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Posted on Mar 18 • Originally published at zipy.ai on Mar 15

19 Best React devtools in 2024

#react #reactiveprogramming

Anom Warbhuvan

~ 12 min read | Published on Jan 29, 2024

TABLE OF CONTENT

Imagine you’re a chef working in a busy restaurant and you have orders coming in left and right. Your priority is to make sure that you cook delicious food every single time. And now imagine, you have to accomplish this without any kitchen appliances. Sounds like an absolute nightmare, doesn’t it?

This is the same as taking away devtools from developers and asking them to ship out highly performing React apps. React can be complex due to factors like the virtual DOM, state management, and component-based architecture. As a result, the process of app development might become complex. This is where React dev tools come into the picture. And before we check out the best React devtools in the market, let’s first verse ourselves on how React devtools work. Let’s jump right into it, shall we?

What are React devtools

What are React devtools? React devtools cater to various aspects of the development lifecycle, offering functionalities that aid debugging, testing, and optimizing performance. Some key components include:

Error monitoring tools: These tools help diagnose errors in your React app, alert the team and provide insights into the issue. For example — Zipy.
Error debugging tools: Debugging tools assist developers resolve identified errors faster. Some of them even provide AI support.
Bundlers: React devtools like Webpack or Parcel help bundle and optimize your React application’s source code, ensuring efficient delivery to users’ browsers.
Code editors/IDEs: Editors like Visual Studio Code or Atom provide features like syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and integrated debugging, streamlining the coding experience.
Linters: ESLint or TSLint help maintain code quality by identifying and fixing common coding errors, enforcing coding standards, and enhancing overall code consistency.
Testing libraries: Jest, Enzyme, or Testing Library offer comprehensive testing capabilities, including unit testing, integration testing, and component testing for React applications.
State management tools: Redux or MobX aid in managing state across React components, providing a centralized and predictable way to handle application data.
API mocking tools: Tools like Mirage JS or MSW (Mock Service Worker) enable developers to simulate API responses during development, facilitating testing and development without relying on actual backend services.
Component libraries: UI component libraries such as Material-UI or Ant Design offer pre-built React components, enhancing development speed and ensuring a consistent look and feel.

These tools collectively contribute to a robust and efficient development workflow, making it easier for developers to create, test, and maintain React applications. Now that we’ve gone over React devtools in detail, let’s look at the benefits of these React devtools in the next section.

Benefits of React devtools

Developers should use tools for React development for several reasons:

Efficient development: React devtools come with a bunch of utilities and features that ensure a better development process. This includes scaffolding tools, code generators, and pre-configured project setups, reducing the time and effort required for project initialization.
Debugging support: With React-specific developer tools developers can dive deeper in issue and figure out what went wrong at the code level. This could be having access to user environment, error breadcrumbs, or logs, making it easier to debug.
State management: React tools often integrate with state management libraries like Redux, providing developers with dedicated tools for monitoring and managing application state. This simplifies the process of handling complex state logic in large applications.
Maintain code quality and style: Integrated tools for code linting and formatting ensure adherence to coding standards and best practices. This leads to cleaner, more maintainable code and helps catch potential issues early in the development process.
Hot reloading: Many React development tools support hot module replacement, allowing developers to see changes in real-time without manually refreshing the entire application. This feature speeds up the development cycle and enhances the developer experience.
Performance optimization: React devtools also support performance analysis of their applications. By identifying components that contribute to rendering bottlenecks, developers can optimize the code for better overall performance.

In summary, using React devtools enhances productivity, facilitates effective debugging, and improves code quality for a more efficient and enjoyable development and customer experience.Now that we understand how React devtools can help, let’s check out some popular React devtools in the market.

Best React devtools — 2024

1. Zipy

Zipy is a multi-faceted tool that comes with multiple use cases. It provides a massive range of functionalities that enhance the digital experience of your users. Zipy is designed to help developers, track errors, debug them in time, and manage their status. It helps teams with frontend error debugging and even performance monitoring of their applications.

