What is the main difference between React Query and Redux?

Question

currently I am using redux in different projects for state management. A few days back, I listened about react-query which is also used for state management and provides caching and async fetching. I am trying to figure out the main difference between these two libraries. Where I should use react-query and in which cases I need redux.

Answer 1

React-query is what you would call a specialized library. It holds an api cache for you - nothing else. And since it is specialized, it does that job quite well and requires less code.

Redux on the other hand gives you tools to just about store anything - but you have to write the logic. So you can do a lot more in Redux, but you'll have to potentialy write code that would not be necessary with a specialized library.

You can use them both side-by-side: api cache in react query, rest of your global state in Redux.

That said, the official Redux Toolkit also ships with an api cache abstraction RTK Query since version 1.6 with a similar feature set as React Query, but some different concepts overall - you might also want to check that out.