Posted on
September 3, 2024
Updated on
October 7, 2024
Read time
26 mins read
Sick of scrolling through thousands of React libraries? That’s it! We have developed it for you, just to spare you the effort! Here comes the set list of the most popular and effective React libraries that will help to supercharge your development game. For the advanced level developer who has been coding for a while now and wants to try their hand at React, as well as the beginner developer who is just beginning the foray into React, there is something for everyone on this list. Ok, let’s start going and unveil the tools that will change your next project!
What are the React Libraries?
React Libraries are a set of pre constructed code which provides ready made components, functions and utilities so that the developer need not to write a separate code which takes more time and also enhances the performance of the application and user interface. From smooth interfaces to intricate state and other operations, React libraries are your ally when it comes to designing perfect web apps.
Think about what it would be like to have a chest full of ready made pieces that when placed together form structures, every piece has a use. This is precisely what is provided by React libraries. Through proper use of these libraries, the development cycles are enhanced, and the quality of coded work is as well enhanced as a means of enhancing the reliability of applications. Therefore, come with us and find out how experienced or amateur React developers can improve the performance of their project with the best-of-the-best React libraries.
Table of Content
Best React Library based on Downloads
React Router
React Router is one of the most popular tools aimed at navigation in the React applications. Web applications designed for the traditional web model require server-side rendering of routes for changing between pages. Nevertheless, as it will be seen, React, as a single page application (SPA), has some features of its own. This is where React Router comes in because it will help in receiving and distributing all the data that is passed in through the URLs.
It is a library that optimizes the means of defining an application with a web-based UI by using components and routes for rendering the appropriate components when the user navigates through the app. It enables you to build the real front-end by transitioning intact from one view (component) to another depending on the URL. At the time of writing, the official React Router repository on GitHub has over 49K stars. 2k stars, meaning more developers and active community members work on this project.
Key Features of React Router
- Route Definition: React Router allows you to define routes using components. Each route maps a specific URL path to a corresponding React component. This makes it clear and intuitive to understand how different parts of your application are structured based on the URL.
- Navigation Components: React Router provides various components like Link and NavLink that simplify navigation within your application. These components handle the URL updates and browser history in a user-friendly way.
- Nested Routing: React Router supports nested routing, which is ideal for applications with complex navigation structures. You can define child routes within parent routes, allowing for a hierarchical organization of your application’s views.
- Parameters and Wildcards: React Router allows you to capture dynamic segments from URLs using parameters and wildcards. This enables you to create flexible routes that can handle different data variations within a URL path.
- Programmatic Navigation: You can also programmatically navigate between routes using the useNavigate hook (in newer versions) or the history object (in older versions). This allows you to trigger navigation based on user interactions or application logic.
Benefits of Using React Routers
- Improved User Experience: React Router promotes a smooth and intuitive navigation experience for users within your React application. Transitions between views happen seamlessly, mimicking the behavior of traditional multi-page web applications.
- Organized Code Structure: By defining routes using components, React Router encourages a well-organized and maintainable codebase. Your application’s navigation logic becomes clear and easy to understand.
- Flexibility: React Router offers features like nested routing, parameters, and wildcards, allowing you to create complex and flexible navigation structures for even the most intricate React applications.
- Separation of Concerns: Decoupling routing logic from your React components promotes cleaner code and improves reusability. You can define routes in a central location and use them throughout your application.
React Router is one of the powerful and must have tool to implement the structure and good user experience of the React applications. It uses declarative approach, has component based structure and a lot of features which makes it a great solution for navigation management in your React projects. Using React Router can make navigation more natural in your applications, and that way improves the given React applications.
Redux
Redux is a popular open-source JavaScript library specifically designed for managing application state in complex React applications. It promotes a predictable and centralized approach to state management, making it easier to reason about how your application’s data changes and how those changes affect different parts of your UI. Redux has over 59.3k stars on GitHub and over 19.5k forks. This high level of engagement suggests its continued relevance and use in various projects.