Let’s look a bit in detail at how Zipy is helping developers:

Real time user monitoring: Enhance user experience with real-time monitoring, low-code click event insights, and quick resolution of JS errors. Proactively address issues, streamline user journeys, and ensure optimal performance with comprehensive data dashboards.
Error debugging : Streamline error management with a comprehensive errors page summarizing JavaScript and API issues. Gain detailed insights on user impact, environment, and location. Explore error analytics trends and dashboards, and delve into sessions using DevTools. Efficiently identify and resolve specific error types or user-related issues with advanced filters.
API performance monitoring: Monitor API performance with Zipy, revealing latency scores and identifying slow-performing APIs. Track API errors, pinpointing those causing 4xx or 5xx errors. Assess user impact to prioritize customer needs and utilize Zipy’s API diagnostics for precise root cause analysis and recommended fixes.
Stack traces: Efficiently debug JavaScript with Zipy’s stack trace, reaching the exact line number and full function stack in DevTools. Debug minified code using the sourcemap upload feature, ensuring complete stack trace availability for production errors. Group errors by stacktrace for detailed insights and easily access DevTools to drill down to specific stack traces from any error.
Console logs: They showcase info, debug, warning, and error logs in Zipy DevTools, helping you easily transcend between user actions and corresponding console logs in the DevTools.
Network logs: Provides you with an understanding of API/network calls that have been made during user sessions. It also helps foster a holistic view of network errors within the DevTools. With the help of the advanced filter feature, this tool helps you search for any API issues in the error dashboard.
Error alerts: Zipy offers a range of alerting features to keep you ahead of the curve. You can now focus on new errors that have emerged in the last 24 hours, addressing them promptly to prevent customer complaints.
Session replay: These are recordings of user sessions on your web and android app that you can use to see how the users interact with your digital product in real time. It does so by monitoring user interactions with your app and tracking the clicks, scrolls, and any other actions on your app.
Identify users: Effortlessly find any user in Zipy using the identify method, searching by company name, email ID, username, IP address, or custom identity. Ensure privacy with custom identification parameters, gaining valuable customer insights and understanding user impact. Streamline data filtering and cohort creation based on user-specific parameters for simplified and impactful analytics.
AI assistance for error resolution: Zipy can now auto-resolve the frontend errors and suggest how to fix errors in your code. ChatGPT assists Zipy with this feature.
User environment details: Each user session recording is accompanied by user details like their OS, browser, location, device screen size and more.
Track error breadcrumbs: Synchronize error breadcrumbs, timeline errors, and React devtools details for seamless debugging in a single screen. Connect the dots effortlessly with this integrated feature.
Identify release specific bugs: Know which release has issues and identify, view, and debug the error.

You can use Zipy across the entire lifecycle of your React application, reduce the time to resolution, and keep customers happy.

In terms of pricing, Zipy has a free plan that offers 1000 sessions per month. Paid plans start at $39/month billed annually. For more information you can visit their pricing page.

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2. React Bootstrap

React Bootstrap is a CSS framework that works in great synergy with React devtools. React Bootstrap supersedes the Bootstrap JavaScript, offering standalone React components that work in sync with React devtools- reducing the dependency on rival tools like jQuery.

In jQuery, methods and events are implemented imperatively by directly manipulating the DOM. In contrast, React adopts a more declarative approach by using state updates to modify the virtual DOM. This distinction is where React-Bootstrap shines, as it seamlessly integrates Bootstrap features into React’s virtual DOM, offering a more dependable solution.

As React Bootstrap comes with a library of pre-built React components, it significantly helps React devtools with making responsive React applications, along with helping save a lot of time. Its responsiveness facilitates consistent appearance across devices, and its large community provides ample support.

