9 React Libraries you should be using in 2020
Developed by Facebook in 2013, React is a widely used Javascript library that helps you build user interfaces for both web and mobile apps.
Basically, React consists of reusable pieces of code called “components”. It’s open-source, which has prompted developers around the web to build their own super helpful React Libraries, that can seriously speed up your team’s work.
Whether you’re just getting started or you’re an experienced react developer, you should keep these React Libraries close before starting your next project:
Material UI is one of the most popular react libraries out there. The components in this library make use of Google’s Material Design and include, among others, a wide range of buttons, icons, menus, sliders and dialog boxes.
It’s quite easy to implement and the documentation is extensive, in case you get stuck.
Redux is an open-source library for managing application state. Even though it’s not exclusively used with React, it is one of its most common uses.
Redux keeps the state of your app in a store, and each component can access any state it needs from it. In their own words, Redux “helps you write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments (client, server, and native), and are easy to test.”
As you probably guessed, the React Bootstrap library consists of Bootstrap components built with React.
It is one of the oldest React libraries and replaces the older Bootstrap Javascript in order to give the developer more control over the different components.
React DND is different from most of the other drag-and-drop libraries, since it was built on the HTML5 drag-and-drop API.
React DND helps you build advanced drag-and-drop interfaces while keeping your components decoupled.
Originally created by the Airbnb team and released in 2015, Enzyme was built to test React components.
It’s API is intuitive and flexible and it can be used with a wide variety of test runners like Mocha, Karma and Jest.
Ant Design is a design system that provides over 50 customizable high-quality components and demos crafted with a specific philosophy in mind for interactive UI’s.
It’s written in TypeScript with predictable static types and supports all modern browsers.
Blueprint focuses on complex data-dense desktop applications. It was built by Palantir, a US tech company specializing in big data analytics.
This React library features a wide range of useful components, from different kinds of dropdowns, breadcrumbs, buttons and navbars to Date-Time pickers, interactive tables and over 300 icons.
Onsen UI is the perfect React library if you’re building cross-platform web mobile applications. It’s written in pure Javascript which means you can also use it with Angular and Vue, for example, besides React.
Onsen UI provides many different components such as tabs, stack navigation and side menus, all of which have iOS and Android support using the same source code.
Rebass has a very simple beginning: it has eight main components in a super small file which are built for responsive web design and are extensible and themable.
It is based on the Styled System library which gives an amazing developer experience
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These were the 9 React libraries you should use, or at least know of, in 2020!
At Space, we use and recommend these to make your job as a developer (and your life!) easier. Are you already using most of them? Do you have a favorite?
