List of the Top 3 Offline-First Databases for React in 2025

RxDB is a NoSQL database designed for local-first use, particularly suited for contemporary web and mobile applications. It facilitates offline-first capabilities by saving data directly on the client side through various storage engines such as IndexedDB, OPFS, and SQLite. With real-time reactivity, RxDB allows developers to monitor changes in documents, fields, or queries, which means that UI components can reflect data updates instantly. Its adaptable replication engine offers synchronization with multiple backends and custom endpoints, providing flexibility for various use cases. Furthermore, RxDB easily integrates with different frameworks and environments, enhancing its usability. Key features include field-level encryption, schema validation, conflict resolution, backup and restoration options, as well as support for attachments and CRDTs. By minimizing server demands and enabling rapid local queries, RxDB significantly boosts performance and scalability, making it a prime choice for applications that need real-time updates, offline functionality, and uniformity across platforms. The combination of these capabilities positions RxDB as a forward-thinking solution for developers aiming to build efficient and responsive applications.

Dexie.js serves as a streamlined and dependable wrapper for IndexedDB, aimed at making client-side storage management more approachable. With a minified and gzipped size of around 29k, it presents a straightforward API that tackles the intricate challenges posed by the native IndexedDB, including inconsistent error management, inefficient querying, a lack of reactivity, and overall code complexity. The library is built upon a thoughtfully crafted API, featuring strong error handling, the ability to extend functionality, and awareness of change tracking, in addition to enhanced KeyRange capabilities for diverse operations such as case-insensitive searches, set matches, and OR conditions. By adhering to the IndexedDB specification and leveraging its complete feature set, Dexie.js allows developers to seamlessly interact with existing IndexedDB data without any requirement for data migration. Additionally, it supports real-time composable queries, permitting components to reflect database changes instantaneously across multiple front-end frameworks like React, Svelte, Vue, and Angular. Furthermore, with the integration of Dexie Cloud, developers can create reliable, authenticated, and access-controlled local-first applications with minimal additional coding effort. This combination of features makes Dexie.js a highly valuable tool for modern web development, particularly when managing client-side data efficiently.

WatermelonDB is a cutting-edge reactive database framework tailored for the development of robust React and React Native applications that can efficiently scale from a few hundred to tens of thousands of records while maintaining high speed. It guarantees immediate app launches, regardless of the amount of data, incorporates lazy loading to fetch data only when necessary, and features offline-first capabilities along with synchronization with your own backend systems. This framework is designed to be multiplatform. Specifically optimized for React, it facilitates uncomplicated data integration into components and is framework-agnostic, allowing developers to use its JavaScript API in conjunction with various other UI frameworks. Built on a solid SQLite infrastructure, WatermelonDB offers static typing through Flow or TypeScript, while also providing optional reactivity via an RxJS API. It effectively tackles performance challenges in complex applications by deferring data loading until explicitly requested and executing all queries directly on SQLite in a dedicated native thread, which ensures that the majority of queries are resolved almost instantly. Additionally, this innovative framework supports seamless data management, making it a versatile choice for developers aiming to enhance the performance and responsiveness of their applications.