# State-management

The heart of every Reactcomponent is its **state**, an object that determines how that component renders & behaves. When an application is built, the components have internal state, which is accessed by `this.state` set by `this.setState()`. The state of a component is shared across components when they interact with each other. Components might also have to mutate the state of other components to suit their functionality. As the application code becomes bigger and more complex, dealing with the component state gets complicated. To address this issue, there are two popular React state-management libraries: *Redux* and *MobX*.

Both **Redux** and **MobX** are essentially state-management libraries; however, there are some intricate differences in the way that they operate and deal with application state. You should be aware of these differences before choosing which library to use for state-management in your application. Here is a table highlighting the key differences between these *state-management* libraries.


Redux vs. MobX

Redux uses immutable state and functional programming, while MobX uses mutable state and object-oriented programming.

Redux	MobX
Uses a single store to save state.	Uses multiple stores to save state. You can logically separate these stores.
State is immutable – a new state is always returned	State is mutable – a mutated state is always returned.
Developed using Functional Programming principles	Developed using Object-Oriented Programming principles.
Uses plain JavaScript objects as data structures to store the state.	Uses observables to store state.
Comes with more boilerplate code.	Comes with less boilerplate code.