A few years ago, if you asked “what React table should I use?”, the conversation was mostly about rendering rows, sorting, maybe filtering, and how customizable the grid was.

In 2026, that’s not really the hard part anymore.

The hard part is building a datatable like Linear : something that already feels like part of a serious product.

I mean the stuff around the grid itself:

filters

saved views

URL state

bulk actions

grouping

persistence

server-side loading

shareable state

keyboard-friendly workflows

a UI that feels coherent instead of stitched together

I know this because I ended up building the same thing 4 times across different React projects.

And every time, the pattern was the same.

The grid itself was only a small part of the work.

The real engineering time disappeared into all the surrounding UX and behavior that users start expecting once the table becomes part of a real workflow.

So eventually I stopped rebuilding it from scratch and turned it into a product: react-datatable…