CSS vs. JavaScript • Josh W. Comeau
www.joshwcomeau.com
There are a bunch of JavaScript animation libraries out there, and you might have wondered whether there’s a performance cost compared to traditional CSS transitions and keyframe animations. In this blog post, we’ll compare the same animation across several different strategies and see the differences firsthand. There’s some interesting nuance here!

One of the most common questions around animation performance is whether JS-based animations are slower than CSS-based ones. Should we always strive to use CSS transitions, or is it OK to use JavaScript animation libraries?

There’s a surprising amount of nuance to this question, and I think that the conventional wisdom isn’t quite right. In this post, we’re going to dig into this question and see the differences for ourselves!