React, ah, doesn’t he get tired of it? No, I don’t. If you love using React, this is for you. If you don’t, hold my beer and take a seat because we are going in for quite the ride.
Now that we have that out of the way, I am going to talk about 10 absolutely amazing npm packages every React developer should know and use. A huge thumbs up to you if you already know them, and I would love to know how many you have used personally in your projects via the comment section.
If you'd rather watch video content, then here is the video for you on YouTube.
Framer Motion
Framer Motion is an animation library built for React. Framer Motion allows you to produce amazing animations with seamless effort. The animation API is very intuitive, and there is no shortage of excellent examples of what you could achieve in their documentation.
Framer Motion Animate elements via props like animate, initial, and exit. Values update automatically, with smart default transitions. There is built-in support for hover, tap, drag, and pan interactions: whileHover, whileTap for interactive states. Drag with constraints, momentum, and elastic boundaries. It also allows you to automate size/position changes with layout or layoutId for shared-element transitions. You can define reusable animation states and synchronize parent-child transitions.
I18next
I18next is a robust internationalization (i18n) library for JavaScript, widely used in React applications for multi-language support. It handles translations, plurals, date/number formatting, and more. The react-i18next package provides React-specific utilities for seamless integration.
Its core features are translation management by mapping keys to language-specific strings. Pluralization & Interpolation. It also supports dynamically inserted variables (e.g., {{count}} items). I18n can help us format dates, numbers, and currencies. It features a modular design by loading translations on demand (e.g., via HTTP, filesystem). It is also extensible and has plugins for language detection (browser, cookies), caching, etc.
React Apex Charts
React ApexCharts is a React wrapper for ApexCharts.js, enabling seamless integration of interactive, responsive charts into React applications. It supports 20+ chart types with extensive customization via SVG rendering, making it ideal for dashboards and data visualizations.
React ApexCharts charts feature diverse chart types. It supports line, bar, pie, donut, heatmap, radialBar, and candlestick charts, with mixed-chart combinations. It is highly interactive with built-in gestures like tooltips, zoom/pan, and event handlers (e.g., dataPointSelection for click events). It auto-renders charts when series or options props change, enabling real-time data sync. Charts adapt to container size; supports width="100%" for fluid layouts.
React-toastify
React-Toastify is a lightweight, MIT-licensed library for adding elegant toast notifications to React apps. It supports customizable, non-intrusive messages for user feedback (e.g., success/error alerts) with minimal setup.
There are predefined styles for default, success, error, warning, and info toasts, each with intuitive icons and color coding. It allows flexible positioning with six positions to choose from: top-left, top-center, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-center, bottom-right. Rich Customization with themes: light, dark, or colored (matches notification type). CSS Control: Style via inline styles, CSS classes, or SCSS variables (e.g., toastClassName, progressClassName). You can replace default icons or disable them. It also enables advanced interactions with swipe-to-close: draggable in any direction.
React Select
React Select is a highly customizable dropdown library for React, replacing native <select> elements with enhanced features like search, multi-select, async loading, and accessibility compliance. It simplifies complex selection workflows while offering deep customization via props and hooks.
It enables selection of multiple values with tags, search filtering, and customizable UI for added/removed options. You can fetch data dynamically from APIs (e.g., user lists), ideal for large datasets or real-time filtering, allowing developers to override default UI parts (options, dropdowns) with React components.
Xlsx
SheetJS (xlsx) in React Ecosystem SheetJS (xlsx) is a robust JavaScript library for reading, manipulating, and writing spreadsheet files (e.g., XLSX, CSV) in React apps. It supports 20+ file formats, enables data conversion between JSON/HTML/Excel, and works client-side or server-side.
Moment
Moment.js is a legacy JavaScript library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates and times. Though now in maintenance mode (with modern alternatives like date-fns or Luxon recommended), it remains widely used for date handling in React apps due to its simplicity and rich feature set.
Moment allows us to convert strings/objects to dates with strict validation, display dates in 200+ locales, add/subtract time units with human-readable differences, work with time spans, and compare dates.
React Dropzone
React Dropzone is a lightweight, accessible library for handling file drag-and-drop and selection in React apps. It provides a seamless interface for file uploads with robust customization options, supporting both browser-native drag/drop and programmatic control.
With its awesome features, React Dropzone creates drop zones with visual feedback (e.g., border highlights) during file interactions. You can validate files by type (e.g., accept: "image/*"), size, or custom logic; you can extract metadata (name, size, type); and you can preview files (images, PDFs).
React Calendar Timeline
React Calendar Timeline is a powerful, customizable library for rendering interactive timeline views (e.g., Gantt charts, resource schedulers) in React. It supports drag-and-drop resizing, grouping, and time range navigation, ideal for project management, booking systems, and historical data visualization.
It allows us to display events on horizontal timelines with zoomable scales (minutes to years) and customizable time zones. Organize items into vertical lanes (e.g., teams, resources) with collapsible groups. Reschedule events via drag interactions (with callback support for validation), and you can render custom components per timeline item (e.g., tooltips, progress bars).
React Grid Gallery & React Image Lightbox
React Grid Gallery is a responsive image gallery component that displays images in a masonry-style grid, while React Image Lightbox provides a customizable lightbox viewer for image previews. Together, they create a seamless gallery and lightbox experience with features like zooming, navigation, and responsive layouts.
You can auto-adjust columns based on container width with customizable breakpoints, add tags to images and filter them dynamically, control aspect ratio, spacing, and hover effects, connect with lightbox libraries for image previews, and lastly, it supports lazy loading and virtualization for large galleries.
Now that was quite the ride. You have 10 packages all devoted React worshipers should absolutely use for their next projects. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the video and how many of them you’ve used before; do so using the comment section.
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