Redux is a state management library specifically designed for complex React applications. It simplifies managing state in large projects, ensures a single source of truth for shared data across UI components, centralizes complex data transformations, and promotes cleaner and more testable code through separation of concerns between UI and state logic.
Key Features of Redux
Here are some key features of the Redux library:Here are some key features of the Redux library:
- Single Source of Truth: It is necessary to use Redux because it forces the user to set up only one Store in the application, which does not allow the occurrence of data conflicts.
- Pure Functions: Updates in Redux are effected via state reducers which are pure functions that accept the current state as well as an action and produce a new state. This makes it easily to predict and reason about the changes in state of the system due to the causal deterministic behavior.
- Immutable State: Redux encourages immutability, meaning you don’t directly modify the state object. Instead, you create a new state object with the desired changes. This improves performance and simplifies debugging.
- Actions: Actions are plain JavaScript objects that describe what happened in the application. These actions are dispatched to the Redux store to trigger state updates.
- Reducers: Reducers are pure functions that take the current state and an action as input, and return the new state object based on the action type.
Benefits of Using Redux
Here are some benefits of using Redux in your React applications:
- Improved Predictability: Redux promotes a predictable way to manage state, making it easier to understand how your application behaves and debug issues.
- Centralized State Management: Having a single source of truth for application state simplifies reasoning about data flow and avoids inconsistencies.
- Improved Testability: The separation of concerns and use of pure functions in Redux lead to more easily testable code.
- Large Community and Ecosystem: Redux has a large and active community, with numerous libraries and tools built around it. This provides extensive support and resources for developers.
Redux brings the environment of a strict and predictable management of the application state to complicated building processes in React. It takes a bit of time learning, but in terms of maintaining, testing and scalability, it is one of the most effective tools, which can be used to build massive and dynamic React apps. Nonetheless, Redux could be an overkill in relatively small and uncomplicated applications.
Axios
Axios is a popular and widely used promise-based HTTP client library for making API requests in JavaScript applications. It offers a clean, modern, and intuitive API for fetching data from servers and handling responses. Axios boasts over 100k stars on GitHub, solidifying its position as a widely adopted and popular choice among developers in the JavaScript community.
Axios is a HTTP client library that simplifies making API requests (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) in JavaScript applications, especially React projects. It excels at fetching data from external APIs to populate your UI, sending data to servers for actions like form submissions, and managing the asynchronous nature of these requests using Promises for a smoother data flow within your application.
Key Features of Axios Library
Here are some key features that make Axios a popular choice for making HTTP requests:
- Promise-Based API: Axios uses Promises for handling asynchronous requests and responses. This provides a clean and modern approach compared to traditional callbacks.
- Interceptors: Axios allows you to define interceptors for request and response handling. This enables features like adding authentication headers to all requests or handling errors globally.
- Automatic JSON Transformation: By default, Axios automatically parses JSON responses for you, simplifying data handling.
- Cancellation Support: cancel(); is available out of the box in Axios which can be helpful in enhancing the capacity or look and feel of the application.
- Browser and Node. js Support: Axios ‘can be used in both the browser environment and Node.js’. It runs in both node.js and browser environments, which makes it an HTTP client library.
Benefits of Using Axios
Here are some benefits of using Axios in your JavaScript applications:
- Simplified API: Axios gives a simple and neat HTTP API to make requests, and would be simpler than the native Fetch API or XMLHttpRequest. Promise-Based Handling: It is more comprehensive and easier to read and manage; it enhances code fluency and easy to manage.
- Promise-Based Handling: It is more comprehensive and easier to read and manage; it enhances code fluency and easy to manage.
- Interceptors: Interceptors offer flexibility for centralizing common request or response handling logic.
- Automatic JSON Parsing: Most API developers rely on JSON format and automatic parsing is helpful in the later since it eliminates the need to manually go through it. Cancellation Support: ToDelete really makes more sense when used with more overall control to enhance the throughput and user experience where the request may be long.
