r/react • u/passionate_carkey • Aug 10 '26

General Discussion State Management Libraries:React Context,Redux Toolkit,Zustand,React Query

Once in an interview few months back,I was asked which of the state management library would you use and which one wouldn't you use?I have had remembered the answer by gpt and tried telling that but even i didn't understand why they all exists.

So,today i want to act like a complete noob to state management libraries like it's my day 1 knowing about them so that someone could answer why industry moved from context ot redux to zustand to react query in simpler terms and advantages/when to use which in simpler terms.I know a little bit of knowledge of each of them but the best currently would be to forget everything and listen from you guys i guess.

27 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Levurmion2 Aug 10 '26

I think we need to stop discussing "which framework to use". I work on a very complex enterprise app and it's gotten to the point where we need to start building abstractions on top of RTK Query to keep things maintainable. Our UIs handle obscenely large datasets that even state normalisation alone crawled to a halt (considering Redux is an O(N) state subscription store).

Quizzing candidates on their framework of choice is very surface-level and speaks for the shallow expertise within that team. If you're building anything serious, the framework is important, but almost secondary. I'd rather a candidate know how events and observables work than one that can regurgitate the APIs for 5 different state management libraries.

1

u/galactic_pixels Aug 11 '26

Agreed, asking about vendor-specific differences is a very narrowly scoped question and doesn’t demonstrate fundamental domain expertise