Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Create React App VS RxJS

Compare Create React App VS RxJS and see what are their differences

Create React App logo Create React App

Create React apps with no build configuration

RxJS logo RxJS

Reactive Extensions for Javascript
  • Create React App Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-18
  • RxJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29

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.

RxJS features and specs

  • Asynchronous Programming Model
    RxJS allows you to work with asynchronous data streams with ease, enabling you to handle events, Ajax requests, and other asynchronous operations more effectively.
  • Composability
    RxJS operators enable developers to compose complex asynchronous operations concisely. This provides greater flexibility and power over handling streams of data.
  • Functional Programming Paradigm
    By using a functional programming approach, RxJS promotes cleaner and more predictable code. It encourages immutability and side-effect-free functions, enhancing code maintainability.
  • Rich Operator Set
    RxJS has a comprehensive set of operators, which allows developers to transform, combine, and filter data streams in various ways without needing to write a lot of boilerplate code.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    With its active community and extensive ecosystem, RxJS provides robust support, an abundance of learning resources, and numerous integrations with other libraries and frameworks.

Possible disadvantages of RxJS

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For developers unfamiliar with reactive programming concepts or functional programming, understanding RxJS can be challenging, potentially leading to difficulty in adopting it.
  • Overhead for Simple Tasks
    Using RxJS for simple asynchronous tasks might add unnecessary complexity compared to native JavaScript promises or async/await due to its powerful abstractions.
  • Bundle Size
    In certain circumstances, incorporating RxJS might lead to increased bundle sizes, which can be a concern for web performance if not managed properly.
  • Complex Debugging
    RxJS introduces a level of abstraction that can make debugging more complex, especially when dealing with multiple combined and transformed data streams.
  • Performance Overhead
    While RxJS is powerful, its generalized approach to handling asynchronous stream processing can introduce performance overhead if not used judiciously.

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.

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

RxJS videos

RxJS is My Favorite Library

More videos:

  • Review - Reactive Programming with RxJS - James Churchill
  • Review - Tero Parviainen "Reactive Music Apps in Angular and RxJS"

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Create React App and RxJS)
Javascript UI Libraries
83 83%
17% 17
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Front-End Frameworks
0 0%
100% 100
JS Library
75 75%
25% 25

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Create React App seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 120 times since March 2021. 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 (120)

  • Those Golden Era of React...๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ปโ˜บ๏ธ
    This project was bootstrapped with Create React App. - Source: dev.to / 5 months 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 / 6 months 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 / 7 months 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 / about 1 year ago
  • 45 NPM Packages to Solve 16 React Problems
    Create-react-app -> Building a single-page application. Good for beginners. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
View more

RxJS mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of RxJS yet. Tracking of RxJS recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

NativeExpress - The ultimate React Native & Expo boilerplate with everything you need to build, launch, and monetize your mobile app as fast as possible. Including step-by-step submission guides and all the resources you need to submit your app to the stores

Zustand - Bear necessities for state management in React

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

Finagle - Finagle is aย protocol-agnostic RPC system.

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

axios - Promise based HTTP client for the browser and node.js - axios/axios