Zustand adoption guide: Overview, examples, and alternatives

Zustand is a lightweight state management tool for React applications, created by Jürgen Martens in 2019 as an alternative to the more complex Redux. It offers a straightforward API with minimal boilerplate, making it easy to set up and use, especially for developers familiar with React's principles like immutable state and unidirectional data flow. Zustand's core package is only a few kilobytes, ensuring a minimal impact on application bundle size while providing various performance-oriented features such as shallow comparison and selective state subscription to reduce unnecessary re-renders. The community around Zustand is rapidly growing, supported by detailed documentation and a range of integrations, including offline state persistence and server-side rendering with Next.js. Zustand is particularly suited for performance-critical applications and MVPs due to its ease of use, scalability, and efficient state management through concepts like the "single source of truth." Comparatively, Zustand is faster and simpler than Redux and MobX, with a focus on maintaining a thin core API to ensure performance and ease of use.