- Cancellation Support: ToDelete really makes more sense when used with more overall control to enhance the throughput and user experience where the request may be long.
- Wide Browser and Node.js Support: Axios’s compatibility across environments makes it a versatile choice for various JavaScript projects.
Axios is a great and flexible HTTP client that makes it easier to handle APIs in JavaScript applications. It has a clean API, uses promises, and includes such options as interceptors, while its cancellation support makes it useful for developers using React and other JavaScript frameworks.
Material UI
Material UI is an extensive, open source React UI library which incorporates Google’s Material Design. They offer a wide variety of prefabricated and easily adjustable widgets that have been designed with Material Design in mind. This enables you to be able to create good and appealing graphical user interface applications in React with ease. The sign of how popular it is, perhaps measured by the number of stars, which at the time of writing was 68,374, on the Material UI GitHub repository.
Material UI is a React component library offering a vast collection of pre-built UI elements like buttons, menus, and dialogs that follow Material Design guidelines. This allows for rapid UI development, a consistent and user-friendly experience, and customization to match your branding or design needs. Theming capabilities further enhance this by letting you define a central theme for a cohesive visual style throughout your React application.
Key Features of Material UI Library
Here are some key features that make Material UI a popular choice for building React UIs:
- Rich Component Set: Material UI provides a vast collection of components covering various UI elements, from basic buttons and forms to complex navigation menus and data tables.
- Customizability: As for components’ appearance, you can use props, themes, or even CSS classes for the specified components.
- Accessibility: Material UI includes accessibility and thus makes your applications accessible to any user regardless of a disability.
- Internationalization (i18n) Support: Internationalization is also supported in Material UI, meaning that it would be easy to translate your application to another language.
- TypeScript Support: Material UI comes with the option of extra definitions in TypeScript as a way to enhance the type safety and the development process.
Benefits of Using Material UI
Here are some benefits of using Material UI in your React applications:
- Faster Development: This is because you can be able to make a lot of changes to the pre-built components and customization options when using React.
- Consistent and Beautiful UI: Material Design principles make sure that when the user is in your application, the interface is going to look good.
- Improved User Experience: Staying true to design patterns brings general understanding of the interface environment to a user’s sight.
- Focus on Code: Using pre-built components, (S), you can avoid the considerable amount of time you need to spend on the development of the UI and thus, you can work on the real logic of applications.
- Large Community and Ecosystem: Material UI’s community is quite large and there is much content and resources that are available to developers.
Material UI is a performance-oriented, complex suite to help develop UI in React. Being based on Material Design and providing designers with the opportunity to use a broad set of components, Material UI enables one to develop aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-navigate, and consistent applications for React environment. As with any new technology, it can take the average user some time to get familiar with it but in the long run, the time that would have been taken to make a good UI design would have been sufficient to learn this new framework.
Styled Components
Styled Components is one of the trends for React that give opportunities to write CSS in JS, precisely in components. There is actually a method called CSS in JS that provides a better and more efficient way to style your components. Over 57,000 stars on GitHub repository. This is a significant number, indicating strong adoption and popularity within the React development community.
Styled Components is a React library for writing CSS directly within your components. This enables component-specific styling, avoiding conflicts, and promotes maintainability. It allows for dynamic styling based on props or state, theming for consistent visual style, and keeps styles close to the components they apply to for improved code readability.
Key Features of Styled Components Library
Here are some key features that make Styled Components a popular choice for styling React applications:
- Tagged Template Literals: Styles are defined using tagged template literals, which means that allow using CSS-like syntax in JavaScript.
- Scoping: This is because styles are naturally confined to the component in which they are used which eliminates cases of style overlap.
- Theming: Styled Components also has concept of theming which enables you to create reusable styles that can be use throughout your application.
- Prop-Based Styling: You can define styles that would be dependent of the props received by the component, allowing interactive styles or styles based on a specific value.
- Integration with Other CSS-in-JS Libraries: Although, Styled Components is very flexible, it is possible to use it in combination with other CSS-in-JS solutions in case of need in more complex styling.
