What makes React the best option for SaaS Apps?

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have grown in popularity in today's fast-paced digital environment, giving organizations and consumers the convenience of online access to software and services. According to Statista, the European software as a service (SaaS) industry is anticipated to expand between 2020 and 2025. Among the countries listed, Germany is expected to experience the largest increase, from 6.85 billion euros to 16.3 billion euros in 2025.

In order to compete in the ever-evolving SaaS market, you need to consider the best way to keep your web application running smoothly. That's why choosing the appropriate technology stack is essential when developing SaaS apps.

Before you start reading the article, a small disclaimer: in this article we will only touch on the SPA, because for Stormotion the benefits of the SPA are obvious. Let's highlight the main ones:

1. SPAs are loaded once when the user first accesses, after which all further interactions occur dynamically without reloading the page. This allows you to achieve high speed and instant response to user actions.
2. Navigation between different sections of the application is smooth and instantaneous using AJAX requests or other technologies that allow you to update only the necessary parts of the interface.
3. SPAs allow you to create rich user interfaces with animations, transitions, and complex elements.
4. Since the SPA does not need to load a new page each time, the number of requests to the server and the amount of data transferred are reduced.
5. SPAs are based on a component approach, where the user interface is broken down into independent components. This makes the code more organized, more modular and easier to maintain.

SPAs can be written in a variety of languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, or Dart, and use a variety of frameworks, including Angular, Vue JS, React JS, and more. Each of these languages and frameworks has its own features and benefits.

However, in this article, we will focus specifically on React, compare it with other popular frameworks, explore React’s features and why it’s the perfect choice for building Single-Page Applications in a Software as a Service (SaaS) context.

 
 

🎯 Criteria for Choosing Technology

Before proceeding with the actual development of the application, you have to make a very important decision - choosing the appropriate technology stack. Consider that you are about to seize an opportunity for your possibly successful SaaS business. Your choice is significant since it has an impact on the effectiveness, functionality, and final product of your web application.

For example, React facilitates efficient delivery of web applications, including its virtual DOM and efficient rendering.

 

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Cross-browser compatibility means the ability of a web application to function consistently and correctly in different web browsers. This ensures that users, regardless of the browser they use, can access and use the SaaS web application without compatibility issues or functional limitations.

Choosing the right cross-browser compatibility approach is important for several reasons:

• User Experience: Users expect seamless access to a SaaS web application. If the app behaves differently or crashes in certain browsers, it can lead to frustration, reduced user satisfaction, and even lost potential customers.
• Market coverage: Different users prefer different browsers, including popular options like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, etc. Providing cross-browser compatibility allows you to reach a wider audience and expand your market reach.
• Professionalism and Trust: Inconsistent or faulty behavior across browsers can give the impression of an unprofessional or poorly designed application.

 

Data Flow and Encapsulation

A data flow refer to how data is transferred, processed, and exchanged within an application. It involves moving data between different components, modules, or layers of an application. Choosing a technology stack that supports an efficient and well-defined data flow is important from the point of view of organization and ease of maintenance, optimization and data flow management.

And encapsulation, in turn, is a principle in software development that involves combining data and methods or functions that work with that data into a single unit, often called an object or class. Encapsulation ensures that data is protected and accessible only through well-defined interfaces, promoting modularity, reusability, and code maintainability.

Choosing a technology stack that supports robust encapsulation mechanisms will allow you to create components that can be reused in another part of the application or even in the next future project. Also, data encapsulation will protect it from unauthorized access or accidental changes.

These two important aspects will provide you with more scalable, reliable and convenient SaaS web application development.

 

Testing and Debugging

Special attention to this criterion is crucial, which will be reflected in the quality of your product. Testing and debugging involve identifying and resolving software bugs, errors, and problems to ensure that the program functions properly.

Choosing the right approach to testing and debugging involves selecting the appropriate testing infrastructures, tools, and methodologies that meet the specific requirements of your SaaS application. This ensures that your application undergoes rigorous testing, debugging, and quality assurance processes, resulting in a more stable, secure, and reliable product.

