Comparisons

Every tool here is good at what it set out to do. The honest comparison is about what each one knows.

stylelint-declaration-strict-value

The incumbent, and deservedly popular: it forces listed properties to use a variable. What it doesn’t have is your token set — any var(--anything) passes, including a fabricated var(--color-primry), and CSS-in-JS is explicitly out of scope.

Choose it when you want a zero-config “no raw values in CSS” nudge and don’t need membership checking, suggestions, or non-CSS surfaces. Choose dscheck when the question is “is this value in my system?” — membership, nearest-token suggestions, unknown-token detection, and one allowed-set across CSS, JSX, Tailwind classes, and CSS-in-JS.

Tailwind’s own linting (IntelliSense, canonical classes)

Tailwind ships excellent class-level tooling: canonical-class suggestions in the editor and increasingly in core. For a Tailwind-only codebase where every style is a utility class, that may be all you need.

Choose it when styles live exclusively in class strings. Choose dscheck when values leak outside classes — inline style={{}}, style-object constants, CSS files, styled-components — or when you want the class checks and the rest under one config, one baseline, one CI gate. (dscheck’s class parsing runs through Tailwind’s own engine when it’s installed; it wraps, never reimplements.)

Terrazzo (and DTCG token toolchains)

Terrazzo lints and transforms the token file — naming, aliases, formats. dscheck lints the code that uses the tokens. They’re complementary layers, not competitors: a healthy setup can use Terrazzo to keep tokens.json well-formed and dscheck to keep the codebase on-system.

Choose it when the problem is inside your token source. Choose dscheck when the problem is between your token source and your code.

Org-specific plugins (Atlassian’s, Primer’s, Carbon’s…)

These are the existence proof for the whole category — deep, polished rule sets with migration maps, hard-wired to one company’s tokens. If you work at one of these companies, use theirs.

Choose dscheck when you want that class of enforcement for your system without building a plugin: point it at the token source you already have.

What nothing else does (yet)

One allowed-set enforced across every surface at once; distance-based suggestions (ΔEOK for color, scale steps for lengths) instead of exact-match-only; fabricated-token and fabricated-class detection; a baseline debt ratchet compatible with your hosts’ suppression format; and the agent loop — findings shaped so a coding agent can apply the fix without a human in between.