React

The library for web and native user interfaces

5.0•163 reviews•

2.6K followers

The library for web and native user interfaces

5.0•163 reviews•

2.6K followers

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Interface design tools

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Engineering & Development

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UI frameworks

A free and open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on components.

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React Launches

React19 Simplify. Optimize. Create

Launched on December 7th, 2024

react.dev The new home for React and its documentation

Launched on March 27th, 2023

React.js A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

Launched on January 15th, 2023

Forum Threads

p/react

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27d ago

React Debugger — Debug React directly inside DevTools

React Debugger is a Chrome DevTools extension built for deep React debugging.

It gives you performance profiling, memory monitoring, anti pattern detection, Side Effects & CLS insights, plus Redux tooling all in one panel.

Install:

npx @nhonh/react-debugger

View all

5.0

Based on 163 reviews

Review React?

Makers largely celebrate React’s stability, speed, and massive ecosystem. The makers of

Metabase

Dodo Payments

, and

Reflex

highlight predictable composition, portable components, and seamless integration—underscoring React’s fit for scalable UIs and SDKs. Broader reviewers praise its component model, hooks, and strong community, noting fast onboarding and maintainability. Some mention a learning curve and occasional complexity, but say the payoff is worth it. Many compare favorably to Angular/Vue, citing flexibility and tooling. Overall: a dependable, future-proof choice for interactive web and native interfaces.

+161

Summarized with AI

Pros

component-based architecture (21)

dynamic user interfaces (11)

flexibility (10)

fast performance (9)

large ecosystem (8)

reusable components (8)

scalability (7)

strong community support (4)

virtual DOM (4)

easy learning curve (3)

Pros

Cons

Reviews

All Reviews

Most Informative

•1 review

What's great

flexibility (10)component-based architecture (21)

React's core strength lies in its declarative nature and component-based architecture. It allows developers to build complex UIs from small, isolated pieces of code, which significantly improves maintainability and scalability.

Virtual DOM: By minimizing direct manipulation of the actual DOM, React ensures high performance even in data-heavy applications.
Massive Ecosystem: The availability of countless libraries (like React Router, TanStack Query, and UI kits) means you rarely have to "reinvent the wheel."
Strong Community: Finding solutions to bugs or hiring experienced developers is much easier compared to newer or more niche frameworks.

What needs improvement

No tool is perfect. When providing constructive feedback, consider these common pain points:

Boilerplate & Configuration: Even with modern tools like Vite or Next.js, setting up a specialized environment (testing, linting, state management) can feel "fragmented" compared to batteries-included frameworks.
State Management Complexity: Managing global state can become messy. While useContext exists, complex apps often require external libraries (Redux, Zustand, Recoil), which adds to the architectural overhead.
The "Hook" Learning Curve: While Hooks are powerful, understanding rules like dependency arrays in useEffect or avoiding unnecessary re-renders can be tricky for juniors.

vs Alternatives

Svelte

Angular

Vue.js

When choosing a frontend library, common alternatives usually include Vue.js, Angular, or Svelte. Here is how to frame why you stuck with React:

Over Vue.js: While Vue has a gentler learning curve, React’s ecosystem and the prevalence of TypeScript-first patterns often provide better long-term stability for enterprise-level projects.
Over Angular: React offers more flexibility. Unlike Angular’s "opinionated" all-in-one framework approach, React lets you choose your own stack for state management and routing.
Over Svelte: Svelte is faster and has less boilerplate, but React's job market dominance and the sheer volume of production-tested third-party components make it the safer bet for commercial products.

How well does React integrate with TypeScript?

React and TypeScript are essentially the industry standard for modern web development. The integration is seamless:

First-Class Support: Most popular scaffolding tools (like Vite or Next.js) offer "out-of-the-box" TypeScript templates.
Strongly Typed Props: Defining interfaces for component props makes your code self-documenting and catches errors during development rather than at runtime.
Hooks & Generics: React’s built-in hooks are designed with generics in mind, ensuring that useState<User | null>(null) provides full type safety for your data.
Ecosystem Maturity: Almost every major React library (Redux, TanStack Query, etc.) is either written in TypeScript or provides high-quality @types definitions.

How easy is testing React components?

Testing in React has evolved to be very intuitive by focusing on user behavior rather than implementation details:

React Testing Library (RTL): This is the gold standard. It encourages testing how a user interacts with the app (e.g., "is the button clickable?") rather than checking internal state.
Vitest/Jest: These runners provide a fast, familiar environment for executing tests with built-in mocking capabilities for APIs.
Component Isolation: Because React is component-based, it is straightforward to write unit tests for small, pure components or integration tests for complex forms.
End-to-End (E2E): Tools like Playwright or Cypress integrate beautifully with React applications to test the entire user flow in a real browser environment.

What are best practices for performance optimization?