3. Material UI

Material UI (MUI) is a React component library that implements Google’s Material Design. It provides a collection of pre-built components, including buttons, forms, and navigation menus. MUI components are very easy to use, and they can help you to quickly create a beautiful and modern app.

MUI works in sync with React devtools, making it easy to inspect and debug your components. You can view the component hierarchy, props, and state, as well as step through code execution. MUI also provides a number of features that make it easy to customize your components, such as responsive design.

MUI comes with three pricing plans. First off — the Community plan, that is free of cost. Next up- you have the Pro plan that costs $15 per month, and lastly, you have a Premium plan in place that costs $37 per month.

4. Cypress

Cypress stands as a widely embraced open-source testing framework tailored for the rigorous testing of web applications. Cypress’s user friendly nature is assisted by a top tier feature set- thus making it a good choice for quick and efficient testing of React devtools.

Cypress comes with user-friendly documentation, written in straightforward language, filled with API details and a horde of helpful guides. It sees to it that the users have a solid development experience.

Cypress operates right within the browser. Its user-friendly and straightforward API makes it a breeze to interact with your application and manage tests with ease. Cypress enables users to produce tests that simulate user interactions, thus giving them the ability to thoroughly go over any expected behavior from the web applications and handle any issues that crop up.

As far as pricing is concerned- Cypress comes with 4 pricing plans. First off, it has a free plan, next up there is the Team plan that costs $67 a month, Business plan that costs 267 dollars per month and lastly, you have the Enterprise plan that comes with the option of custom pricing. All in all- Cypress is a tool that works in excellent sync with React devtools.

6. Vite

Vite is a front end tool that is used to ensure speedy and efficient creation of optimized web applications. It makes use of a modern build system and a fast development server. Thus, it helps make the development of web applications smoother.

Vite makes use of native ES modules and rollup to process and fine tune your code to facilitate better production. This leads to faster build times and reduced bundle sizes. In addition to this- it also has a speedy development server that enables you to witness real-time changes as you write their code.

Vite works seamlessly with React devtools and carries out pre requisite functions that will be of great help to them. It offers several advantages over normal build tools and is a value addition to React devtools. Pricing wise, Vite is a free to use, open source tool.

7. Bit

Bit is a tool for building, sharing, and reusing React components and other JavaScript modules. It includes a robust versioning and dependency management mechanism that lets you track changes to your components over time.

It will be easier to test and deploy on different environments after you create isolated and reproducible builds. Integration with popular package managers like npm and Yarn allows developers to easily install and manage components dependencies.

With a web-based platform, you can also share and discover components created by other developers. Not just this, you can even publish your components to a global registry to make them available to developers. It has a free trial option.

8. VS Code

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a popular code editor that provides powerful tools and extensions for React devtools. It has several features for React development, such as syntax highlighting, code completion, code snippets, and debugging tools. Its IntelliSense feature provides code completion and suggestions based on the React API, making it easy to write error-free React code.

VS Code has a number of extensions specifically designed for React development, including extensions for formatting, linting, testing, and debugging React applications. It includes Git integration and collaboration tools, making it simple to collaborate with other developers on React projects. Overall, every developer should have the best Visual Code extensions installed to streamline effective workflow. As far as pricing is concerned, Visual Code is a free and open source software.

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9. Enzyme

Enzyme is a popular JavaScript testing utility for React applications. The library provides a simple and intuitive API for rendering React components, interacting with them, and asserting on their output.

It supports both shallow and full rendering of React components, allowing you to test components in isolation from their children or in the context of their entire subtree. With a powerful set of APIs, you can interact with props, state, and instance methods thoroughly to test the behavior of your components.

Enzyme has a number of helpful utilities for testing React components, including the ability to simulate user events and manipulate the internal state of components. If you are looking to test React components, Enzyme can be a valuable tool for sure.

Apart from Enzyme, there are other React testing libraries, which you can consider as well.

