That's a good question there Anthony. You absolutely don't need Redux. In fact, I would recommend you don't use it and begin with vanilla React.

For side projects, the most important part is to hack up functionalities quickly. Adding Redux will provide some resistance to it. Just sticking to ReactJS with minimal supporting toolset at first will help you get the app up and running quickly.

If/When you reach a point where you feel that the app is getting complex. You can start refactoring and reorganising the code. That's the best time to think about adding Redux.

Although, there is a situation when using Redux would be any good– if you already know it well and using it won't slow you down.

Good luck for your side project and keep hacking. Cheers!

You don't need using redux! But redux helps you apply a pure funcional programming approach on your application. With redux you gain more control about the flows and the states of your application, is more easy to test and to maintain. It may seem difficult at first, but as you learn becomes easy and amazing.

If you need learning more about redux I recommend this amazing tutorial

According to Pete Hunt :

Use of flux(redux) is justified when two conditions are met:

• You have a piece of data that needs to be used in multiple places in your app, and passing it via props makes your components break the single-responsibility principle (i.e. makes their interface make less sense).

• There are multiple independent actors (generally, the server and the end-user) that may mutate that data.

Jared Forsyth did answer here .