The Best IDE For React Developers Free 2024

Looking for the best React JS IDE for faster development? Then this is the list of the best IDE for React Developers. IDEs can be very helpful in boosting the productivity and efficiency of projects. Thus, when you are working on the ReactJS project, you should use them. Here we have mentioned some of the best premium and free IDE for React. However, before we start the collection, let’s get to know what is an IDE.

What is An IDE?

IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, and it is a piece of software containing a variety of capabilities that aid in the development of other software. IDEs boost programmers’ productivity by merging common software development tasks such as editing source code, creating executables, and debugging into a single application. The following functionalities are typically found in an IDE.

Features:

• Autocomplete
• Text editor fields
• Syntax checking
• The debugger is a built-in program that allows you to debug errors
• Provide a suggestion
• Viewing the live web page inside the IDE for a better understanding of the output
• Syntax highlighter
• IDE should allow you to quickly go to the definition of class or method
• Shortcuts for ease of access;
• Plugin support to extend functionality.

To know more refer to the in-depth article on IDE in Programming. This article explains IDE in detail. If you are a beginner who is completely new to IDE, then this article will help you understand it.

What Is React?

Maintained by the tech giant Facebook, React is an open-source, component-based front-end library. It helps create an interactive User Interface or view layer.  Besides, the syntax is provided in JSX, which makes it easy for the programmer to call a specific component as the tags are formed. In addition, it has a huge community following and is now maintained by Facebook.

Furthermore, React employs virtual DOM to populate the HTML DOM with data. In addition, Changing the DOM elements rather than rebuilding the entire DOM helps the virtual DOM work faster than the others. To develop responsive ReactJS web apps you will need the React Admin Templates.

Following are some of the features of React JS which make it preferable.

Features:

• Virtual DOM
• JavaScript XML or JSX
• React Native
• One-Way Data Binding
• Declarative UI
• Component-Based Architecture
• Short Learning Curve
• Enables Building Rich UI

Factors To Consider While Choosing the Best IDE

The following are the factors you can consider while choosing the right IDE.

• Work speed
• Ecosystem.
• IDE should be able to open very large files and not freeze.
• Search in source files must be easy
• Can be easily integrated with the various build systems
• Must be scalable over large projects

You can also check the Materio MUI React Next.js Admin Template. It is the most developer-friendly & highly customizable Admin Dashboard Template based on React.

Besides, the highest industry standards are considered to bring you the best React Admin Dashboard. It is not just fast and easy to use, but highly scalable. Furthermore, it offers ultimate convenience and flexibility, you’ll be able to build whatever application you want with very little hassle.

Materio also offers invaluable features that aim to help you create premium quality single-page apps exactly as you imagine them. Furthermore, it comes with unique and useful tools such as fuzzy search, Dark, Semi-Dark, bordered layout options, Advanced cards, and Charts.

In case you are working on an eCommerce project, then this React eCommerce template offers every essential component for an eCommerce app.

Features:

• Pure ReactJS, No jQuery Dependency
• Built with Next.js & MUI
• Based on functional components & React hooks
• Includes Both TS & JS Versions 🎉
• Auth & ACL Support
• Internationalization/i18n & RTL Ready

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor that supports nearly every language. It’s small, packed with features, and works on a variety of platforms. Besides, it requires only one license to be installed on any machine.

In addition, the tool is quick, integrates with other tools, and supports React and React Native as well as all web development languages. Sublime Text has excellent plugin support to expand the editor’s capabilities. It is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The following are useful packages:

• react-native-snippets – It is a collection of Sublime Text Snippets for react-native
• babel-sublime – Syntax definitions for ES6 JavaScript with React JSX extensions.

Plugins can be used to extend and customize the capabilities of the Sublime text editor. In practice, several JS plugins aid in the transformation of Sublime Text into a beautiful Javascript IDE. Furthermore, Sublime Text employs a proprietary UI toolkit that is intended for speed and aesthetics, utilizing native capability on each platform.