10. React Testing Library

React Testing Library is similar to Enzyme as it provides a set of APIs for testing React components in a way that closely resembles how users interact with them. It encourages developers to create tests that focus on component behavior rather than implementation details, resulting in more reliable and manageable tests.

React Testing Library provides a simple and intuitive API for rendering React components, querying the rendered output, and asserting on the behavior of the components. With support for both synchronous and asynchronous testing, you can easily test components that rely on external data or APIs.

Apart from Enzyme, React Testing Library is framework-agnostic and can be used with a wide range of testing frameworks, including Jest, Mocha, and Cypress. We have also seen developers migrate from Enzyme to React testing library, for its improved testing practices and better alignment with React’s recommended approaches.

11. React Hooks Profiler

React Hooks Profiler provides insights into how often a component renders, how long it takes to render, and what specific hooks are causing re-renders. By using it, developers can optimize their components and improve the overall performance of their React devtools.

React Hooks Profiler can be used to identify hooks that are causing performance problems and optimizing your code. You can specifically use it for debugging and inspecting React hooks.

12. Jest

Jestis a popular testing framework for JavaScript applications, including React. It comes pre-configured with Create React App to set up and bootstrap new React projects. It has a simple and powerful API for writing and running tests, with features such as test suites, assertions, and test runners.

Parallel test execution and intelligent test filtering makes it fast and efficient. It has code coverage analysis support, allowing developers to view how much of their code is covered by tests. It has support for features such as snapshot testing, which allows developers to compare the output of a component to a previously saved snapshot.

Jest is highly configurable, allowing developers to customize their test setup and add additional plugins and features as needed. It is free to use software.

13. Rekit

Rekit is a React integrated development environment (IDE) that aims to simplify the development process and boost productivity. Developers can construct React apps fast and efficiently, with code generation, project management, and testing tools. Some notable features in Rekit are highlighted below.

Built-in code editor: Rekit includes auto completion, code refactoring, and syntax highlighting, for a smooth editing experience.
Project management: It allows developers to easily navigate and manage their React project, including features such as searching, filtering, and grouping.
Supports testing: It is supported by popular testing frameworks such as Jest and Enzyme.
Code generation: You can automate repetitive tasks involved in building a React application, such as creating new components and containers, setting up Redux state management, and configuring routing.

14. React Styleguidist

React Styleguidist is a style guide generator for React components, designed to help developers create and maintain consistent and well-documented component libraries. It allows developers to create living style guides that automatically update as they make changes to their components, ensuring that documentation stays up-to-date and accurate.

Developers can preview their components in isolation with a built-in development server in React Styleguidist. It simplifies the process of writing styles for React components by offering support for popular CSS preprocessors like Sass and Less. This enables developers to use their preferred syntax when writing styles for their components.

Styleguidist majorly comes with a number of tools for documenting components, including support for Markdown and the ability to add code examples and usage instructions.

15. Redux

Redux is a state management library that is commonly used with React applications to manage complex application states in a predictable and efficient manner. It operates using a single, immutable state tree that is managed by a centralized store. This allows for easy access and manipulation of state data across the entire application.

With a powerful middleware system developers can easily extend the functionality of the store and add features such as asynchronous data fetching and logging. Redux may be used with a wide range of React projects, from simple single-page apps to huge business applications with complicated state management requirements.

Redux integrates well with other React devtools, such as the React Developer Tools browser extension, allowing developers to easily visualize and debug state changes in their applications. It is an open source software.

16. WebStorm

WebStorm is a popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that includes support for React devtools. It comes with a wide range of tools for building web applications. It has an integrated code editor with code completion, highlighting, and refactoring to assist you in writing clear functional code.

It offers a variety of debugging and testing features, supports running unit tests in Jest, and allows integration with the React devtools browser extension and popular testing frameworks such as Mocha and Karma.

You can use WebStorm’s productivity-related features to streamline React development, including support for code snippets, automatic code formatting, and powerful search and navigation tools.

