TanStack Query vs SWR: The Data Fetching Battle Nobody Expected

TanStack Query has 12.3 million weekly downloads. SWR has 7.7 million. Two years ago, SWR was ahead. The trend is clear — and it tells a bigger story about what developers want from their data fetching layer. Originally published on pkgpulse.com Both libraries solve the same core problem: fetching, caching, and synchronizing server state in React applications. But they take fundamentally different approaches to how much they handle for you. We compared them using real-time data from PkgPulse across five dimensions that actually matter. Here's what the data says. At a Glance: The Numbers Metric TanStack Query SWR Weekly Downloads 12.3M 7.7M Bundle Size (min+gzip) ~13.4KB ~4.2KB GitHub Stars 44K+ 30K+ First Release 2019 2019 Current Version 5.x 2.x TypeScript Built-in Built-in Creator Tanner Linsley Vercel License MIT MIT See the full live comparison — health scores, download trends, and more — at pkgpulse.com/compare/@tanstack/react-query-vs-swr The headline stat: TanStack Query's weekl