Features:

• It offers a command palette for changing the syntax.
• You can quickly go to the definition of class or method.
• Sublime Text provides API to extend the features.
• This tool supports shortcuts for ease of access.
• Sublime Text provides a command palette to hold frequently utilized functionality.
• It highlights the syntax.

Pros:

• Sublime Text is powerful where you need it to be, but simple and out of your way at the same time.
• Great keyboard shortcuts and multi-selection options
• Great package manager installation process for easily extending functionality

Reactide

Reactide is a cross-platform desktop program with a simulator for live reloading and easy prototyping of React components. To make React programming easier, React provides an integrated set of development tools. Thus, do check this best free IDE for React JS.

Additional Info:

• Price: Free, open-source
• Languages: React
• Platform: macOS, Windows, Ubuntu, Debian

Features:

• Component visualization.
• Inbuilt tools
• Hot module reloading
• State flow visualization
• Streamlined configuration.
• Compatible terminal for workflows and commands.
• An extensible developer environment in one click

Pros:

• Every feature that you want in your React Native app can be added here.
• It is a cross-platform tool.
• Synchronous GUI controls for styles and properties of components.

Vim editor

Vim is an IDE that has been around for a long time. It’s a powerful text editor, and you’ll never force developers who use it to convert to VScode or WebStorm. Because of its configurable properties, it is well-known among developers. It’s the best free IDE for React js developers. Also, it is fully customizable.

Vim is a lightweight text editor with search and syntax highlighting. As a result, it can manage extremely huge files. Setting up Vim, on the other hand, will take a long time. The application has a graphical interface, but it must be customized, as you may have imagined. You have to sweat even for the mouse to work.

Following are some useful plugins.

• vim-jsx – Syntax highlighting and indenting for JSX.
• vim-react-snippets – A set of snippets for Vim to work with Facebook’s React library.
• vim-babel – Another set of snippets for Vim to work with Facebook’s React library.

Additional Info:

• Price: Free
• Languages: Almost all
• Platform: Linux, macOS
• Extension or Plugins: https://vimawesome.com/

Features:

• It takes very little space on RAM to run efficiently;
• Different tabs and windows can help work on different projects at the same time;
• Extensive plugin system;
• Support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats;
• Powerful search and replace.

Pros:

• It is possible to install it on a very large number of operating systems;
• Deep editor settings, you can customize it all as you need;
• The code editing process is speedy.

GNU Emacs editor

GNU Emacs is a text editor with a simple user interface but a lot of useful features. It is one of the best free IDE for React JS developers. The program is part of the text editor family, which is noted for its extensibility. Those who have used the Vim editor will be fairly familiar with GNU Emacs. This editor can be described as the most basic editor available, but it contains all of the necessary functionality.

Additional Features:

• Price: Free
• Languages: Language agnostic
• Platform: GNU, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, MS Windows, and Solaris
• Extension or Plugins: https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs

Features:

• Well-documented references are available
• Supports Unicode files
• Capabilities to install and download the extensions
• It can do a lot more than React Native app development.
• Full Unicode support

Pros:

• High-speed coding environment
• Syntax highlighting
• A lot of useful tutorials
• Theme customization

Spacemacs

If you’re looking for the ideal combo of Emacs and Vim, Spacemacs is the editor to go to. Spacemacs is a community-driven Emacs distribution, making it the finest editor by combining the best of Emacs and Vim. It is a free IDE for React js developers.

Additional Info:

• Price: Free
• Languages: Emacs Lisp
• Platform: Windows, Linux, macOS
• Extensions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Edit_with_Emacs

Features:

• Great documentation
• Beautiful GUI
• Git Integration
• Excellent ergonomics
• Mnemonic key bindings
• Batteries included

Pros:

• Available on several platforms
• The documentation provided here is more than enough
• Spacemacs has a great community meaning you will never be stuck on a problem for a long
• Great if you already are a massive Emacs or Vim fan
• You can use Emacs at the console or through a telnet session
• Emacs allows you to have several files open at once, and to switch among them quickly.
• Writes checkpoint files
• Has modes for several programming languages
• Emacs uses keyboard commands
• Has multiple clipboards
• Can configure eslint support
• Can use prettier.js for formatting files on save

Reki

Rekit is a toolkit that uses React, Redux, and React-router to create scalable web apps. Besides, it’s a one-stop shop for building modern React apps. Furthermore, It also allows you to concentrate on business logic instead of dealing with large libraries, patterns, and setups.