It helps to streamline the development process and build complex React applications with ease. As far as payment is concerned, including taxes, a 1 year plan will cost $187 per user. It goes down to $149 when you get to the second year and for every year post that, it will cost $112.

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17. MobX

MobX provides a powerful set of tools for managing application state, including support for computed values, reactions, and actions. It has support for advanced features like async actions and middleware which makes it a powerful tool for building complex React applications.

It helps in improving application performance and reducing the amount of code needed to manage complex application state. This makes MobX highly flexible and increases its usability with a wide range of other JavaScript libraries and frameworks.

How does MobX help React devtools, you ask? Well, MobX enhances React DevTools by providing deeper insights into the inner workings of your React applications. It enables you to effortlessly track and analyze state changes, making it a valuable companion for debugging and optimizing your React-based projects.

18. Bundle Analyzer

Bundle Analyzer is one of many React devtools that helps with the analyzing of the size and content of the bundles generated by your React application.

It provides a detailed breakdown of the bundle size and content, including information about individual modules, dependencies, and other code artifacts. It has a wide range of visualization tools which help developers to understand treemaps, bar charts, and other interactive visualizations.

With Bundle Analyzer, developers can quickly identify large or redundant code modules, identify opportunities for code splitting or lazy loading, and optimize their application bundles to improve performance.

19. Code Sandbox

CodeSandbox is an online code editor that is specifically designed to work in collaboration with React devtools. It provides a live preview of your code, along with a set of tools that help with app debugging and testing processes.

CodeSandbox is a potent asset for React devtools, encompassing a suite of essential features. It boasts a live code preview, a versatile array of debugging tools, an integrated testing framework, a convenient code sharing function, a repository of ready-made components, and comprehensive support for diverse React frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby, making it a versatile and indispensable platform for React developers.

CodeSandbox has three pricingplans in place- a free plan, Pro plan that costs $15 a month, and enterprise plan- which, as is the norm, comes with custom pricing options.

Now that we have gone over a wide array of React devtools, alternatives, and tools that streamline collaboration with React devtools- it is important to us to understand what we want from them. We shall now walk you through what to look for while choosing the right React devtools.

How to choose the right React devtools

Consider the type of work you do most often: If you spend a lot of time debugging, you’ll want React devtools that have powerful debugging features. If your focal point is performance optimization- you will require a tool that will help you identify and sort out performance bottlenecks.
Project requirements and complexity: Measure the size and complexity of your project. If you have a smaller project in hand- a basic code editor and browser developer tools will do. But if you have a big project- it might be better to go for React devtools that are specialized in debugging, performance optimization, and component testing.
Ease of use and integration: It is preferable to go for React devtools that are simple to learn and seamlessly integrate into your existing development workflow. It will be a hassle to navigate tools that are difficult to learn or need extensive changes.
Features and functionality: Go through the features and functionalities that React devtools encompass. Some React Devtools’ core areas may be debugging and performance optimization- whereas others may specialize in code generation or component testing.
Think about your budget: The market has a wide range of React devtools to choose from, free and paid alike. If you’re on a budget- it may be more fruitful to start with a free tool and see if it meets your needs.If you have more to spend, you can consider paid React devtools that may have more features.

Try out a few different tools. The best way to find the right React dev tool for you is to try out a few different ones. Most React devtools offer free trials, so you can take them for a spin and see if they’re a good fit for your workflow.

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Conclusion

React devtools are the must have partners you need to deliver clean and functional code in record time. These tools have the power to change the way you have been testing, error debugging, or performance monitoring.

It is important to have an astute understanding of the market of React devtools before you make your decision. Once you are well versed with the React devtools out there and know which ones fit your needs, you can give them a shot. If available you can also go for a trail before you make up your mind. If you are looking for a React debugger, Zipy would be a good tool to go for. If not, take your time and run through the above list of React devtools and pick the one you find fit.

Happy coding!

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