Zustand vs reselect: What are the differences?

Zustand vs. Reselect

Zustand and Reselect are two popular state management libraries in the React ecosystem. While both libraries serve the purpose of managing state in a React application, they have some key differences that set them apart. In this discussion, we will explore these differences and highlight the unique features of each library.

1. Implementation Approach: Zustand is a lightweight state management library that follows a hook-based approach. It allows you to create and manage state using the familiar useState hook. On the other hand, Reselect is a library that focuses on efficient data selection and memoization. It provides a powerful mechanism for creating selectors that efficiently derive data from the application state.

2. Complexity: Zustand aims to provide a simplified API and focuses on making state management straightforward and intuitive. It offers a minimalistic approach with a small learning curve. On the other hand, Reselect offers more advanced features and concepts like memoization, reselect selectors, and state slices. It requires a deeper understanding of these concepts, making it slightly more complex to work with.

3. Performance: Zustand provides excellent performance optimizations out of the box. It achieves this by leveraging React's built-in useReducer and useContext hooks, resulting in efficient re-renders and minimal subscriptions. Reselect, on the other hand, excels in performance optimization through memoization. Selectors created with Reselect automatically cache their results, preventing unnecessary recalculations and improving overall performance.

4. Selector Composition: Zustand uses a traditional approach for composing derived state values. It allows you to manually compute state values based on the current state. Reselect, on the other hand, provides a powerful selector composition mechanism. It allows you to create complex selectors that depend on other selectors, enabling a more modular and reusable approach when deriving state values.

5. Integration with Redux: Zustand and Reselect have different integration approaches with Redux. Zustand is designed to be a standalone state management solution and does not require Redux. It provides a simpler alternative without the need for Redux boilerplate code. Reselect, on the other hand, is a library that complements Redux by improving its performance with selector memoization. It is commonly used as a plugin within a Redux-based application.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Zustand is gaining popularity within the React community, but its ecosystem is still relatively smaller compared to Reselect. Reselect has been around for a longer time and has a mature ecosystem with robust community support. It has numerous third-party libraries and extensions available, making it easier to integrate into larger React projects.

In summary, Zustand and Reselect have distinct approaches to state management in React. Zustand offers a lightweight, hook-based solution with great performance, while Reselect focuses on efficient data selection and memoization within the Redux ecosystem. The choice between these libraries depends on the complexity and requirements of your project as well as your familiarity with the respective concepts.