Benefits of Using Styled Components
Here are some benefits of using Styled Components in your React applications:
- Improved Maintainability: If styles are kept close to the components that they apply they are easier to understand, and can also be updated much easier.
- Reduced CSS Complexity: Due to the fact that Styled Components does not uses global styles and class names, this decreases the chances of getting congested CSS code.
- Dynamic Styling: The fact that it is possible to style item either using props or state provides opportunities to have interactive and data processed UI items.
- Better Readability: Anything that includes both the logical and stylistic components within one file would be easier to discern and comprehend.
- Improved Developer Experience: Compared to other methods of styling the React components,Styled Components is much easier to use.
Styled Components is a powerful and convenient library for styling React applications. It promotes component-specific styling, dynamic styling capabilities, and improved maintainability. While it requires a slight shift in mindset compared to traditional CSS, Styled Components can significantly enhance the way you approach styling in your React projects.
Formik
Formik is an open-source library that aims at solving the problem of forms in the applications built with React. It provides a declarative and functional solution to manage form state, validation, and submission and therefore makes the form creation in React easier and fun.
Formik simplifies building React forms by handling the repetitive tasks: managing form state (values, errors, visited fields), validation (rules and error messages), and submission (single onSubmit handler). This declarative approach promotes readable code and reduces boilerplate, making form development in React more efficient and enjoyable.
Key Features of Formik Library
Here are some key features that make Formik a valuable tool for React form development:
- Declarative Approach: Formik encourages defining form logic declaratively, focusing on what the form should do rather than how to manage its state manually.
- Flexibility: You can choose to use Formik’s built-in features for form state and validation, or integrate it with other validation libraries like Yup for more complex validation needs.
- Error Handling: Formik provides clear error messages and simplifies displaying them to users within the form.
- Performance Optimization: Formik helps optimize form performance by only re-rendering parts of the form that need to update.
- Customizable: While Formik provides default functionality, it allows customization of various aspects of the form behavior and appearance.
Benefits of Using Formik
Here are some benefits of using Formik in your React applications:
- Simplified Form Development: Formik streamlines the process of building forms, saving you time and effort compared to manual state management.
- Improved Code Readability: Declarative approach enhances the form’s logic to become cleaner and easier to be read while maintaining the minimal possibility of having the code bugs.
- Reduced Boilerplate Code: Formik saves the time of writing a number of lines of code to manage the state of the form and validate fields.
- Flexibility and Customization: The features of Formik are quite rich and serve as a good starting point while there is quite a lot of flexibility in the implementation of forms.
- Strong Community and Ecosystem: Formik is very popular and is actively being developed, so there are a lot of resources and additional tools to help you create solid and convenient forms.
Formik is a great library that allows the integrator to create sophisticated and highly adaptable forms in their React programs. That is why its declarative approach, embedded features, and the ability to further customize it, make it rather popular among developers who want to reduce the development of forms, as well as need to maintain the code in the future. No matter if you are working with basic forms or forms with complex validation rules Formik can greatly improve your work with React forms.
React Query
React Query can be described as a modern, high-performance library of higher-order functions that aims to simplify data fetching and updating in APIS in React applications. It is an imperative and fire-and-forget model for getting data from APIs, storing responses, and syncing your UI as much as possible with little code.
React Query makes the process of fetching data in the React applications quite easy and offers a set of hooks to define how to fetch the data from APIs. Engages in handling of asynchronous requests, caching data with enhanced performance and does your UI update without having to be done manually. This includes features for optimistic updates, showing users a temporary representation while the actual update happens in the background.
Key Features of React Query Library
Here are some key features that make React Query a popular choice for data fetching in React:
- Declarative Approach: You define how to fetch data and React Query handles the rest, promoting cleaner and more readable code.
- Automatic Caching: React Query automatically caches fetched data, improving performance and reducing unnecessary API calls.