In the case of using the React framework, there are already ready-made solutions for this stage - these are various tools and libraries that will simplify the work process. You will learn more about ready-made solutions below. Keep reading!

 

Easy Extensibility

By prioritizing easy extensibility as a criterion, you ensure that your SaaS web application is flexible, adaptable and future-proof. This criterion is related to the first one, in which we wrote about the importance of scalability during application development. There is a certain relationship between these two criteria: easy extensibility affects the scalability of your project.

But beyond that, choosing a technology stack with this criterion in mind will enable you and your development team to:

1. Customize and personalize the program according to your specific requirements. This may include changing user interfaces, adding custom workflows, or integrating with external systems.
2. Integrate external APIs, services or platforms to improve your product.
3. Reduce the time and effort required to implement new features or improvements. You will not need a large-scale refactoring or rewriting of the existing code base. Developers will be able to create new elements based on existing modules and components.

 

Abundance of Ready-Made Solutions

Having existing libraries, frameworks, plugins, and tools that you can easily use in your development process can greatly improve your development process. We can single out great advantages of choosing a framework with available ready-made solutions, including:

1. Saving time and reducing costs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, developers can use pre-built components and libraries to speed up development.
2. Reliability of decisions. Components and libraries that are often used have already been tested and verified in various areas.
3. Active communities and documentation. Ready-made solutions have a lot of support from other developers and forums. This will facilitate the process of solving possible problems.

 
 

📚 Understanding React and Its Advantages

Remember we gave statistics on the most popular programming language in 2022? So, React is a JavaScript-based free and open-source framework for creating user interfaces. It was developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2011. The framework has gained immense popularity in the web development community and is widely used to create interactive and dynamic apps.

React provides a flexible and efficient way to create dynamic and interactive applications.

 
 

💻 Third-Party React Components for Web Applications

When developing SaaS applications with React, using third party components can be very helpful. These components provide ready-made solutions for various tasks, which saves time and effort during web development.

Here, we have collected for you frequently recommended components and libraries that can be useful for you for various aspects of developing web applications with React:

1. UI: Material-UI, React Bootstrap, Blueprint.
2. Animations: Framer Motion, React Spring.
3. Forms: Formik, React Hook Form.
4. Validation: yup, zod.
5. State management: Redux, ApolloClient, MobX.
6. Payment integration: Stripe, React PayPal, Braintree and other.
7. Navigation: React Router, React-Navigation.
8. Charts & Visualization: D3.js, Chart.js.
9. Translation: react-i18n.
10. Authentication: Firebase, OAuth.
11. Testing: Jest, React Testing Library, Puppeteer, Cypress.
12. API: Axios, Apollo Client, Socket-IO, React-Query.

 
 

🚀 SaaS Apps Built On React

Here we have collected some examples of well-known SaaS products that were developed using React. Let's take a look!

1. Facebook Ads Manager provides advertisers with a comprehensive platform to create, manage and optimize their Facebook ad campaigns. The app uses React's component architecture and virtual DOM for efficient rendering and user-friendliness.

2. Dropbox, a popular cloud storage and collaboration platform, uses React as the foundation for its web application. Dropbox's React-based architecture allows users to easily upload, organize, and share files while providing real-time collaboration features. Dropbox has more than 600 million users and processes 1.2 billion downloads every day, and React was perfect for this task!

3. Atlassian. The software company behind popular tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello also uses React in development. Again, thanks to React's component architecture, Atlassian apps provide users with a customizable and scalable experience, allowing teams to adapt tools to their specific workflows.

4. Slack is a widely used platform for team communication and collaboration. In the development of such an application, it was very important to ensure smooth operation of the user. That is why the developers chose React for work. React's virtual DOM and efficient rendering help with real-time messaging, channel organization, and Slack integration. Reusability of React components allows Slack to continuously improve its platform with new features and integrations while maintaining a consistent user interface.

5. Salesforce - a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, uses React to build its SaaS applications. React's component architecture and data flow model are used to build customizable and scalable CRM solutions. With React, Salesforce offers a user-friendly interface for managing customer data, tracking sales, and automating business processes.