Essential React vs React.js Boilerplate: What are the differences?

Developers describe Essential React as "A minimal skeleton for building testable React apps using ES6". A minimal skeleton for building testable React apps using ES6. On the other hand, React.js Boilerplate is detailed as "🔥 Quick setup for performance orientated, offline-first React.js apps". Quick setup for new performance orientated, offline–first React.js applications featuring Redux, hot–reloading, PostCSS, react-router, ServiceWorker, AppCache, FontFaceObserver and Mocha.

Essential React and React.js Boilerplate belong to "Javascript UI Libraries" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Essential React are:

• Minimal tooling
• ES6 with support for IE 8
• Testability

On the other hand, React.js Boilerplate provides the following key features:

• Using react-transform-hmr, your changes in the CSS and JS get reflected in the app instantly without refreshing the page. That means that the current application state persists even when you change something in the underlying code! For a very good explanation and demo, watch Dan Abramov himself talking about it at react-europe.
• Redux is a much better implementation of a flux–like, unidirectional data flow. Redux makes actions composable, reduces the boilerplate code and makes hot–reloading possible in the first place. For a good overview of redux, check out the talk linked above or the official documentation!
• Babel is a modular JavaScript transpiler that helps to use next generation JavaScript and more, like transformation for JSX, hot loading, error catching etc. Babel has a solid ecosystem of offical preset and plugins.

Essential React and React.js Boilerplate are both open source tools. It seems that React.js Boilerplate with 22.7K GitHub stars and 4.55K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Essential React with 2.06K GitHub stars and 147 GitHub forks.