- Automatic Updates: Your UI automatically reflects changes in the data, simplifying state management and keeping your application in sync.
- Optimistic Updates: React Query allows for optimistic updates, providing a smoother user experience by showing temporary changes while data updates in the background.
- Mutations: It provides support for handling mutations (data updates on the server) and keeping your UI consistent with the server state.
- Fine-Grained Control: Despite its automatic nature, React Query offers customization options for specific use cases.
Benefits of Using React Query
Here are some benefits of using React Query in your React applications:
- Simplified Data Fetching: React Query eliminates a lot of the complexity of working with asynchronous data requests, allowing for the data to be fetched and used within components.
- Improved Performance: Caching automatically makes an application efficient to work with as it eradicates the continuous use of Application Programming Interface.
- Reduced Boilerplate Code: React Query eliminates the need to write a lot of repetitive code for data fetching and state management.
- Automatic UI Updates: Your UI stays up-to-date with the latest data automatically, improving user experience and reducing the need for manual state manipulation.
- Focus on Business Logic: Therefore, instead of writing data fetching and cache handling in your components, you can use React Query to do this for you and thus, concentrate on the main business logic of your application.
React Query itself is quite good and may be useful in certain specific cases for managing data state and fetching in React applications. For this reason, its declarative nature, numerous automatics, and possibilities for adjustments are being lucrative for the developers who look for an easy way to handle data, increase performance, and create semantically correct React applications.
React Bootstrap
React Bootstrap is a front-end library that combines two common frameworks into one: the Bootstrap and the React. It is a package of pre-crafted and responsive React components which are compatible with Bootstrap look and feel. This enables you to rapidly develop site April 2021 that are clean, modern and responsive user interfaces (UIs) for your React applications.
React Bootstrap is a collection of pre-built, responsive UI components building on top of both Bootstrap and React.js, which helps you to build beautiful and easily navigable UIs in your applications at a very fast rate. It also brings a clean design with uniform look and feel, adjustability to different view ports and possibilities to adjust to your design preferences.
Key Features of React Bootstrap Library
Here are some key features that make React Bootstrap a popular choice for building UIs in React:
- Rich Component Set: Most of the components that are included in the React Bootstrap library are undoubtedly great; there is almost nothing that can be said about it as it has a wealth of components that ranges from basic ones, such as buttons and forms to the more complex ones including navbars, tabs, dropdowns, and data tables among others.
- Responsive Design: Responsive designs are incorporated in every aspect, therefore the UI of your designs will shift according to screens sizes.
- Customization: The look and feel of the components can be controlled by using props, themes or CSS classes of your own.
- Integration with Bootstrap: React Bootstrap works based on basic Bootstrap’s functionality and styles which are very familiar to developers who already using Bootstrap.
- Accessibility: Like all of our UI tools, the components in React Bootstrap are designed for accessibility, meaning your applications will be accessible by anyone.
Benefits of Using React Bootstrap
Here are some benefits of using React Bootstrap in your React applications:
- Faster Development: Thus, the pre-built components and the options of customization should help you write React code much faster.
- Beautiful and Responsive UIs: Bootstrap contains all the rules that entail your application to be a visual masterpiece and is responsive.
- Improved User Experience: In simple terms, we use Bootstrap design patterns such that the user of your application will interact with it in a seamless manner.
- Focus on Code: With the complexes like pre-built components, one does not have to dedicate considerable time on the UI and can rather concentrate on the application’s logic.
- Large Community and Ecosystem: It is also important to admit, that React Bootstrap has a great community with a lot of resources and tools for developers.
React Bootstrap is one of the most useful tools for creating responsive UI interfaces in the React application. It offers a vast component library, follows the Bootstrap design system, and allows customizations to be built while making the work of a UI developer much more manageable and effective to deliver a consistent and easy-to-navigate UI. Despite the fact that it can have a stereotype for those who use Bootstrap for the first time, it can be very efficient in terms of designing rapid, high quality and optimized to the devices kind.
