Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

One Million Checkboxes VS React Complex Tree

Compare One Million Checkboxes VS React Complex Tree and see what are their differences

One Million Checkboxes logo One Million Checkboxes

checking a box checks it for everyone.

React Complex Tree logo React Complex Tree

Unopinionated accessible tree component with drag and drop
Not present
  • React Complex Tree Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-14

One Million Checkboxes features and specs

  • Simple and engaging concept
    One Million Checkboxes has an incredibly simple premise โ€” a shared page with one million checkboxes that anyone can check or uncheck. This minimalist design makes it instantly accessible and intriguing, requiring no instructions or onboarding.
  • Shared social experience
    All checkboxes are shared globally in real-time, meaning every visitor sees and interacts with the same set of checkboxes. This creates a unique communal experience where strangers collaborate (or compete) anonymously, fostering a sense of collective participation.
  • Emergent creativity and community
    Despite its simplicity, the project inspired remarkable emergent behavior, including users encoding hidden images, messages, and art within the checkbox grid. Communities formed around coordinating efforts, showcasing human creativity even within extreme constraints.
  • Interesting technical achievement
    Managing real-time state synchronization of one million checkboxes across potentially thousands of concurrent users is a non-trivial engineering challenge. The project serves as an impressive demonstration of web technologies, real-time databases, and scalable architecture.
  • Nostalgia and internet art appeal
    The project evokes the spirit of classic internet experiments and web art projects, reminiscent of initiatives like Reddit's r/Place. It captures a playful, exploratory ethos of the early web that many users find refreshing and charming.

Possible disadvantages of One Million Checkboxes

  • Limited long-term engagement
    Once the novelty wears off, there is very little reason to return. The experience lacks depth, progression, or meaningful goals, meaning most users will visit once or twice and never come back, leading to a short-lived lifespan.
  • Vulnerability to bots and abuse
    The open and anonymous nature of the project makes it highly susceptible to automated scripts and bots that can rapidly check or uncheck massive numbers of boxes, undermining genuine human interaction and frustrating users trying to participate organically.
  • No persistent individual impact
    Since anyone can undo anyone else's actions at any time, individual contributions feel impermanent and potentially meaningless. Users may feel frustrated that their effort to check boxes can be immediately reversed by others.
  • Performance and scalability issues
    With high traffic, the site can experience lag, slow loading times, or synchronization delays. Rendering and tracking the state of one million checkboxes in a browser is resource-intensive and can strain both server infrastructure and client devices.
  • Lack of accessibility and purpose
    The project offers no clear purpose, narrative, or outcome, which can feel pointless to many users. Additionally, a grid of one million tiny checkboxes presents significant accessibility challenges for users with visual impairments or those using assistive technologies.

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 One Million Checkboxes

Overall verdict

  • One Million Checkboxes is a fun, novelty web experiment where users collectively interact with a shared grid of one million checkboxes in real time. It's not a productivity tool but a lighthearted piece of internet culture showcasing collaborative, pointless-but-satisfying online interaction.

Why this product is good

  • Simple, addictive concept: click checkboxes and watch changes update live across all users worldwide
  • Demonstrates real-time websocket technology in an accessible, fun way
  • Nostalgic appeal reminiscent of early internet novelty sites and shared online experiences
  • No sign-up or cost required, instant access to interact
  • Interesting case study in emergent collective behavior and internet virality
  • Lightweight and works well even with massive concurrent user interaction

Recommended for

  • Casual internet users looking for a quick, quirky distraction
  • Developers interested in real-time web technology demonstrations
  • People who enjoy collaborative or communal online experiences
  • Fans of internet culture and viral novelty websites
  • Anyone curious about emergent behavior in large-scale shared systems

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to One Million Checkboxes and React Complex Tree)
Design Tools
49 49%
51% 51
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
57 57%
43% 43
Video
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, One Million Checkboxes should be more popular than React Complex Tree. It has been mentiond 4 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.

One Million Checkboxes mentions (4)

  • Encoding Jake Gyllenhaal into one million checkboxes
    Omcb is available but only in single player mode now: https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • One Million Chessboards
    Nope, just like his original site, one million checkboxes https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Show HN: One Million and One Checkboxes. Running on Elixir and Mithril.js
    Hello! As soon as I saw eieio's https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/, I knew I wanted to try it out using Elixir. The original was created using Python and Redis (later Go and Redis) but this one is using just one Elixir server and HAProxy for SSL termination. It's also using S3 to show the overview page where all the checkboxes are drawn on a 1000x1000 canvas. The whole site is running on a 4 core 8 GB Hetzner VPS... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Rendering One Million Checkboxes Efficiently: Performance Insights using Vanilla JS๐Ÿ™ƒ
    The first challenge was to figure out how to render thousands of checkboxes without crashing the browser or breaking the code. I knew about concepts like lazy loading and batch rendering, but I soon realized those alone wouldnโ€™t be enough. As seen on One Million Checkbox, the checkboxes render on scroll, leveraging the viewport of the DOM โ€”meaning only the checkboxes visible in the view are rendered. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago

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 One Million Checkboxes and React Complex Tree, you can also consider the following products

p5.js - JS library for creating graphic and interactive experiences

Pagedraw - Beta release - Compile UI Mockups to React Code

Bees.js - Unleash hordes of bees on your customers.

The HTML Maze - Find the exit.

Blockies Animate - Smooth, plug-and-play UI animations for any modern web app

Preact.js - Preact is a fast 3kB alternative to React with the same modern API. Components & Virtual DOM.