Tool profile
Component-based UI library for building interactive web interfaces and product frontends.
Interactive web apps and internal tools
The declarative UI library behind Next.js, most design systems, and countless AI product dashboards.
React is distributed under the MIT License from Meta—there is no per-developer or per-user fee to import react and react-dom from npm. Spend shows up in build pipelines, CDN traffic for JS chunks, SSR hosts, and observability—the same as any modern SPA stack. react.dev documents APIs; pricing lives on your host and analytics vendors.
Pick React for ecosystem gravity; pick Svelte or Vue when their compiler model fits your performance story better.
Quick fit
Editorial take
React is a framework library entry, and it now also sits under the React Foundation rather than Meta alone. The main cleanup is keeping the entry anchored on MIT licensing and on the fact that your spend is in tooling and hosting, not in React itself.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Ant Design
Free planEnterprise and back-office React applications
Enterprise-class React UI design system and component library with a free MIT-licensed core and a strong opinionated visual language.
Choose Ant Design when speed and enterprise-style consistency matter more than design neutrality.
Pricing snapshot
React's official repository is MIT licensed, and the docs position it as the library for web and native user interfaces. There is no React license fee; the real spend is the hosting, rendering, design-system, and monitoring stack you build around it.
Apollo GraphQL
Free planGraphQL federation, routing, and schema governance
Commercial GraphQL platform for schema management, federation, routing, and API governance with free and usage-based GraphOS plans.
Choose Apollo when GraphQL has become important enough to need governance, routing, and federation workflows.
