When building React applications, data fetching often starts with the native fetch API or tools like Axios. While this approach works for small projects, larger applications require features such as caching, retries, synchronization, and request cancellation, and it is here that TanStack Query, formerly React Query, excels. It provides a battle-tested abstraction for CRUD operations with powerful state management built in.

In this article, we’ll walk through fetching data with useQuery, performing mutations with useMutation, and highlighting some features that make TanStack Query a helpful tool for scaling React apps.