Top 11 React Developer Tools to Build High-Performance Apps

React, a JavaScript toolkit developed by Facebook initially emerged as a solution to build highly interactive and dynamic user interfaces. It has the potential to serve as an excellent framework for developing robust web and mobile apps. React offers developer tools that facilitate its extensive adoption and reliability. The React developer tools facilitate the creation of clean, durable, and steady code, thus saving time during development. React can be an exceptional platform for building more dynamic and efficient web and mobile apps. The availability of roughly 30-40 different React developer tools has been instrumental in promoting React’s widespread acceptance and dependability. React is widely adopted by major corporations like Facebook, Airbnb, Tesla, Skype, and others, thanks to its diverse features. Below is a list of practical React Developer Tools to help developers enhance their productivity.

Why are Developer Tools for React necessary? 

Let’s examine some of the advantages of employing these dev tools, which can provide you with a clear understanding, before exploring some of the best ReactJS dev tools.

• Simplifies inspection and debugging of apps.
• Enables the inspection of props, hooks, states, etc., to troubleshoot any malfunctioning component.
• The ReactJS Dev tools can be installed effortlessly in the browser and accessed conveniently.
• Allows you to switch between and explore different component states without affecting other components.
• The “components” tab provides a quick overview of the root React components rendered for the page.
• Detailed and rapid profiling enables the detection of each performance bug.
• The “Profiler” tab in React Developer Tools provides an overview of the re-render summary.

React Dev Tools: How to use them

First things first, you’ll need to download the React developer extension. You can grab the add-ons here for Firefox or here for Chrome. Install them on your browser, and you’re good to go!

Once you install the extension, you’ll see a new “React” tab in your Chrome DevTools. Click on it, and you’ll find a list of root React components and their subcomponents rendered on the page. To open React Devtools quickly, right-click on the page you’re interested in and select the “inspect” option.

Select a Component in the React tab, and you can view and edit its props and state in the right-hand panel. The breadcrumbs function at the bottom lets you inspect the selected Component, the Component’s creator, the Component that created the creator, and so on.

If you use the Elements tab to inspect a DOM element, you can switch over to the React tab, and it will automatically select the corresponding component. It will also automatically select the component if you have a breakpoint within the render phase. Once the component is selected, you can step through the render tree and see how one component affects another. 

Top React Developer Tools to Build Advanced Apps

React Developers Tools

React Developers Tools is the developers’ best friend for debugging the React tree, allowing them to examine components, their hierarchy, and their state. You can even check out how a component influences other components!

You can get React Developer Tools as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome. With full support for react hooks, you can use all the cool features of React without even creating a class. Its filter mechanisms make it easy to navigate deep into nested hierarchies.

Features

• React Developer Tools is super customizable. 
• You can easily theme it to fit your style, and it offers convenient options to interact within the console. 
• It also has a profiler to debug performance issues quickly.
• Its transparency level in source code viewing is top-notch. 

Create React App

Create React App is a helpful tool that provides a comfortable environment for building new single-page apps using React. It enables developers to use the latest JavaScript features and optimize the app for production without worrying about backend logic or databases. Create React App is preconfigured with tools like Babel and webpack, making it easy for developers to focus on coding. Node.js 14.0.0 or later and npm 5.6 or later are required to get started with Create React App on macOS, Windows, or Linux.

Features

• A local development server for testing and debugging
• Support for ES6 and ES7 features with an in-built Babel preset
• Easy asset importing from JavaScript modules for bundling of files used in your app
• Efficient styling with easy CSS imports
• Unit testing with Jest and automatic re-running of tests when changes are made
• ESLint for detecting errors during the development stage. 

Why Did You Render

Why Did You Render is an excellent tool for debugging component behavior. Components are not always easy to understand, so developers must know when they are rendered and re-rendered. This is especially helpful if you are new to React development. The why-did-you-render feature in React and React Native alerts developers when unnecessary component re-renders occur and provides details on why. It is a valuable tool for troubleshooting performance issues.

Features of Why Did You Render

• Avoids component re-renders
• Identifies when and why a re-render occurred
• It helps developers understand component behavior

Storybook

Storybook is an excellent user interface design tool that enables React developers to create, develop, and test UI components. It serves as a UI component playground and a development environment, allowing developers to test and display their work quickly. React provides a means to create a user-friendly interface through complex components. The Sandbox is where components are created outside of the business logic environment. The component development playground is known as a Storybook since the components are stored as stories. Every story has statistics; each state is compared using a visual test case. Stories are displayed on screens by a function that generates value.

Key Features of Storybook include

• Quick and simple setup & configuration
• Rapid UI development backed by numerous add-ons
• Development of components in isolation
• Interactive environment for creating and showcasing components
• Delivering a highly interactive and robust UI
• Simplified documentation with UI development and testing

CodeSandbox

CodeSandbox is an online code editor perfect for developers with limited space on their laptops or PCs. It allows developers to build apps by writing code online. CodeSandbox offers a one-click project setup and is an all-in-one tool for building, transpiling, and managing dependencies. It has a live preview function that allows you to see your code’s output in real-time. The platform supports all types of NPM dependencies, including React-specific capabilities. You can share the URL of your project with others to view it, and you can collaborate in real-time. CodeSandbox provides the ability to download the React project in a create-React-app template.

