Instead of styled-components: Tailwind CSS

Why Tailwind CSS is better

• Tailwind produces plain CSS at build time. styled-components generates and inserts CSS at runtime as components render.
• Its current engine makes full builds up to 5x faster and incremental builds over 100x faster than the previous major version, per the Tailwind team.
• Theme values live in CSS. You customise Tailwind with an @theme block in your stylesheet, and every design token is exposed as a native CSS variable, with no JavaScript config file.
• It is far more widely used. npm counted 537,015,324 downloads of tailwindcss in the month to early November 2026, against 44,494,936 for styled-components.
• In March 2025 the styled-components maintainer wrote that the ecosystem had moved on from CSS-in-JS and that he would not recommend it, or most CSS-in-JS libraries, for new projects.

When to keep styled-components

Keep styled-components in a large existing codebase or design system built on it, especially one that styles heavily from props or shares components with React Native, which it supports with the same API. Development resumed after the 2025 pause, and it now supports server components and has a v7 in prerelease, so there is no urgency to rip it out.

Switching

It is a rewrite of every styled component. Each styled.div with a CSS template becomes a plain element with utility classes, prop-driven styles become conditional class names, and global styles and themes move into CSS. Teams usually migrate screen by screen and run both side by side until the old components are gone.

Watch out

Utility classes make markup long and take time to learn, and complex component variants need helpers such as tailwind-merge to resolve conflicting classes. Tailwind targets the web; React Native needs a separate library. Development is funded by Tailwind Labs through sponsors and paid products, so one company sets its direction.

Also worth a look

• vanilla-extract Zero-runtime styles written in TypeScript and compiled to static CSS files; pick it to keep typed styles next to components without a browser runtime.

More newer, better libraries, runtimes and developer tools

• Moment.js →, use date-fns
• Lodash →, use es-toolkit
• Axios →, use Ky
• Redux →, use Zustand
• Prisma ORM →, use Drizzle ORM
• ImageMagick →, use libvips
• Beautiful Soup →, use selectolax