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ShepherdJS VS React

Compare ShepherdJS VS React and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

ShepherdJS logo ShepherdJS

Guide your users through a tour of your app.

React logo React

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
  • ShepherdJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29
  • React Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-19

ShepherdJS features and specs

  • User Guidance
    ShepherdJS allows for creating guided tours and feature introductions, which can help in onboarding new users or guiding existing users through new features effectively.
  • Customizability
    The library provides a wide range of customization options for the appearance of the tour steps as well as their behavior, allowing developers to tailor the user experience to meet specific application needs.
  • Ease of Integration
    ShepherdJS is designed to be easy to integrate with modern JavaScript applications and supports various JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.
  • Accessibility
    It includes built-in features to enhance accessibility, ensuring that tours can be experienced by all users, including those with disabilities.
  • Community and Support
    ShepherdJS has an active community and is backed by frequent updates and bug fixes, which can be valuable for developers seeking support and reliability.

Possible disadvantages of ShepherdJS

  • Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of integration, there can still be a learning curve associated with understanding and implementing the full range of features ShepherdJS offers, especially for new developers.
  • Dependencies
    ShepherdJS has dependencies that need to be managed, which can sometimes lead to conflicts or increase the difficulty of the setup process in certain environments.
  • Performance Overhead
    Implementing tours in a web application may introduce additional DOM elements and require JavaScript execution, potentially impacting performance, especially on resource-constrained devices.
  • Limited Offline Capability
    Like many web-based libraries, ShepherdJS requires a browser environment to function, which can limit its effectiveness in offline scenarios or in cases where network connections are unstable.

React features and specs

  • Component-Based Architecture
    React encourages the creation of reusable UI components, which can be leveraged to build complex user interfaces efficiently. This promotes better code organization and separation of concerns.
  • Virtual DOM
    React uses a virtual DOM to optimize and accelerate the process of updating the browser’s DOM, significantly improving application performance.
  • Strong Community and Ecosystem
    React has a large and active community, which means plenty of third-party libraries, tools, and community support are readily available to assist developers.
  • JSX Syntax
    React’s JSX syntax allows developers to write HTML structures within JavaScript code, making the code more readable and easier to debug.
  • Unidirectional Data Flow
    React promotes a unidirectional data flow, which helps maintain the predictability and ease of debugging, especially for larger applications.
  • Extensive Documentation
    React's official documentation is comprehensive, well-organized, and provides numerous examples and tutorials to help developers get started and advance their skills.

Possible disadvantages of React

  • Steep Learning Curve
    React comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those unfamiliar with JavaScript ES6 and JSX syntax.
  • Boilerplate Code
    Setting up a React project often requires boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming compared to simpler frameworks.
  • Fast-Paced Development
    React and its associated libraries evolve rapidly, necessitating frequent updates and learning new patterns, which can be overwhelming for developers.
  • Complexity in Larger Applications
    As a React application grows in size, managing state and props across components can become complex, sometimes necessitating additional state management libraries like Redux or Context API.
  • SEO Challenges
    React, being a JavaScript library, can present challenges for search engine optimization (SEO) due to Googlebot's limitations in executing JavaScript, although this can be mitigated with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG).

ShepherdJS videos

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React videos

What Is React?

More videos:

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  • Review - NIKE REACT INFINITY RUN FLYKNIT REVIEW | The Ginger Runner

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ShepherdJS and React)
User Engagement
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100
User Onboarding And Engagement
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare ShepherdJS and React

ShepherdJS Reviews

8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
Shepherd.js is not a fully developed 3rd party tool like most of the other alternatives that I listed. It is an open-source library to make it easier to create simple product tours.
Source: userguiding.com

React Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025
ReactJS is a JavaScript based UI development library which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source framework which is widely used by developers for web development. One of the major reasons why React.JS is widely popular is because it uses Virtual DOM. This enables developers to create web applications faster.
Source: solguruz.com
The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development
React’s the cool kid on the block, turning heads since Facebook dropped it at our feet. Building dynamic user interfaces feels less like coding, more like crafting with this JavaScript library.
Top 9 best Frameworks for web development
React uses a virtual DOM to optimize the performance of UI updates and follows a one-way data flow for easy tracking of data changes. With its active community and abundance of third-party resources and libraries, React is a solid choice for web development.
Source: www.kiwop.com
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is concerned with rendering data to the DOM, so creating React apps usually requires additional libraries for state management, routing, and interaction with an API.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Some of its top features include server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, client-side routing, built-in CSS support, static site generation and API routes. Overall, Next.JS is a powerful and flexible framework that provides developers with a simple and intuitive way to build complex React applications with ease. It is widely used in the React community and has a...
Source: www.bocasay.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, React seems to be a lot more popular than ShepherdJS. While we know about 814 links to React, we've tracked only 10 mentions of ShepherdJS. 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.

ShepherdJS mentions (10)

  • 7 best product tour JavaScript libraries for frontend apps
    Shepherd.js is a simple JavaScript library aimed at easing the process of making user tours in web applications. It has a clear, intuitive interface wherein you describe your tour step-by-step, which helps improve the tour UX and enhance user understanding: Shepherd.js offers extensive customization options and seamless integration with your application. It prioritizes accessibility with full keyboard navigation.... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Using React Shepherd to build a site tour
    In this tutorial, I will show you how to use React Shepherd to easily implement a site tour on your website. React Shepherd is a lightweight wrapper library for Shepherd.js that allows us to create a walkthrough of a website — either parts of the site or the whole application — by using dialogs that represent steps that you create. At the end of this article, we will have a functioning site tour as shown in this... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Guided Tours Solution for Your Web Application
    Shepherd is a powerful and customizable open source JavaScript library for creating interactive tours and onboarding experiences in web applications. It uses another open source library Floating UI to render the dialog tours. It offers a simple setup process, dynamic content support, the ability to create custom actions and events, and theming and styling too. More importantly, it is responsive too and never goes... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Reddit: Help us design more content to onboard users
    Using/building something like this would go a long way (https://shepherdjs.dev/) and could also have the benefit of keeping the tours in parity with the current L2 UI. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What is the UX term for those pop-up boxes which helps users with their first few tasks after finishing onboarding?
    We’ve called them Product Tours https://shepherdjs.dev is good. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

React mentions (814)

  • Indie Hacking with Open Source Tools: Innovating on a Budget
    One inspiring example is a developer building a "Todoist Clone" using a combination of React, Node.js, and MongoDB. The developer tapped into open source libraries and community support to create a highly responsive task management application. This project underscores how indie hackers can achieve rapid development and adaptation with minimal budget – a theme echoed in several indie hacking success stories. - Source: dev.to / 6 days ago
  • Next.js Localization: How to Build a Multilingual Website with Next-Intl
    Next.js is a very popular framework built on top of the React.js library and it provides the best Development Experience for building applications. It offers a bunch of features like:. - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
  • Web Development Using React Framework
    Explore the official React documentation. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Monorepo Tutorial With Lerna, Storybook & Next.js
    We’ll be creating the components package inside the packages directory. In this monorepo package, we’ll be building React components which will be consumed by our Next.js application (front-end package). - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Migrating from AngularJS to React
    After evaluating our options including upgrading from AngularJS to Angular (the name for every version of Angular 2 and beyond) or migrating and rewriting our application in a completely new JavaScript framework: React. We ultimately chose to go with ReactJS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ShepherdJS and React, you can also consider the following products

Intro.js - Simple Javascript framework for adding screen tips

Vue.js - Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces

UserGuiding - Create in-app experiences with the most straightforward product adoption platform — quick implementation, lasting user engagement.

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps

Userlane - Digital adoption platform with interactive guidance for software applications allowing anyone to understand and master any software from the get-go.

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps