Tab Navigation vs Route-Based Navigation in React: My Experience with Large Datasets

Insight Mar 12, 2025

Today I want to share my journey with a common React challenge: choosing between tab navigation and route-based navigation for dashboards with large datasets.

The Problem I Faced

Last month, I was working on a dashboard project that displayed around 1000 user records across multiple views. I needed to decide: should I use tabs within a single page or create separate routes for each view?

It wasn't an easy decision. I had to think about:

Performance with large datasets
User experience and navigation flow
Memory management
Code organization

What The Documentation Says

According to React Router documentation, route-based navigation is recommended for complex applications with distinct views, while component-based tab navigation works well for related content that needs to maintain shared state.

The React community generally agrees that route-based navigation provides better code organization and supports the web's natural linking and history capabilities. However, this is just general guidance - we need real metrics for our specific use case.

My Experience with Both Approaches

function Dashboard() {
  const [activeTab, setActiveTab] = useState(0);
  
  return (
    <div>
      <div className="tabs">
        <button onClick={() => setActiveTab(0)}>Products</button>
        <button onClick={() => setActiveTab(1)}>Users</button>
        <button onClick={() => setActiveTab(2)}>Orders</button>
      </div>
      
      {activeTab === 0 && <ProductsPanel />}
      {activeTab === 1 && <UsersPanel />}
      {activeTab === 2 && <OrdersPanel />}
    </div>
  );
}

Strengths:

Fast switching between views (felt instant to users)
Preserved state between tab switches
Simpler implementation initially
No need to handle route management

Weaknesses:

Memory usage increased dramatically with dataset size
Initial load time was longer since all tabs needed to initialize
Testing became more complicated
No direct URLs for specific views

function App() {
  return (
    <BrowserRouter>
      <Routes>
        <Route path="/" element={<Dashboard />}>
          <Route index element={<Navigate to="products" />} />
          <Route path="products" element={<ProductsView />} />
          <Route path="users" element={<UsersView />} />
          <Route path="orders" element={<OrdersView />} />
        </Route>
      </Routes>
    </BrowserRouter>
  );
}

Strengths:

Better memory management
Cleaner architecture and separation of concerns
Support for direct links to specific views
Better code splitting possibilities

Weaknesses:

Slightly slower navigation experience
Extra work to maintain state between route changes
More complex implementation initially

Measuring Real Performance

To make a data-driven decision, I measured both approaches using Chrome DevTools with a dataset of 1000 records:

Metric	Tab-Based	Route-Based
Memory Usage	~130MB	~65MB
Initial Load	~2.8s	~1.6s
Navigation Time	~80ms	~350ms
DOM Elements	~3200	~1200

The tab navigation approach used nearly twice as much memory and had significantly more DOM elements, which explained the occasional freezing issues.

To address the slower navigation of route-based approach, I implemented:

Optimistic UI updates - Show the new view immediately while data loads
Data caching with React Query - Store previously fetched data

function UsersView() {
  const [page, setPage] = useState(1);
  
  const { data, isLoading } = useQuery(
    ['users', page],
    () => fetchUsers(page),
    { 
      keepPreviousData: true,
      staleTime: 5 * 60 * 1000 // 5 minutes
    }
  );
  
  if (isLoading && !data) return <LoadingSpinner />;
  
  return (
    <div>
      {/* User data display */}
      <Pagination currentPage={page} onChange={setPage} />
    </div>
  );
}

With these optimizations, the navigation delay became barely noticeable but we kept the memory benefits.