Sonner and react-hot-toast are both lightweight toast notification libraries for React applications, designed to provide user feedback with minimal setup. Sonner, created by Emil Kowalski, focuses on performance through virtualized rendering and zero dependencies, while react-hot-toast by Timo Lins emphasizes simplicity with a hook-based architecture and promise-aware APIs.
This comparison matters because toast notifications are ubiquitous in modern web apps, and choosing the wrong library can impact bundle size, DX, and integration complexity. Sonner targets developers building performance-critical apps with shadcn/ui or Next.js, while react-hot-toast appeals to teams prioritizing React-idiomatic patterns and async state management through hooks.
Sonner is the clear winner for most modern React applications in 2025. Its combination of minimal bundle size, superior rendering performance, and hook-free API makes it the optimal choice for Next.js apps, shadcn/ui projects, and any application where bundle size matters. The virtualized rendering and zero-dependency architecture provide measurable performance benefits, especially in navigation-heavy SPAs. The API is simpler to use across the entire codebase without worrying about React component boundaries.
React-hot-toast remains a solid choice only in specific scenarios where you need deep integration with React's hook lifecycle or have existing codebases heavily invested in hook-based state management patterns. If your team strongly prefers React-idiomatic APIs and you're building complex async flows that benefit from hooks, react-hot-toast provides that familiarity. However, for greenfield projects or applications prioritizing performance and DX, Sonner's advantages are substantial enough to make it the default recommendation.