Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Create React App VS React Complex Tree

Compare Create React App VS React Complex Tree and see what are their differences

Create React App logo Create React App

Create React apps with no build configuration

React Complex Tree logo React Complex Tree

Unopinionated accessible tree component with drag and drop
  • Create React App Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-18
  • React Complex Tree Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-14

Create React App features and specs

  • Ease of Setup
    Create React App provides a simple command to quickly set up a new React project. This reduces the time required for initial configuration.
  • Zero Configuration
    The tool comes with a large set of defaults out of the box. You don't need to configure Webpack, Babel, or other build tools manually.
  • Best Practices
    It encapsulates a lot of best practices for building React applications, ensuring you start off on the right foot.
  • Development Server
    Includes a local development server with hot-module reloading powered by Webpack, which improves the development experience.
  • Community Support
    As a Facebook-backed project with a wide user base, Create React App benefits from extensive documentation and community support.
  • Testing Setup
    Initial Jest configuration is included, providing a straightforward way to start writing and running tests.
  • Production Optimizations
    Built-in optimizations for production builds, such as code splitting and minification.

Possible disadvantages of Create React App

  • Limited Customization
    While the zero-configuration approach is convenient, it can be limiting if you need to modify the underlying configurations (Webpack, Babel, etc.).
  • Monolithic
    Create React App is a single monolithic package, which can make it difficult to understand or change certain aspects without ejecting.
  • Eject Complexity
    Ejecting from Create React App exposes all underlying configurations, which can be overwhelming and increase the complexity of your project.
  • Dependency Management
    Because it abstracts away many details, you may not be aware of what dependencies are being used in your project.
  • Less Control
    Advanced users may find Create React App restrictive as it abstracts many details and does not easily allow for deep customization.
  • Performance Overhead
    For very small applications, the built-in tooling might be overkill and add unnecessary complexity and performance overhead.

React Complex Tree features and specs

  • Customizability
    React Complex Tree offers a high degree of customizability, allowing developers to tailor the tree component to fit their specific needs. This can be especially useful for creating unique UI experiences.
  • Feature-Rich
    The library includes a wide range of features out of the box such as drag-and-drop support, keyboard navigation, and dynamic data loading, which can save development time.
  • Accessibility Support
    React Complex Tree is designed with accessibility in mind, providing support for ARIA attributes and keyboard interactions, which helps ensure that applications are usable by people with disabilities.
  • Performance
    The component is optimized for performance, handling large data sets efficiently without significant slowdowns, which is critical for applications that manage extensive hierarchical structures.
  • Community and Documentation
    The library has a supportive community and well-structured documentation, providing developers with ample resources to troubleshoot and extend its functionality.

Possible disadvantages of React Complex Tree

  • Complexity
    Due to its extensive features and customizability, React Complex Tree can be complex to set up and configure properly, which may lead to a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Bundle Size
    As a feature-rich component, React Complex Tree can increase your bundle size, which might be a concern for projects where performance and loading time are critical.
  • Third-Party Dependency
    Relying on a third-party library introduces dependencies outside of your control, which may present challenges in terms of long-term maintenance and potential update or deprecation issues.
  • Specific Use Case Tailoring
    While it offers a lot of features, developers may find that very specific use cases require additional effort to customize or extend the component beyond its intended use.

Analysis of Create React App

Overall verdict

  • Create React App is a good choice for developers looking for a straightforward way to start React applications without delving into setup configurations. It's a robust, flexible tool for beginners and those who appreciate productivity and ease of use over micromanaging build setups.

Why this product is good

  • Create React App is widely appreciated for streamlining the setup of new React projects. It abstracts away the complex configurations of tools like Webpack and Babel, allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than managing build processes. It offers a strong development environment with features like hot reloading, a development server, and support for the latest JavaScript features. Additionally, it provides a sensible set of defaults and is maintained by the React team, ensuring compatibility and access to the latest React updates.

