Jotai vs Zustand vs Context: When to Use Which

React Context excels for infrequently changing global values: current theme, user locale, authentication status, or design system tokens. These values are set once and rarely mutated during a session.

The API is built into React, requires no dependencies, and communicates "this value is shared globally" clearly to the team.

When the context value object changes (even one field), every consumer re-renders. This is acceptable for stable global config but catastrophic for high-frequency state like form inputs or UI animation flags.

Splitting contexts into smaller pieces mitigates this partially, but the pattern becomes unwieldy at scale.