Choosing a Library

Star counts are the worst way to judge a React 7,897 package: stars accumulate and never expire. Three registry queries tell you more, in ten seconds.

Interrogating a package before you install itShell
npm view react-bootstrap version time.modified peerDependencies license
npm view react-bootstrap dist-tags
curl -s https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-week/react-bootstrap
Output
version = '2.10.10'
time.modified = '2025-09-22T05:34:15.235Z'
peerDependencies = { react: '>=16.14.0', 'react-dom': '>=16.14.0', ... }
license = 'MIT'

time.modified is the last time anything was published: a year of silence in a library with open React 19 issues is a warning, the same silence in a small, finished utility is fine. peerDependencies is the compatibility contract — react: '>=16.14.0' accepts React 19, while a range stopping at ^18.0.0 means npm 2,036 refuses the install or you pin --legacy-peer-deps forever. Weekly downloads measure how many people hit a breaking change with you; under about 50,000 a week there is no crowd to file the bugs you will find. dist-tags shows whether a rewrite is in beta — React Bootstrap 126 's next points at 3.0.0-beta.5.

The libraries used in this section, as published on npm on 17 September 2026
Package Version (published) Licence Weekly downloads
@tanstack/react-query 5.103.1 (Sep 2026) MIT 45.6 M
recharts 3.10.1 (Jul 2026) MIT 40.5 M
storybook 10.6.0 (Sep 2026) MIT 16.0 M
motion 13.4.0 (Sep 2026) MIT 15.4 M
radix-ui 1.6.7 (Jul 2026) MIT 10.1 M
@headlessui/react 2.2.10 (Apr 2026) MIT 5.4 M
react-aria-components 1.21.1 (Sep 2026) Apache-2.0 3.1 M
react-bootstrap 2.10.10 (May 2025) MIT 1.1 M

Four names still appear in tutorials and are a bad choice today: react-charts (a beta from May 2020, repository archived — use Recharts 126 ), react-motion (October 2017 — use Motion 153,286 ), Create React App 190,986 (sunset February 2025 — use Vite 25,978 , Creating a Project with Vite) and react-router-dom (folded into react-router, Installing React Router).