6 Create React App alternatives I wish I had known earlier
Create React App is gone.
Yes, it’s no longer the recommended tool for starting React apps. Some of us were surprised, but many of us knew it was a long time coming.
There are much faster and leaner alternatives available today.
Why don’t I use CRA anymore?
Create React App was great.
Setting up React apps become as easy as ever without any need to bother with tedious Webpack and Babel configs. But despite the convenience, it had notable issues I just couldn’t ignore:
1. Bulky and slow
Create React App is a bloated tool.
It installs an unbelievable number of packages and takes forever to finish. If you’re a long-time CRA user like me, you’ve probably gotten used to this process, but it’s far from normal.
Once you enter the command to start a new project, you will quickly realize the insane number of packages CRA needs to set up.
Look at how large the node_modules folder is for CRA compared to a superior alternative. Both folders were just newly set up, yet the CRA project is already almost 5 times as large as the Vite one!
Many packages mean longer install times, even if you’re using PNPM or Yarn 2.
2. Insecure and outdated packages
Bundling so many packages makes it harder to keep track of them all, and many become abandoned and insecure later.
Things improved but any insecure package is something to worry about, and there are still quite a few.
In my GitHub repos using CRA, I get several Dependabot alerts at every turn — even from one of my first GitHub projects!
And they’re almost always about security flaws in packages CRA installed.