Developer Survey 2023

We asked React Flow users about the library and the ecosystem of docs, support, and subscriptions around it to better understand our users' needs, and help guide the core team as we continue improving the library.

Here's what we found ✌️

The survey

The survey was focused on five important questions:

1. Who are our users and what is their expertise?
2. What are they building with React Flow?
3. Where do our users go for help?
4. What features do they find most difficult to use and what do they want to see added?
5. What do our users think about React Flow Pro?

The survey was at most 19 questions long, took an average of 8:44 minutes, and had an 42.2% completion rate.

Who responded?

We had 83 complete responses.

Respondents were using React Flow in companies big and small, and from an even spread of how long they've been using React Flow. 21% of respondents have at some point been subscribed to React Flow Pro.

What is your role or area of expertise?

We let folks select multiple options for this one, but we might have fumbled a bit by including a "full-stack" option when selecting both "frontend" and "backend" would have been made more sense.

A total of eight respondents didn't choose one of "full-stack" or "frontend". it's hard to imagine someone unfamiliar with frontend getting stuck into a library like React Flow, talk about jumping in at the deep end!

Where are you using React Flow?

As before, folks could choose multiple options if they were using React Flow in different contexts.

The vast majority of respondents are using React Flow at work, but we were surprised to see how many people were using React Flow at work and on personal projects. A quarter of respondents using React Flow on personal projects were also using it at work!

How long have you been using React Flow?

So many newcomers, welcome to React Flow!

We've been developing the library and also engaging with the community for so long now that it's easy to lose sight of what the experience is like for someone who's just getting started.

We made moves last year to improve the onboarding experience for new folks, including revamping our quickstart guide, expanding our API reference, and providing new.reactflow.dev so folks can get started without having to install anything. We'll be looking for ways to improve this experience even more in 2024.

What are our users building?

Where do people get help?

Our docs are the most common place for people to go for help.^{thank goodness}

More curiously though:

26% of people said they go to ChatGPT but only 6% would ask a friend or coworker.

The API reference is the most-used section of our docs.

When you are having trouble with React Flow,where do you go to get help?

Eight people did not select docs.

We think most of the survey's respondents came from our Discord community, and that might have skewed the number of folks mentioning Discord.

On the other hand, we found it difficult to surface the survey to our users that primarily interact with us through GitHub issues. All six of the "Other" responses mentioned GitHub, and we suspect that number would be higher if we had more participants coming from GitHub.

We were really surprised, a little disheartened, and slightly concerned that ChatGPT was so popular. We're proud of the breadth and depth of our documentation that we provide for free, and think it's one of the main things that sets us apart from similar libraries. We don't have any official integrations with any LLMs so it's a bit of a bummer to know folks are turning to them instead of our docs for help.

Which section of the docs do you use most often?

When looking at the data for this question, we considered how much experience someone had with the library. We found that folks newer to React Flow spend most of their time in the learnsection of our docs: these are long-form guides. On the other hand, our most experienced users spent most of their time in the API reference.

This insight might be useful to other open source maintainers who want to know where to focus their documentation efforts.

What is most the difficult thing about React Flow?

So we have an idea of where folks are going to get help, but what exactly are they looking to get help with?

We asked some open-ended questions about what things our users found most difficult about using React Flow or what features and functionality they felt was missing from the library. Then, we went through the responses and grouped them into categories or themes.

Here are the most common categories:

Performance

Getting performance right in a big React app is a hard problem, and many of our users have definitely felt that pain. We noticed recurring pain points around state management: particularly related to custom nodes and node data.

Here's what we're planning to do about it:

• Put Performance FAQ in Docs (including what's not possible/good to make with React Flow)
• Create hooks for connecting node's info to a large graph without slowing down the app
• Surface more information about React Flow's internal state

Jump to another category:

State management

Our users felt state management was difficult to get right in React Flow. There's a lot of confusion around what state is managed by React Flow versus what state should be managed by the user, and then there are questions about what library or approach to use for state management!

Here's what we're planning to do about it:

• Make computed flows possible, which covers many simple cases without having to use a third-party library.
• Create an example where we load data from a database
• Teach some common state management tips in our React Flow documentation for folks who are new to React

Jump to another category:

Smart edges

Smarter and more powerful edges has been a recurring request from our users for literally years! There's scope for the library to improve but we're also weary about making the library harder to maintain: some of the features folks want end up being quite complex!

Here's what we're planning to do about it:

• Create a Pro Example showing off editable edges and edge routing.
• Create a new example demonstrating how to do custom edge animations.

Jump to another category:

Layouting

Around 50% of respondents mentioned they had implemented some sort of node layouting in their flows.

We have no plans on adding layouting directly to the library – there are other packages out there that solve that problem much better than we could – but it is clear that this is something many of our users need and perhaps we could do a better job at pointing folks in the right direction.

Here's what we're planning to do about it:

• Build more complex layouting examples, e.g. changing a layout after getting node updates from a database
• Create more step-by-step tutorials on how to use 3rd party tutorials with React Flow (like Elk, Dagre, etc.), instead of just the examples we already provide

Jump to another category:

We also had some responses that didn't fit into any of these categories...

Understanding the internals

Custom nodes

Interactivity and UX

Why do people subscribe to React Flow Pro?

React Flow Pro is how we sustain ourselves as a business and can afford to work on React Flow while keeping it open source. It's important to us - and maybe other open source maintainers too - to understand why people are (or aren't) willing to pay for our Pro subscription.

We asked about it, and got responses from 19 Pro subscribers.

Everyone who responded to the survey knew what React Flow Pro was! We've never put money into advertising or promotion, and now we know we don't need to start now! 💅🏻

Main reason that someone subscribed to React Flow Pro was to access to Pro Examples. This is consistent with a previous survey we did, and it's good to hear: we put a lot of effort into making those examples valuable!

Most of those who subscribed said that they found the pricing fair. Some found it expensive, some didn't know how much their organization was paying. None found the price to be too low. 👁️👁️

One reason why folks might think the pricing is too high is that we currently don't offer region-based pricing. Our subscription is affordable to businesses in Europe or the US, but if you're in India or Brazil, it's significantly more expensive.

For the folks that didn't subscribe to React Flow Pro, the most common reason was its price. We cater our Pro subscription around businesses because those are the folks with the money available to keep React Flow sustainable, but that can mean our pricing feels unfair to individuals or small teams.

We offer discounts for early stage startups, and students and open source projects can access Pro Examples on request.

Some people were unhappy about the subscription model and would prefer a one-time payment. Our Pro platform is constantly improving and we are regularly adding new examples! The Pro subscription is what allows us to keep working on React Flow as a job and keep the library MIT licensed: having that recurring revenue makes all that possible.

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out our survey! We really appreciate your feedback and we're excited to use it to make React Flow even better.

If you'd like to read things in more detail, you can check out the full survey over on our blog.

Catch you next time! ✌️ The xyflow team