I am very familiar with Context API, I completed a crash course with Redux and they both appear alike (in principle) to me. The question is, which one should I focus on? What are the major Pros and Cons between Context API and Redux?. Which is best in React State management.
3 Answers
Context and Redux are very different tools that solve different problems, with some overlap.
Context is not a "state management" tool. It's a Dependency Injection mechanism, whose only purpose is to make a single value accessible to a nested tree of React components. It's up to you to decide what that value is, and how it's created. Typically, that's done using data from React component state, ie, useState and useReducer. So, you're actually doing all the "state management" yourself - Context just gives you a way to pass it down the tree.
Redux is a library and a pattern for separating your state update logic from the rest of your app, and making it easy to trace when/where/why/how your state has changed. It also gives your whole app the ability to access any piece of state in any component.
So, yes, you can use both of them to pass data down, but they're not the same thing.
For more details, see my posts:
Redux offers optimization straight out of the box which Context API doesn't guarantee and the DEV tools which you could lean on whenever the bugs occur at cost of writing actions and reducers.
I would recommend using the Context API. Better to use the native API than a library.
I think it would depend on the complexity of your app, otherwise for most usecase a combination of Context, useState and uesReducer would just be OK.
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