kentcdodds/use-deep-compare-effect

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1916 stars · 88 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A small React hook library that provides a drop-in replacement for useEffect which compares dependencies with deep equality instead of reference equality. It prevents effect callbacks from re-running when object or array dependencies are recreated each render without meaningful changes.

Use cases

• run an effect only when object dependencies actually change in react
• avoid useEffect firing every render because a dependency object is recreated
• deep compare arrays in react hook dependencies
• replace useEffect with deep equality check for query variables
• stop unnecessary http requests triggered by reference-equal props

When to choose

• your useEffect dependencies are objects or arrays that are new on every render
• you cannot restructure props or memoize dependencies to use plain useEffect
• you want a tiny, focused drop-in hook with no extra dependencies

When to avoid

• your dependencies are primitives like numbers, strings, or booleans
• you can solve the problem with useMemo, useCallback, or better data flow
• your dependency objects contain functions defined during render, which still trigger every render

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

state-management developer-tools frontend web-development developer-tools browser react-hooks useeffect deep-comparison react nodejs web-server

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