React Query vs Redux: Making State Management Choices

Category App Development, Product engineering

Do you need Redux to handle the state, or would something like React Query be sufficient? 

Let’s dive deep into this to choose the appropriate way to manage the state in your next React application.

React Query is a popular JavaScript library that simplifies data fetching and state management in React applications. It provides a set of hooks and utilities for managing, caching, and synchronizing data between your application and an external data source, such as an API.

The three main features of React Query are:

  1. Automatic Caching: It has a revolutionary capacity to cache and invalidate data based on query parameters automatically. In simple terms, it will only make a single request and supply cached outcomes for the next requests.
  2. Intuitive API: It simplifies the mutations i.e., tracking the loading, success, and error state of our requests making it more faster and efficient with fewer lines of code.
  3. Architecture: React query is intentionally made for quickly fetching data and caching API calls. Thus using React Query for applications that depend mainly on server communications will be an excellent choice.

Why do you need React Query?

  1. Functionality: It concentrates on data fetching and caching, so the application demands heavy API calls with optimized data fetching and caching, Choosing a React query will be very helpful.
  2. Bundle Size: The bundle size of the react query is a bit smaller than compared of redux.
  3. Usability: It offers much more straightforward API calls.
  4. Performance: React query is faster and lightweight compared to redux and it is more concentric towards data fetching.
  5. Community: React query is a new library that gained a strong following and has a growing community.
  6. Ecosystem: We don’t need any plugins in the react query.

The best use case of React query is when the application heavily relies on data fetching and caching and it is small and simple.

Thus React query is the perfect way to manage data fetching and state for small to medium-data-driven applications that focus mainly on efficient and reliable ways of fetching and caching.

Author: Vikash Kumar

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