I Switched from Htmx to Datastar

Summary

In 2022, David Guillot delivered an inspiring DjangoCon Europe talk, showcasing a web app that looked and felt as dynamic as a React app. Yet he and his team had done something bold. They converted it from React to HTMX, cutting their codebase by almost 70% while significantly improving its capabilities.Since then, teams everywhere have discovered the same thing: turning a single-page app into a multi-page hypermedia app often slashes lines of code by 60% or more while improving both developer and user experience.I saw similar results when I switched my projects from HTMX to Datastar. It was exciting to reduce my code while building real-time, multi-user applications without needing WebSockets or complex frontend state management. While preparing my FlaskCon 2025 talk, I hit a wall. I was juggling HTMX and AlpineJS to keep pieces of my UI in sync, but they fell out of step. I lost hours debugging why my component wasn’t updating. Neither library communicates with the other. Since they are different libraries created by different developers, you are the one responsible for helping them work together.Managing the dance to initialize components at various times and orchestrating events was causing me to write more code than I wanted to and spend more time than I could spare to complete tasks.Knowing that Datastar had the capability of both libraries with a smaller download, I thought I’d give it a try. It handled it without breaking a sweat, and the resulting code was much easier to understand.I appreciate that there’s less code to download and maintain. Having a library handle all of this in under 11 KB is great for improving page load performance, especially for users on mobile devices. The less you need to download, the better off you are.But that’s just the starting point. As I incorporated Datastar into my project at work, I began to appreciate Datastar’s API. It feels significantly lighter than HTMX. I find that I need to add fewer attributes to achieve the desir...