Lightning CSS
High-performance CSS parser and minifier written in Rust, with modern CSS feature support.
Styling and CSS npm MPL-2.0
Used in agent projects
22
0.2% of 12,697 public repos built with AI coding agents
Rank in styling and css
#14 of 15
by use in those projects
Downloads
178M
npm, last 7 days, lightningcss
GitHub stars
7,700
last push Oct 8, 2026
How Lightning CSS is used
Lightning CSS is a dependency in 22 of the 12,697 public GitHub projects set up for AI coding agents that we scanned (0.2%), #14 of 15 in styling and css. The most used alternative there is Tailwind CSS. Projects that use it most often also use Playwright (JavaScript) (45.5%), tw-animate-css (36.4%), ESLint (68.2%).
Often used with Lightning CSS
| Playwright (JavaScript) | 45.5% of Lightning CSS projects · 5.2× more than average |
|---|---|
| tw-animate-css | 36.4% of Lightning CSS projects · 5.4× more than average |
| ESLint | 68.2% of Lightning CSS projects · 1.8× more than average |
| TypeScript | 81.8% of Lightning CSS projects · 1.5× more than average |
| Vite | 50.0% of Lightning CSS projects · 2.2× more than average |
| react-markdown | 27.3% of Lightning CSS projects · 9.6× more than average |
| Vitest | 36.4% of Lightning CSS projects · 3.0× more than average |
| Tailwind CSS | 59.1% of Lightning CSS projects · 1.7× more than average |
By coding agent
| Claude Code | 0.4% of projects set up for it |
|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 0.4% of projects set up for it |
| Cursor | 0.3% of projects set up for it |
Share of public repos configured for each agent that list Lightning CSS as a dependency.
Install
| Package | npm install lightningcss |
|---|---|
| Main stacks | TypeScript / JavaScript (13), Next.js (4), Python (3), React Native / Expo (1) |
| Example projects | miantiao-me/bm.md, blueprintui/blueprintui, confluentinc/vscode, dimaslanjaka/php-proxy-hunter, stainless-code/codemap |
Alternatives to Lightning CSS
| Tool | Used in agent projects | Downloads / wk | GitHub stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tailwind CSS npm Utility-first CSS framework for building custom user interfaces rapidly. |
4,410 (34.7%) | 134M | 97.9K | MIT |
| Tailwind Merge npm Merge Tailwind CSS classes intelligently without style conflicts. |
2,136 (16.8%) | 85.8M | 5,695 | MIT |
| Emotion npm CSS-in-JS library for styling React components with scoped styles and theming. |
332 (2.6%) | 20.2M | 18K | MIT |
| Sass npm CSS preprocessor adding variables, nesting and mixins to stylesheets. |
233 (1.8%) | 30.9M | 4,230 | MIT |
| styled-components npm CSS-in-JS library for styling React components with dynamic scoped styles. |
154 (1.2%) | 10.8M | 41.1K | MIT |
| react-responsive npm React library for implementing responsive design with CSS media queries. |
54 (0.4%) | 1.4M | 7,182 | MIT |
| tailwind-variants npm Compose Tailwind CSS classes conditionally with a variant-first composition API. |
53 (0.4%) | 4.3M | 3,318 | MIT |
| postcss-import npm PostCSS plugin to inline @import rules before other transformations. |
46 (0.4%) | 41M | 1,409 | MIT |