13 Essential React Libraries to Boost Development

To be a modern React developer is more than understanding React’s core concepts. It’s also about getting versed with the entire React ecosystem. It includes the knowledge as well as experience of it’s Libraries. These applications used libraries to help make the development process easier. Even when one doesn’t have the experience to work with it, to be aware of it is important. It helps to solve the problems better.

The given article here will provide detailed information about the useful libraries. The React developers can use it to do their job better.

Useful React Libraries for Devs

There are different React libraries. Some useful ones are,

TanStack Query

Developed by Tanner Linsley, TanStack Query is an open-source library. It’s a data-fetching library for the React. It has 1.7 million+ weekly downloads on the NPM. While on GitHub, it has 35k stars as of August 2023.

React doesn’t have the standard method to fetch data. It needs developers to use useState or useEffect hooks. It even uses general-purpose state management libraries. TanStack Query, it streamlines the data-fetching process within React applications. It reduces the complex logic. It minimizes the code lines while enhancing the code maintainability. It even enhances the app’s performance.

Some of the key features of it are,

• Scroll Recovery
• Render-as-you-fetch
• Auto Refetching
• Auto Caching, etc.

Redux

It is the open-source JavaScript’s state management library. It has 58K stars on the GitHub. It also has 7.8 million+ weekly downloads on the NPM as of August 2023.

Redux offers the predictable container state for the JavaScript apps. It ensures the consistent behaviour across varied environments while having ease in testing. Redux further offers,

• Robust developer experience via live code editing and the time-traveling debugger.
• Centralization of application state. It makes it easy to be testable and also debuggable using DevTools of its own.
• Flexibility with the larger ecosystem of the add-ons.

Mui

It is one of the top React libraries which facilitates the rapid development of UI. It has 4 foundational libraries,

• Joy UI- for the designed components that are beautiful.
• Material UI- for Material Design for Google.
• Base UI- for the headless hooks and components.
• MUI System- for CSS utilities.

With the 88k GitHub stars and around 2.9 million+ weekly NPM downloads, the library is popular. It was designed for helping the developers build and ship the UI fast.

React Bootstrap

It is a standalone UI library. It brings components of Bootstrap to React without reliance on jQuery/Bootstrap.js. It has over 21K stars on the GitHub. While there were 2.4 million weekly downloads on NPM as of August 2023. The library is easy to use. It is stateful and has accessible components. All this makes it an excellent choice to build the application UIs.

React DND

It is the library for the implementation of drag-and-drop functions within React applications. It leverages HTML5 drag-and-drop API. It is pretty straightforward to use. It has different practical applications within the real world. As in August 2023, it had 19K stars on the GitHub, while the NPM’s weekly download was 1.8 million.

SWR

SWR is a very compact, data-fetching library for the React. It offers features including,

• Built-in cache
• Pagination
• Suspense
• Reusable data fetching, etc.

It is one of the alternatives to the React Query. It has 27k stars on the GitHub. It also has 1.2 million downloads weekly on the NPM. To understand more, in specific, about, reactjs development services, hire a professional today. They will handle all your queries, offering solutions as required.

React Hook Form

It is a high-performing and dependency-free library for the form building within React. The library helps to enhance the app’s performance by reducing of code. It further does so with the isolation of re-renders and then enabling the faster mounting.

React Hook Form feature is Native HTML form validation & integration with UI libraries. It then validates schemas like Zod and Yup. As of August 2023, the library had 36k GitHub stars and 3..4 million weekly NPM downloads. In short, it’s one of the best React libraries and frameworks.

Recharts

Recharts is the charting library that’s open-source. It was built with D3 and React. It provides native SVG support and has 11 built-in chart components. Some of these components are BarChart and AreaChart. It simplifies chart integration into React apps.

As of August 2023, Recharts had 20k stars on the GitHub. It also has 1.3 million downloads weekly on the NPM.

React Router

React Router is another popular React libraries and frameworks routing library. It has 50k GitHub stars and 10 million weekly NPM downloads (as of August 2023). The library supports the routing across the web, React Native environments and servers. It was developed by the team that’s behind the Remix framework. It is used by prominent companies like Netflix, Microsoft, and Twitter.

Blueprint

It is the React-based UI toolkit. It’s optimized to build the data-dense web interfaces for the desktop apps. It has 7 NPM packages. It includes,

• Core UI Components
• Date-time interaction tools
• Item selectors
• Timezone tools
• Popovers
• Vector Icons
• Interactive Tables

Blueprint, as of August 2023, had 20K GitHub stars.

React Virtualized

It’s designed to handle large lists as well as tabular data efficiently within React apps. It’s useful for apps managing the extensive datasets. In August 2023, it had 25K GitHub stars with 2.5 million NPM weekly downloads.

React Suite

It is a React component libraries comprehensive set that’s aimed at enterprise systems. It offers well-designed UI components like Drawers, Loaders and Buttons. Its distinguishable features are its depth and superior design. In August 2023, it had 7K GitHub stars and around 60K weekly NPM downloads.

TailwindCSS

It is the utility-first CSS framework. It’s used to rapidly style websites. It isn’t a React library but a CSS styling framework. It’s a popular choice among React Developers. It’s used by them to style the apps.

Tailwind makes UI building easy using utility classes, including text-center, flex, pt-4, and more. Each of these has CSS values that are pre-defined. It becomes active after a particular class is assigned to the particular JSX element. Tailwind has 71k GitHub stars and 6 million+ weekly NPM downloads (August 2023).

Final Words

It’s not necessary to learn all the above-said React libraries and frameworks to have Reactjs development services. Most of them have similar uses. To say, MUI, React Suite, and React Bootstrap are the UI component libraries. Instead, you can try to work with the libraries used for varied purposes. To say, build the React app, which uses the React Suite for UI, React Query for data fetching, and more. Now, it’s also not necessary that you have to use what we suggest. It’s all on you and your purpose as to what you choose and what you use. Make sure you make better decisions.