To keep a React app snappy, the goal is to minimize unnecessary re-renders and reduce the bundle size:

Memoization: Use useMemo for expensive calculations and useCallback to cache function references between renders.
Code Splitting: Implement dynamic imports via React.lazy and Suspense to load components only when they are needed.
Windowing: For long lists, use libraries like react-window or react-virtualized to render only the items currently visible on the screen.
Effective State Management: Keep state as local as possible to avoid triggering a "ripple effect" of re-renders across the entire component tree.

Ratings

Ease of use

Reliability

Value for money

Customization

Report

1 view3d ago

used

React

to build UniDeck

•6 reviews

React powers UniDeck’s intuitive interface, enabling a seamless and dynamic user experience for building dashboards without any coding. Its component-based architecture allowed us to rapidly prototype and refine features, ensuring both performance and scalability. While we chose React for its robust ecosystem and active community, alternatives like Vue.js or Svelte could have been considered for their simplicity and smaller bundle sizes but they didn't benefit from the same ecosystem and community size like React.

What's great

scalability (7)component-based architecture (21)strong community support (4)large ecosystem (8)dynamic user interfaces (11)

Report

22 views1yr ago

used

React

to build TableSprint

•7 reviews

We have worked on angular extensively in our last startup which was also very good, but for Tablesprint we went for react due to easy learning curve for new team members and for all it's components. Specific components like tanstack react-table, react-grid and also elstar theme from Themeforest which has provided lot of ready uis with easy to implement in our project really reduced time to develop for us and also experiment with new UIs.

What's great

component-based architecture (21)easy learning curve (3)

Report

13 views1yr ago

•1 review

What's great

flexibility (10)component-based architecture (21)

Virtual DOM: By minimizing direct manipulation of the actual DOM, React ensures high performance even in data-heavy applications.
Massive Ecosystem: The availability of countless libraries (like React Router, TanStack Query, and UI kits) means you rarely have to "reinvent the wheel."
Strong Community: Finding solutions to bugs or hiring experienced developers is much easier compared to newer or more niche frameworks.

What needs improvement

No tool is perfect. When providing constructive feedback, consider these common pain points:

Boilerplate & Configuration: Even with modern tools like Vite or Next.js, setting up a specialized environment (testing, linting, state management) can feel "fragmented" compared to batteries-included frameworks.
State Management Complexity: Managing global state can become messy. While useContext exists, complex apps often require external libraries (Redux, Zustand, Recoil), which adds to the architectural overhead.
The "Hook" Learning Curve: While Hooks are powerful, understanding rules like dependency arrays in useEffect or avoiding unnecessary re-renders can be tricky for juniors.

vs Alternatives

Svelte

Angular

Vue.js

When choosing a frontend library, common alternatives usually include Vue.js, Angular, or Svelte. Here is how to frame why you stuck with React:

Over Vue.js: While Vue has a gentler learning curve, React’s ecosystem and the prevalence of TypeScript-first patterns often provide better long-term stability for enterprise-level projects.
Over Angular: React offers more flexibility. Unlike Angular’s "opinionated" all-in-one framework approach, React lets you choose your own stack for state management and routing.
Over Svelte: Svelte is faster and has less boilerplate, but React's job market dominance and the sheer volume of production-tested third-party components make it the safer bet for commercial products.

How well does React integrate with TypeScript?

React and TypeScript are essentially the industry standard for modern web development. The integration is seamless:

First-Class Support: Most popular scaffolding tools (like Vite or Next.js) offer "out-of-the-box" TypeScript templates.
Strongly Typed Props: Defining interfaces for component props makes your code self-documenting and catches errors during development rather than at runtime.
Hooks & Generics: React’s built-in hooks are designed with generics in mind, ensuring that useState<User | null>(null) provides full type safety for your data.
Ecosystem Maturity: Almost every major React library (Redux, TanStack Query, etc.) is either written in TypeScript or provides high-quality @types definitions.

How easy is testing React components?

Testing in React has evolved to be very intuitive by focusing on user behavior rather than implementation details:

React Testing Library (RTL): This is the gold standard. It encourages testing how a user interacts with the app (e.g., "is the button clickable?") rather than checking internal state.
Vitest/Jest: These runners provide a fast, familiar environment for executing tests with built-in mocking capabilities for APIs.
Component Isolation: Because React is component-based, it is straightforward to write unit tests for small, pure components or integration tests for complex forms.
End-to-End (E2E): Tools like Playwright or Cypress integrate beautifully with React applications to test the entire user flow in a real browser environment.

What are best practices for performance optimization?

To keep a React app snappy, the goal is to minimize unnecessary re-renders and reduce the bundle size:

Memoization: Use useMemo for expensive calculations and useCallback to cache function references between renders.
Code Splitting: Implement dynamic imports via React.lazy and Suspense to load components only when they are needed.
Windowing: For long lists, use libraries like react-window or react-virtualized to render only the items currently visible on the screen.
Effective State Management: Keep state as local as possible to avoid triggering a "ripple effect" of re-renders across the entire component tree.

Ratings

Ease of use

Reliability

Value for money

Customization

Report

1 view3d ago

used

React

to build UniDeck

•6 reviews