 Can I use React without a framework? Dude, this is like a list of everything that's wrong with React. Even if you don't need routing or data fencing at first, you likely want to add some libraries for them. Your JavaScript bundle grows with every new feature, likely to encounter service like networking, waterfalls that make your answer very slow. This is why you shouldn't use React. The React mentality is, there's a problem, let's add more code to fix it rather than just fixing the original problem. This is perfect. Building these capabilities yourself takes real work. No, just don't use React. And then this is easy.