5 Must-Have React Libraries to Supercharge Your Projects in 2021

React‘s ecosystem is massive, with hundreds of libraries available to extend and enhance your projects. But with so many choices, it can be overwhelming to figure out which libraries are worth adding to your tech stack.

As a professional React developer who has built dozens of real-world applications, I‘m here to share my top 5 picks for libraries that can take your productivity and code quality to the next level. Whether you‘re building a simple prototype or a complex enterprise app, these libraries are battle-tested, widely adopted, and can save you a ton of time and headaches.

We‘ll dive into libraries for faster development, seamless data fetching, intuitive state management, sleek UI components, and robust forms. By the end, you‘ll walk away with a powerful arsenal of tools to build React apps faster and better than ever before. Let‘s jump in!

1. Vite: Lightning-Fast Development

If you‘ve ever been frustrated with how long it takes Create React App to start up, Vite is here to save the day. Vite is a build tool that leverages native ES modules in the browser to enable lightning-fast server starts and updates.

Under the hood, Vite pre-bundles your dependencies using esbuild, a JavaScript bundler written in Go. Then during development, it serves your source code over native ES modules, only transpiling on demand for browsers that don‘t support them. The result is dev server start times that are 10-100x faster than Webpack-based solutions like Create React App.

But Vite isn‘t just fast – it‘s also easy to set up and highly configurable. You can use Vite with vanilla JavaScript, TypeScript, or frameworks like React, Vue, and Svelte. Plus, it has a plugin system that lets you easily extend its functionality.

Here‘s how simple it is to scaffold a React project with Vite:

npm init @vitejs/app my-react-app --template react
cd my-react-app 
npm install
npm run dev

And just like that, you have a lightning-fast React development environment up and running! Give Vite a try in your next project and experience the difference in speed for yourself.

2. React Query: Powerful Data Fetching & Caching

Fetching data from APIs is a common task in React applications, but it can quickly get messy and complex. You have to deal with loading states, error handling, caching, and keeping the UI in sync with the server.

React Query makes all of this a breeze by providing a powerful set of hooks for fetching, caching, and updating data. With React Query, you can replace sprawling data fetching logic with just a few lines of code.

At its core, React Query lets you define "queries" – functions that return a promise, usually from fetching data. When you call a query, React Query will automatically:

• Fetch the data
• Handle loading and error states
• Cache the data and avoid unnecessary requests
• Update the cache when you make mutations
• Refetch the data on a configurable interval or when the window refocuses
• Seamlessly share the cache state across your entire application

Here‘s an example of fetching and rendering a list of posts with React Query:

import { useQuery } from ‘react-query‘

function Posts() {
  const { data, status } = useQuery(‘posts‘, async () => {
    const res = await fetch(‘https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts‘)
    return res.json()
  })

  if (status === ‘loading‘) return <div>Loading...</div>
  if (status === ‘error‘) return <div>Error fetching posts!</div>

  return (
    <ul>
      {data.map(post => (
        <li key={post.id}>{post.title}</li>
      ))}
    </ul>
  )
}

With just the useQuery hook, we‘re able to fetch the posts, handle the status, and cache the result. No need for global state, reducers, actions, or thunks. And if we update a post, we can easily invalidate the query to trigger a refetch.

React Query has become my go-to data fetching library for its power, simplicity, and excellent developer experience. Give it a try and see how much boilerplate it can eliminate from your data layer!

3. Zustand: Dead-Simple State Management

While React Query excels at managing server state, you‘ll often need to manage client state as well – things like UI toggles, form inputs, and more. Many developers reach for Redux, but let‘s be honest, Redux is infamously complex, with its actions, reducers, thunks, sagas, and more.

Enter Zustand – a small, fast, and scalable state management library that makes working with state a breeze. Zustand uses a hooks-first approach that feels very natural in a modern React application.

At its core, Zustand lets you create a "store" that holds your application state. You can then access that state and modify it directly from your components using hooks.

Here‘s a simple counter example with Zustand:

import create from ‘zustand‘

const useStore = create(set => ({
  count: 0,
  increment: () => set(state => ({ count: state.count + 1 })),
  decrement: () => set(state => ({ count: state.count - 1 })),
}))

function Counter() {
  const { count, increment, decrement } = useStore()

  return (
    <div>

      <button onClick={decrement}>-</button>
      <button onClick={increment}>+</button>
    </div>
  )
}

We create a store with an initial count state of 0, and increment and decrement functions to update it. We can then use the useStore hook to access the state and functions directly in our component. It‘s that simple!

Zustand has a tiny footprint (less than 1kb gzipped), but it‘s packed with features like memoization, batched updates, and middleware support. It can scale from small to very large applications.

If you‘re tired of the ceremony and boilerplate of Redux, give Zustand a try for your client state needs. It‘s quickly become one of my favorite libraries for its simplicity and performance.

