React May Not Be the Best Tool for Your Project

React is a great tool with a massive developer community. It comes with its own benefits and challenges. And yet, there may be tooling that is more suitable to your project.

I really like React. I work with it daily.

Not Built for Everything

As a fan of React, I also feel like it's important to point out that React is not built for every use case.

I rarely use React for side projects because it's overkill. It would still work, but it's not necessary. It's not the best tool for the thing I'm doing. And I prefer to look to tools that solve my problem more effectively, rather than choosing what I'm already familiar with.

What Others Are Doing Well

As much as I love React, there are a great many developers who are more knowledgeable than me. So I'm not going to give an in-depth analysis on the problems React has or outline precisely when I think you should or shouldn't use it. (At least not here.)

Instead of debating what's wrong with React or when it's not a good fit, we can turn our attention to what others are doing well.

Beginner Developer Experience

There are a number of tools that are highly focused on the developer experience for simple websites. Both Astro and SvelteKit are web frameworks built on top of Vite with their own (similarly-structured) components.

They are taking slightly different approaches and solving slightly different use cases, but one thing they've both done really well is simplifying the process of working with components and keeping a site's code clean.

The Resurgence of Native Web Components

There's also been a renewed love for native web components. Frameworks like Enhance and libraries like 11ty's WebC are building tooling that makes it easier to work with traditional web components, which are native browser features (in contrast to React, which is an abstraction of JavaScript).

Use What's Best for You

I like to say that you should use the right tool for the job. In some cases, that might be what you're most familiar with.

Or you may evaluate your options and decide React and its massive developer community and resources make it a good fit.

But it's still important to recognize that there are other tools out there that come equipped with a good developer experience and are aimed at solving problems differently than React — problems you may have.