How Less is used
Less joined the catalog on its public numbers (5,966,484 downloads a week on npm and 17,018 GitHub stars), not on our project count: it is a dependency in 14 public GitHub projects of our scan, 4 of them set up for AI coding agents. The most used alternative in our scan is Sass (108 projects). Projects that use it most often also use Vite (57.1%), ESLint (71.4%), Lodash (35.7%).
Less popularity over time
Gid Score 56: downloads 80, use in agent projects 22, GitHub stars 59, downloads trend 54 (each 0-100). How it is calculated.
Often used with Less
| Vite | 57.1% of Less projects · 2.9× more than average |
|---|---|
| ESLint | 71.4% of Less projects · 2.0× more than average |
| Lodash | 35.7% of Less projects · 19.8× more than average |
| React | 64.3% of Less projects · 2.0× more than average |
| lint-staged | 28.6% of Less projects · 3.7× more than average |
| Solana Web3.js | 21.4% of Less projects · 57.8× more than average |
| Ant Design | 21.4% of Less projects · 70.0× more than average |
| styled-components | 21.4% of Less projects · 70.0× more than average |
How Less is funded
Open Collective: Less
| Received, last 12 months | $0 Oct 2025 – Sep 2026 |
|---|---|
| Estimated annual budget | $0 Open Collective's estimate |
| Balance | $133 |
| Raised since the start | $133 |
| Typical month median, last 12 months | $0 · $0 over 24 months |
| Contributors, last 12 months | 0 |
Oct 2021Sep 2026
Money by month, last five years. First money received in Mar 2020. The typical month is the median: one big one-off donation does not move it.
Open Collective lists this collective for the less organization on GitHub, so the money is for all of its projects, not Less alone.
USD after payment processor fees, as Open Collective reports it; fiscal host Open Source Collective. Source
Install
| Package | npm install less |
|---|---|
| Main stacks | TypeScript / JavaScript (12), React Native / Expo (1), Python (1) |
| Example projects | NG-ZORRO/ng-zorro-antd, orangecoding/fredy, gxr404/BilibiliVideoDownloadFork, Synerise/synerise-design, GooseFX1/gfx-web-app |
Alternatives to Less
Tools that do the same job, so a project picks one or the other. Add-ons and libraries used alongside Less are not listed here; they are in "Often used with".
| Tool | Gid Score | Used in agent projects | Downloads / wk | GitHub stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sass npm CSS preprocessor adding variables, nesting and mixins to stylesheets. |
65 | 108 (2.2%) | 17.1M | 4,234 | MIT |
More in Styling and CSS: Tailwind CSS Tailwind Merge Emotion tailwind-variants NativeWind Fontsource Inter postcss-import Lightning CSS