<p><pre><code>    webpack, babel, babel-preset-es2015, 
    babel-preset-react, babel-preset-stage-2, 
    react, redux, react-redux, react-router, 
    react-router-redux, redux-thunk, redux-actions
</code></pre>
Those provide the core you need in a react application imho... if you want a &quot;service&quot; abstraction similar to angular, you can use axios.  Yes, there is slightly more boilerplate to setup when you get started... and understanding smart&#x2F;dumb components and higher level abstractions takes a little work.  Once you get past that, and understand how Redux&#x27;s tooling works for building your state management, it gets simpler still.<p>In the end, there are <i>FAR</i> fewer surprises with React + Redux then there are with Angular 1 or 2.  One of my single biggest issues with every angular project I&#x27;ve worked on, is that it&#x27;s hard to find what you&#x27;re looking for...<p>I see a string of &quot;foo-class&quot; rendered as part of the output in the browser, I go search for &quot;foo-class&quot;, and I find it... It&#x27;s in a .html file, now I need to find where that is referenced, find it... and now I&#x27;m looking at controller&#x2F;directive for the foo.html... there&#x27;s an attribute (directive) on one of the elements in the template... WTH does directive-foo come from?  I search for &quot;directive-foo&quot;... not found... oh yeah, I have to search for &quot;directiveFoo&quot; to find it, again the templates are separate from the controller&#x2F;directive, and this ball of mess continues...<p>In a react app, I find the top component, I want to know where FooComponent comes from, I see the import statement above, and go to that directory... the end.  No searching for strings past the first search.<p>That&#x27;s just tracing the rendering stuff... as for the logic, there&#x27;s some disconnect there, but in the end, once you understand the rendering path of the components, vs action creators (which use services, redux-thunk), vs. modyifying the state tree (dispatch) through reducer(s)... in the end it&#x27;s simple, easy to follow, enhance, extend, modify.<p>Working in a large (or even relatively small) angular app is an exercise in ever-increasing frustration... doing the same in a well-organized react app, much simpler.<p>That doesn&#x27;t even go into the size of the min+gz libraries you start with in either&#x2F;or.  I have a preact+redux module&#x2F;app that is a standalone datepicker modal control... in the end, 16.2kb min+gz [1] (the demo site, gh-pages wasn&#x27;t compressed last I checked). The source[2] is pretty clean and well structured.<p>It&#x27;s easy to grow a react+redux application organically... the same cannot easily be said for angular (1 or 2).  And although Angular 2 is much better, I&#x27;d still prefer react + redux any day of the week.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tracker1.github.io&#x2F;md-datepicker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tracker1.github.io&#x2F;md-datepicker&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tracker1&#x2F;md-datepicker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tracker1&#x2F;md-datepicker&#x2F;</a>