React Hook Form
React Hook Form is one among the mostly used library for form development in the React applications and based on the hooks. It offers a fast, efficient and versatile solution for the management of form state, the form validation, and form submission so as to improve the form development process within the contexts of the React library.
React Hook Form simplifies building forms in React using hooks. It efficiently manages form state (values, errors), offers built-in validation with clear error messages, and provides a single onSubmit handler for form submission, reducing boilerplate code and improving overall form development experience.
Key Features of React Hook Form Library
Here are some key features that make React Hook Form a popular choice for React form development:
- Hook-based Approach: React Hook Form leverages React hooks, promoting a concise and modern approach to form management.
- Performance: It prioritizes performance by minimizing unnecessary re-renders and optimizing state updates.
- Validation: Built-in validation features streamline defining validation rules and displaying error messages.
- Default Values: You can easily set default values for form fields.
- Re-validation: React Hook Form offers options for re-validating the form based on user interactions or external events.
- Customization: While offering defaults, React Hook Form allows customization of various form behaviors and appearances.
Benefits of Using React Hook Form
Here are some benefits of using React Hook Form in your React applications:
- Simplified Form Development: React Hook Form streamlines the process of building forms, saving you time and effort compared to manual state management.
- Improved Code Readability: Due to the usage of hooks, the code becomes cleaner and is easier to read and comprehend what really happens in the form.
- Reduced Boilerplate Code: Overall, React Hook Form will let you spend less code on the operational level since it will manage the state and the form validation for you.
- Performance Optimization: Performance aspect makes certain that your forms load properly, and run without straining the user’s experience.
- Strong Community and Ecosystem: Currently, React Hook Form has a strong community and continuously has resources and tools you can rely on when developing powerful and more accessible forms.
React Hook Form is quite effective and easy to implement the forms in the React applications. That is why it is a powerful tool used by developers who would like to enhance the user experience while filling the form in their React API and simplify the work on form creation with the help of hooks, focus on resulting performance, numerous in-built features, and possibilities to customize.
React Helmet
React Helmet is used in applications that have been developed using React as the homepage library for describing the document head tags, or elements. It offers an efficient and a proper way of controlling some features such as <title>, <meta>, <link> etc. which in turn makes the process of SEO optimization and control over the head content easier.
React Helmet simplifies managing the document head in React applications. It lets you dynamically set titles, add or modify meta tags for SEO and social media, control link tags for styles and resources, and even inject custom content or scripts into the head, all through a declarative approach that improves code readability and centralized control over your React app’s head content.
Key Features of React Helmet Library
Here are some key features that make React Helmet a valuable tool for managing the document head in React:
- Declarative Approach: Decide what should be rendered in the head section using React components so that the code is more clean and readable.
- Server-Side Rendering Support: React Helmet is designed to work well in conjunction with server side rendering, it keeps the head content in sync both on the server and the client.
- Default Values: It provides default values for common meta tags, reducing boilerplate code.
- Overriding and Nesting: React Helmet allows overriding previously defined head elements and nesting Helmet components for complex scenarios.
- Safety and Sanitation: React Helmet helps prevent XSS vulnerabilities by sanitizing user-provided content injected into the head.
Benefits of Using React Helmet
Here are some benefits of using React Helmet in your React applications:
- Improved Code Readability: The declarative approach keeps your code clean and easier to understand compared to manually manipulating DOM elements.
- Simplified SEO Management: React Helmet makes it easy to manage meta tags and titles for better SEO optimization.
- Centralized Control: It provides a central location for managing all head elements, improving maintainability and consistency.
- Server-Side Rendering Compatibility: Ensuring consistent head content on both the server and client-side is crucial for SEO and initial page load experience.
- Reduced Boilerplate Code: Default values and features like overriding and nesting minimize repetitive code for common head management tasks.
The React Helmet is a high utility and flexibility library for handling the document head in React applications. That is why using the mentioned tool is beneficial for developers who want to have better head management, improve SEO, and get rid of heavy and tangled code in their React applications.