Curator notes on stacks worth shipping, each one picked, tested and documented.
79 posts
Three open-source DocuSign alternatives, read from their live repositories rather than their marketing. All three sign properly. What separates them is who holds the key, and a licence badge that is wrong in opposite directions on two of the three.
Three React date pickers measured against live registry, repository and tarball state on 7 October 2026. One is what shadcn installs for you, one is a single pre-bundled module your bundler cannot take apart, and one will not start until you have adopted a design system and picked one of eight date adapters. Plus three corrections to our own accessibility instrument, all of which had been wrong in the same direction.
Three React icon libraries that differ less in their icons than in their import surface. Read from the npm registry, the published tarballs, the GitHub API and the Next.js source on 4 October 2026: one of them has a 525-byte root entry, one ships a 478 KB barrel, and the registry's size figures rank all three in the wrong order.
Three React image croppers whose received wisdom is three months out of date. Read from the npm registry, the published tarballs and the GitHub API on 1 October 2026: the library everyone calls selection-only now writes the canvas code for you, the most downloaded one still ships zero canvas code, and the package npm reports as smallest is actually the heaviest.
Three zero-config bundlers for shipping a TypeScript package, measured against live registry and repository state on 28 September 2026. One carries a maintainer deprecation notice, one has not released in over a year, and one requires Node 22.12. Plus what Vercel's turborepo actually uses, which is not what the usual citation says.
All three shipped a release in September 2026 and all three are MIT. What separates them is how much of the component they hand you: five prebuilt components, two, or none at all. The library everyone quotes as 5KB is measured here at eleven times that.
Three React toast libraries whose reputations are all slightly wrong. Read from the npm registry, the published tarballs, the GitHub API and the live shadcn registry on 23 September 2026: the most downloaded one is the heaviest, the one with the steepest search decline shipped a release seven days ago, and the oldest has the best accessibility.
Motion ships 67 files carrying a use client directive, GSAP ships zero across 117, and the rename everyone tells you to migrate for turns out to be a 35 byte alias. Measured from the npm registry and the published tarballs.
Two of these three repositories were pushed to on the day we ran the check. The third was last pushed 312 days earlier, and the prerelease tag npm still advertises for it was published in December 2020.
Three React drag and drop libraries, three different stages of life. Read from the npm registry, the published tarballs and the GitHub API on 16 September 2026: one is archived, one is quietly split in two, and one is not a React library at all.
All three are MIT and all three shipped stable releases this month, so maintenance is not the deciding question. Who holds the copyright and what renders on the server is. Measured from the npm registry and the published tarballs.
Two MIT frameworks and one source-available platform. The licence split is the half everyone writes about; the release log is the half that decides more projects.