Besides, Rekit employs an opinionated manner to arrange folders and code, which is bootstrapped via create-react-app. In addition, it also uses a feature-oriented architecture and a one-action-per-file paradigm to make it scalable, testable, and maintainable. Thus, this ensures that the logic of the application is well-grouped and separated. Thus, you can consider this one as one of the best free IDE for React js developers.

Furthermore, Rekit also provides powerful tools for managing the project:

• Rekit Studio: the real IDE for React, and Redux development.
• Command-line tools: besides Rekit Studio, you can use command-line tools to create/rename/move/delete project elements like components, actions, etc. It has better support for the Rekit plugin system.

In addition, this free IDE for React JS developers offers various capabilities, such as code editing, code generation, dependency diagramming, refactoring, building, unit tests, and an easier method to explore code. The biggest advantage of Rekit is that each React app has its Rekit studio, which keeps things simple and under control. However, we do not recommend Rekit for enterprise-level React js development.

Additional Info:

• Price: Free
• Languages: React
• Platform: Web
• Extension or Plugins: https://rekit.js.org/docs/plugin.html

Features:

• Refactoring
• Unit tests
• Code generation
• Support for Less and Sass
• React router
• Command-line tools
• You can also extend Rekit functionality by developing your plugins.

Pros:

• It allows you to concentrate on business logic instead of dealing with large libraries, patterns, and setups.
• Comes with powerful tools
• Rekit can do code generation, dependency diagramming, refactoring, building, etc.
• It’s highly capable of recognizing different tasks

NetBeans

In web projects, NetBeans provides excellent support for JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, as well as the Cordova/PhoneGap framework for developing JavaScript-based mobile applications. NetBeans is the best free IDE for React js developers.

Syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and code folding are all available in the NetBeans JavaScript editor. JavaScript code included in PHP, JSP, and HTML files can also be edited with JavaScript editing tools. The editor includes jQuery support. Node.js and Express, Gulp, Grunt, AngularJS, Knockout.js, Jade, Mocha, and Selenium are all new or improved in NetBeans 8.2.

As you edit, code analysis runs in the background, generating warnings and hints. Debugging is supported in both the embedded WebKit browser and Chrome with the NetBeans Connector. The debugger may set breakpoints in the DOM, line, event, and XMLHttpRequest, as well as show variables, watches, and the call stack. Browser exceptions, failures, and warnings are displayed in an integrated browser log window.

Additional Info:

• Price: Free, open-source
• Languages: Mostly Javascript
• Platforms: Windows, Linux, macOS

Features:

• Project management.
• Visual debugger.
• Static analysis tools.
• Code converters.
• NetBeans Profiler.
• Batch code analyzers.
• Cross-platform support.
• Multiple language support.

Pros:

• Supports multiple languages which helps in coding for developers.
• Support cross-platforms like Mac, Ubuntu, Windows, etc.
• Rich set of community-provided plugins.
• Easy & efficient project management.
• Bug-free formatted code and much more.

Conclusion:

On the Internet, there are a plethora of additional IDEs and editors. For you, we’ve compiled a list of the best IDEs for React programming in 2024. This collection contains IDEs that will considerably assist you in streamlining your workflow.

There are numerous additional IDEs and editors available on the Internet. Thus,  to save you time, we’ve put together a list of the Best IDE for React Development in 2024. This collection offers integrated development environments (IDEs) that will greatly aid you in streamlining your workflow.

The IDE you choose has a big impact on your development productivity. Besides, each IDE has its own set of features, advantages, and disadvantages that distinguish it. Thus, once you set the requirements, you can easily pick the right one. Once you’ve switched to an IDE to help you with React development, we guarantee you won’t go back to basic editors.

We hope you find the collection helpful. Do let us know which one you are us. Also, don’t forget to share.

If you are working on VueJS projects then we recommend checking the Best Vue Editor.