Recommended for

  • Beginners who are new to React and want to start building projects quickly.
  • Developers who want to focus on app development rather than configuration details.
  • Teams that require a standardized project setup to streamline the development process.
  • Projects that do not require a highly customized build process, as Create React App might be restrictive for advanced use cases that need significant flexibility.

Analysis of React Complex Tree

Overall verdict

  • React Complex Tree is a solid, headless React library for building tree-view UI components, offering strong accessibility support, drag-and-drop, multi-selection, and search out of the box, while giving developers full control over styling and rendering. It's a good choice for developers who need a robust, unstyled tree component without reinventing complex interaction logic.

Why this product is good

  • Headless design gives full control over styling and markup, making it easy to integrate with any design system or CSS framework
  • Built-in accessibility (ARIA-compliant, keyboard navigation) saves significant development time
  • Supports advanced features like drag-and-drop reordering, multi-selection, and renaming out of the box
  • Actively maintained with good documentation and TypeScript support
  • Flexible data model that supports both controlled and uncontrolled tree state management
  • Free and open-source with no licensing costs

Recommended for

  • Developers building file explorers, folder structures, or nested navigation menus
  • Teams that need a customizable tree component that matches their existing design system
  • Projects requiring accessible, keyboard-navigable tree interfaces
  • Applications needing drag-and-drop reordering of hierarchical data
  • TypeScript-based React projects seeking type-safe tree components
  • Developers who prefer headless UI libraries over pre-styled component kits

Create React App videos

Why You Should Stop Using Create React App | React.js Todo List | Code Review #4 Part 2

More videos:

  • Review - Create React App Explained

React Complex Tree videos

No React Complex Tree videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Create React App and React Complex Tree)
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
Design Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
93 93%
7% 7
JS Library
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Create React App seems to be a lot more popular than React Complex Tree. While we know about 121 links to Create React App, we've tracked only 2 mentions of React Complex Tree. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Create React App mentions (121)

  • Understanding Docker multi-stage builds
    Let's start by preparing a sample application that we want to place in a Docker image. This will be a web application created using the React framework and its create-react-app tool. It will generate a code template and configuration, allowing us to focus on the image creation aspects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Those Golden Era of React...๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ปโ˜บ๏ธ
    This project was bootstrapped with Create React App. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • You should know this before choosing Next.js
    I could totally see how you'd arrive there. Backstory: create-react was a starter boilerplate for React built and maintained by Facebook. This was when webpack was the standard and just getting a local development environment to "hello world" for React could be challenging.[1] That project was depreciated and the popularity of the Next.js site framework for react projects (plus I certainly assume heavy lobbying... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Updating my website's tech stack in 2025
    My website's previous iteration was built in 2021. It was bootstrapped using (the now deprecated) Create React App and it took approximately 2 months to build. The home page included a bunch of photos that I had taken myself of my desk and keyboard as background for several sections and it included most of the information on the website. In the middle of the page I put the SkillsTerminal (which also features in... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Micro-libraries need to die already
    This is just a discourse based on "I need to churn out something, I need that fast and I didn't start in the web game when Backbone and E4X were a solid corporate choice". If you are not in a hurry, work in a solid team and have a good attention span, a lot of clickbait idiocy around JS may not happen. I'm presenting you one of countless examples: a lot of coding bootcamps teach React, maybe with TS, maybe with... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
View more

React Complex Tree mentions (2)

  • I'm building react-complex-tree, an unopinionated tree component for react, and recently released a new version!
    You can find the source code for it at https://github.com/lukasbach/react-complex-tree, and documentation and examples at https://rct.lukasbach.com. Source: over 3 years ago
  • I made an Unopinionated Accessible Tree Component with Multi-Select and Drag-And-Drop
    More examples on the customizability, in-depth documentation and a typing API is available at the documentation homepage: https://rct.lukasbach.com/. Source: about 5 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Create React App and React Complex Tree, you can also consider the following products

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

Pagedraw - Beta release - Compile UI Mockups to React Code

React.run - Quick in-browser prototyping for React Components!

React Boilerplate - Offline-first, highly scalable foundation for your next app

Node.js - Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications

Redux.js - Predictable state container for JavaScript apps