enterprises should prioritize solutions that can handle the complexity of large teams and long-term maintenance. So before you chase the next shiny tool, ask yourself if it can scale as your team and project grow—because Sass already does.
I am not here to look down on other solutions. But I worked for over 8 years on design systems with several Fortune 500 companies, and I saw them time-after-time chase the tool-of-the-day for styling, to then 4 years later try to get out of it. And yeah, usually move to Sass modules.
What I see is that most of the trendy tools are trendy because it is super easy to start a new project that looks and feels AWESOME. They are amazing for building a small site, a page, something that works well for rapid-development. This gets them to be viral.
Enterprise software does not behave like this. It has a far bigger lifespan than any other software and potentially 100s of devs working on it at the same time.
There are three main reasons why I always recommend Sass modules:
Performance
Sass compiles styles at build time into static CSS files, ensuring that no additional processing happens in the browser. These CSS styles are native to the browser. So how can you loose with:
- Zero runtime overhead.
- Smaller bundle.
- Faster rendering, native to the browser.
Scalability - Large teams and long projects
Sass modules encourage modularity and separation of concerns. In enterprise projects that involve hundreds of developers working across multiple teams on a single codebase. Maintaining consistency and avoiding style conflicts is a massive challenge. Sass modules gives you:
- Scoped styles
- Reusable patterns (mixins, variables...)
- Easy onboarding - devs do not need to learn anything new. it's enough to KNOW css to be productive.
Maintainability - Backbone of long-lived software
Enterprise software isn’t built for a few months; it’s built to last for years (or even decades). This longevity demands a styling solution that’s easy to maintain and evolve as requirements change. SASS is:
- Readable
- Separation of concerns (styles and markup are not in the same place)
- Version control friendly (changes in styles are easy to track and not impacted from inline utility classes or dynamically generated styles).
Top comments (2)
I agree with you but Sass will get bloated and unmaintainable easily in scale without a CSS culture and a good CSS architecture. Separation of concerns means different things in different types of applications - but how are they separated and how the class semantics can give us hints to categorize code (so I know where to write it) and to find code that is already written (so I know that i don't need to write it again), the best patterns I can think of are SMACSS and ITCSS taxonomies.
BEM for example, focus in naming convention that establishes semantically a relationship between parent and children elements and highlight which of them are composable or coupled, but BEM by itself does not solve code bloating.
I wanted to focus on picking the right styling. I fully agree that without good culture any pattern will bloat and hurt you.