4. Chakra UI: Build Accessible Apps with Speed

While React lets you build your UI from the ground up, sometimes you just want a set of high-quality, pre-built components to hit the ground running. That‘s where component libraries come in, and Chakra UI is one of the best.

Chakra UI is a simple, modular, and accessible component library that gives you the building blocks you need to build React applications quickly. It‘s designed with composition and accessibility in mind, so you can focus on your unique app logic.

One of my favorite aspects of Chakra UI is its intuitive style props system. Rather than writing custom CSS, you can pass style props directly to components:

import { Box, Text, Heading, Button } from ‘@chakra-ui/react‘

function Card() {
  return (
    <Box p={4} borderWidth={1} borderRadius="lg">
      <Heading as="h2" size="xl" mb={2}>
        Welcome to Chakra UI
      </Heading>
      <Text fontSize="lg" mb={4}>
        Chakra UI is a simple, modular and accessible component library that
        gives you the building blocks you need to build your React applications.
      </Text>
      <Button colorScheme="blue">Get Started</Button>
    </Box>
  )
}

With style props like p for padding, borderWidth, borderRadius, mb for margin-bottom, and more, you can quickly style your components without leaving your JSX. Chakra UI also uses a theme system under the hood to ensure consistency and easy customization.

But Chakra UI isn‘t just about styling. It also provides a robust set of accessible components right out of the box, including:

• Layout components like Box, Grid, Stack, and Container
• Typography components like Text, Heading, and Link
• Form components like Input, Select, Checkbox, and Radio
• Overlay components like Modal, Popover, Tooltip, and Alert
• Navigation components like Breadcrumb, Menu, and Tabs
• And many more!

Each component follows WAI-ARIA best practices and includes keyboard navigation and focus management where needed.

If you want to build React apps quickly without sacrificing quality or accessibility, Chakra UI is an excellent choice. It‘s become my go-to component library for its simplicity, flexibility, and commitment to accessibility.

5. React Hook Form: Painless Forms in React

Forms are a part of nearly every web application, but they can be surprisingly difficult to build and manage in React. You have to deal with controlled inputs, validation, error handling, submission, and more. It‘s easy for form code to become long, complex, and buggy.

React Hook Form solves this by providing a performant, flexible, and extensible approach to building forms in React. With React Hook Form, you can build forms with less code, better validation, and improved performance compared to traditional approaches.

At its core, React Hook Form uses uncontrolled inputs with refs to minimize the number of re-renders. It then uses a register function to register your inputs with the form, which provides validation, error handling, and submission out of the box.

Here‘s a simple login form with React Hook Form:

import { useForm } from ‘react-hook-form‘

function LoginForm() {
  const { register, handleSubmit, errors } = useForm()

  const onSubmit = data => {
    console.log(data)
  }

  return (
    <form onSubmit={handleSubmit(onSubmit)}>
      <input
        name="email"
        ref={register({
          required: ‘Email is required‘,
          pattern: {
            value: /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}$/i,
            message: ‘Invalid email address‘,
          },
        })}
      />
      {errors.email && <span>{errors.email.message}</span>}

      <input
        name="password"
        type="password"
        ref={register({
          required: ‘Password is required‘,
          minLength: {
            value: 8,
            message: ‘Password must have at least 8 characters‘,
          },
        })}
      />
      {errors.password && <span>{errors.password.message}</span>}

      <button type="submit">Submit</button>
    </form>
  )
}

We use the useForm hook to get a register function, handleSubmit function, and errors object. We then pass our inputs to register with our validation rules. React Hook Form will automatically validate the inputs and populate the errors object with any validation messages.

We can then use handleSubmit to handle the form submission and access the form data. React Hook Form takes care of preventing the default form submission and only calls our onSubmit function if the form is valid.

React Hook Form has many more features like custom validation, schema validation with Yup or Joi, dependent fields, array fields, and more. It can handle even the most complex forms with ease.

If you‘re building forms in React, React Hook Form is a must-have library. It will save you time, reduce your code, and provide a better user experience. Give it a try in your next project!

Conclusion

There you have it – my top 5 React libraries for building better applications in 2021. To recap, we covered:

1. Vite for lightning-fast development
2. React Query for powerful data fetching and caching
3. Zustand for dead-simple state management
4. Chakra UI for building accessible apps with speed
5. React Hook Form for painless forms in React

Each of these libraries can significantly improve your React development experience by solving common pain points and providing a better developer experience. They are all widely adopted, well-maintained, and can scale from small to large applications.

I encourage you to try out one or more of these libraries in your next React project. They have certainly made my life as a React developer easier and more productive. Let me know how they work for you!

What are some of your favorite React libraries? Share them in the comments below. Happy coding!