Instead of Redux: Zustand

Why Zustand is better

• A Zustand store is a hook. You call create() with your state and update functions, then select what you need in any component. There is no Provider wrapping the app and no action constants or switch-statement reducers.
• Its README says it handles React pitfalls that hand-rolled stores often get wrong, such as the zombie child problem, React concurrency and context loss between mixed renderers.
• Components re-render only when the slice they select changes, and Zustand can also inform components transiently without causing a render.
• It has overtaken Redux in use. In the month to early November 2026, npm counted 265,001,684 downloads of zustand against 191,774,947 for redux.

When to keep Redux

Keep Redux, written with Redux Toolkit, in large apps that already use it, and where the team wants a strict, serializable log of every state change or uses RTK Query for data fetching. The Redux maintainers say any Redux code written today should use Redux Toolkit rather than the hand-written legacy style.

Switching

Migration can be gradual because Zustand and Redux run side by side. Move one slice at a time. Turn its state and reducers into a store with set() calls, then replace useSelector and useDispatch with the store hook. Thunks and sagas have no direct equivalent; their logic becomes plain async functions inside the store.

Watch out

Zustand is deliberately unopinionated, so large teams have to agree their own conventions for splitting stores and handling async work, which Redux Toolkit decides for you. It is maintained by the pmndrs open-source collective rather than a company. It has no equivalent of RTK Query, so pair it with a data-fetching library for server state.

Also worth a look

• Redux Toolkit The official modern way to write Redux, with slices, Immer and RTK Query; pick it to stay on Redux with far less code.

More newer, better libraries, runtimes and developer tools

• Moment.js →, use date-fns
• Lodash →, use es-toolkit
• Axios →, use Ky
• styled-components →, use Tailwind CSS
• Prisma ORM →, use Drizzle ORM
• ImageMagick →, use libvips
• Beautiful Soup →, use selectolax