Top 7 React State Management Libraries to use in 2024

State management in React applications is an important aspect. It ensures that a React application’s data or ‘state’, is consistently maintained across the application. It helps in various aspects:

1.?Consistency: It ensures that the data used by various components or views is always recent and synchronized.

2.?Predictability: Allows the app developers to know how the data flows in the application and ensures a predictable outcome when the state changes.

3.?Avoid Redundancy: Avoids duplication or redundancy of the data by updating only specific and needed components.

4.?Debugging: Makes it easier to trace how the state changes affect the behavior of the application.

What is State Management? [ An analogy ]

Imagine you're running a restaurant. You have a big whiteboard in the kitchen where you write down orders, available dishes, and customer preferences. This whiteboard is your state—the important information everyone in the restaurant needs to know.

Now, if you update the whiteboard, you need to make sure everyone knows about it immediately, so they're all on the same page and don’t serve the wrong food.

State management in a React app works the same way. It helps make sure that whenever something changes (like a user clicking a button or updating data), the app updates everywhere it needs to without confusion. State management is a concept requiring in-depth understanding. Understanding what is state management? Is important before exploring the libraries in detail.

State management? in React applications

State management in React applications is done using two methods.

1.?Without libraries also called local state management.

2.?Using React state management libraries.

Local state management is managing the state in each individual component using hooks like ‘useState’ or the ‘this.State’ property in class components.

The other way to manage state in React applications is by using various libraries which we will explore in detail in the next section.

Top 7 React state management libraries as of 2024

1.?Redux: Redux is the first and the most widely used state management library in React applications. It centralizes the entire app's state in a single object called the store, allowing predictable state changes. State updates are triggered by actions, which describe what happened (e.g., a button click). These actions are processed by reducers, pure functions that specify how the state changes in response to the actions.

2.?Recoil: Recoil is a state management library for React that simplifies managing both local and global state. It introduces the concept of atoms (units of state) and selectors (functions that derive state). Atoms are shared across components, and any component using an atom re-renders when its state changes. Selectors are used to compute or transform state dynamically, making the system efficient and flexible.

3.?MobX: MobX is a state management library for JavaScript applications, known for its simplicity and reactivity. It allows states to be stored as observable objects, which automatically update any part of the UI that depends on them. MobX promotes a declarative approach, focusing on what needs to be rendered rather than how to update it.

4.?Zustand: Zustand is a lightweight and flexible state management library for React that simplifies managing both local and global state. Zustand provides a central store where state is managed and can be accessed by any component, with automatic re-rendering when the state changes.

5. Jotai: Jotai is a minimalist state management library for React, designed to be simple and flexible. It manages state using atoms, which represent individual units of state. Each atom can be directly accessed and updated by components, and changes to an atom automatically trigger re-renders in any component using it. Jotai supports advanced features like derived state and asynchronous atoms, which allow you to compute or fetch state dynamically.

6.?RTK Query: RTK Query is a powerful data-fetching and caching tool built into Redux Toolkit (RTK) that simplifies handling server-side state in React applications. It abstracts complex data-fetching logic, providing automatic caching, background updates, and re-fetching when data becomes stale.

7.?SWR: Stale-While-Revalidate is a React library for data fetching that simplifies the process of managing remote data. It uses the stale-while-revalidate caching strategy, where data is first served from the cache (stale), and then revalidated by fetching the latest data (while-revalidate). This ensures that the user sees cached data immediately while the latest data is fetched in the background.

These are some of the widely used React state management libraries for efficient state management processes. You can know about each in detail over an extensive article including pros and cons of each library. Explore the top React state management libraries in more detail