Features of CodeSandbox

• Online code editor with no installation required
• Space-saving option for developers
• One-click project setup
• Live preview function for real-time output
• Supports all types of NPM dependencies
• Real-time collaboration for teamwork
• Offers React-specific capabilities
• Can download React projects in a create-React-app template

Reactide

Reactide is a popular and well-known dedicated IDE tool for React web development. It simplifies processes; you don’t need to manually configure or build components. With built-in modules, it can easily automate the rendering of a React project in the browser. The tool is cross-platform and can render React projects in the browser automatically when a single React JSX file is opened. Reactide also comes with a simulator and an integrated node server. The app’s interactive GUI provides visual editing capabilities, making getting feedback from the browser simulation easy. 

Features of Reactide include:

• Previewing using hot module reloading
• Compatibility with different terminals for workflows and commands
• Simple visualization of components
• Structured and streamlined configuration for easy understanding
• Custom browser simulator
• An extensible development environment with an integrated Node server, for perfect web development

Redux

Redux is a well-known JavaScript container that lets you keep your app’s state in a store, which any component can access. It provides a set of processes and rules for interacting with the store, guaranteeing that components can’t change or read the store at random. The Redux Toolkit is an essential tool for developers to build Redux logic quickly and efficiently.

In a nutshell, Redux is a way to manage the state, or a cache or storage, that can be systematically accessed by all components using a reducer and action system. The global state of your app can be stored within a single store in an object tree by Redux. The state is read-only by default, and pure reducers or functions are used to make changes.

Features of Redux:

• Enables you to store your app’s state in a single store accessible by any component
• Provides a set of rules for interacting with the store
• Ensures that components cannot change or read the store at random
• Offers the Redux Toolkit for building Redux logic quickly
• Uses reducer and action systems for managing state
• Stores the state in an object tree
• By default, the state is read-only
• It makes use of pure reducers or functions for making changes.

React Sight

React Sight is a powerful visualization tool that helps developers debug large, intricate projects. It represents an application as a hierarchical tree of components, and filters help focus on relevant components. It is open-source and can be downloaded as a Chrome extension.

Features

• React Sight is perfect for developers who want to speed up their work and avoid deviation when working with complex projects. 
• It is easy to learn and understand and comes with in-built filters that help reduce complexity. 
• No installation or setup is required, making it simple.

React-Proto

React-Proto is a tool used to build app architecture from scratch. It is designed to help developers create an app architecture and start with a visual design. This tool helps developers define the ReactJS properties and states and is perfect for developers who focus more on visual design than coding. The tool provides prototyping tools to create the user interface by drag-and-drop instead of writing code. However, it does not mean an app’s user interface can be developed without writing a single line of code. You can label all potential components from a picture using React-Proto and establish the components’ properties, names, and hierarchy. After creating all the components, you can export them into auto-generated codes and change them later.

Features of React-Proto:

• Create, design, drag, and resize components easily
• Define component properties and states
• Establish a component hierarchy
• Visualize the application architecture
• Easily integrate the new architecture into previous projects

React Boilerplate

The React Boilerplate refers to a collection of code snippets that can be reused in multiple projects. It is a kind of template that can be used with minimal or no modifications required. You can create your own boilerplate or use one offered by the community. If you’re new to this, you’re likely to use a build-React-app (CRA) package, which makes starting a React.js project easy. This package is great for learning the basics because it has a limited number of features and dependencies.

When you use create-React-app, you get a project with several configuration options, including Babel and Webpack. This is everything you need to get started using React, and you can add anything you need on demand, such as more modules or libraries.

Key features of React Boilerplate are:

• Supports dynamic imports, which enables efficient loading of specific components
• Complete support for CSS files and CSS modules, which facilitates the customization of styles
• React Router for routing support, which enables the creation of multi-page apps.
• Code splitting for dynamic imports allows for separating code into smaller chunks, improving performance and reducing load times.

Evergreen

Evergreen is a free and open-source JavaScript framework without a predefined setup. It subsequently enables users to combine their design needs into new systems. The establishment and upkeep of segments is the only way to manage this architecture. Also, it is entirely compatible with React because it offers well-polished React components that provide users total control when necessary. It’s inevitable for the apps to appear good, whether in the previous decade or the present one. To achieve infinite composability, the React components in Evergreen are constructed on top of the React User Interface Primitive. For web apps, Evergreen also uses a different UI design language.

Key Features of Evergreen

• Simple to install and set up
• Ideal for aesthetics enthusiasts
• Comprehensive documentation
• Extremely flexible and composable

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve covered different React developer tools to help build clean code. These tools range from browser extensions to libraries with APIs and graphical user interfaces that allow for creating React apps. Using these tools allows developers to create more robust and maintainable code while speeding up the development process. The hope is that these modern React developer tools will make it easier for developers to create, manage, debug, and document apps. While these tools have multiple functions, they can be combined to achieve a complementary effect.

At ultroNeous, we have a skilled and experienced React JS development team well-versed in powerful React developer tools. Our end-to-end React JS development services can help give your app development cycle a boost and help you build web and mobile apps with a shorter time-to-market. Contact us and share your vision or requirements with us, and our experts will be happy to connect with you.