Zustand vs. Redux: Choosing State Management by Problem Shape

Redux earns its ceremony when state is genuinely shared across unrelated feature areas and you need time-travel debugging or middleware-driven side effects.

Zustand wins when state is scoped to a feature — a booking calendar, a multi-step form — and you want to avoid boilerplate without losing devtools support.

On the Co-Workspace Management project, booking/resource availability lived in a normalized Zustand store per location; cross-cutting auth and notification state stayed in Redux from an earlier module.

The real lesson: pick per problem, not per project. Mixing both is fine if the boundaries are clear.