Understanding the Difference Between react-helmet and react-helmet-async

Walter G.

5 minute read

react

When building React applications, especially those concerned with SEO and dynamic content, managing the contents of the HTML document's <head> tag becomes essential. Two popular libraries used for this purpose are react-helmet and react-helmet-async. While they offer similar APIs and functionality, their differences become more pronounced in server-side rendering (SSR) scenarios.

In this article we will break down the differences between both popular libraries and explain when to use each.

What is `react-helmet`?

react-helmet is a well-established library that allows developers to manage changes to the document head from within React components. It supports setting the title, meta tags, link tags, and other elements within the head, all using declarative React syntax.

import { Helmet } from 'react-helmet';

function AboutPage() {
  return (
    <>
      <Helmet>
        <title>About Us – MySite</title>
        <meta name="description" content="Learn more about our team and mission." />
        <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mysite.com/about" />
      </Helmet>
      <h1>About Us</h1>
      <p>We’re a team dedicated to building modern web experiences.</p>
    </>
  );
}

It works effectively for client-side rendered applications and has been the go-to solution for many years.

However, it has limitations in server-side rendering scenarios, particularly when dealing with asynchronous rendering or data-fetching processes.

For those situations, you'll want to rely on react-helmet-async instead.

What is `react-helmet-async`?

react-helmet-async was developed to address the shortcomings of react-helmet in asynchronous and concurrent rendering environments. It provides similar functionality and syntax but includes better support for SSR. This is particularly relevant with the advancements in React 18 and frameworks that support concurrent rendering.

The key difference lies in how the context is managed during SSR. react-helmet-async introduces a HelmetProvider component that wraps your React application, ensuring that the helmet data is collected and extracted correctly even when rendering asynchronously.

Implementation Differences

For react-helmet, a typical usage might look like this:

import { Helmet } from 'react-helmet';

<Helmet>
  <title>My App</title>
  <meta name="description" content="Description here" />
</Helmet>

For react-helmet-async, you first wrap your application with a HelmetProvider:

import { Helmet, HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';

<HelmetProvider>
  <App />
</HelmetProvider>

On the server side, you provide a context object:

const helmetContext = {};
const appHtml = renderToString(
  <HelmetProvider context={helmetContext}>
    <App />
  </HelmetProvider>
);

const { helmet } = helmetContext;

This approach ensures that all head tags are captured correctly, even when parts of your component tree rely on asynchronous data.

Why React 18+ Changes the Game

React 18 introduced several rendering improvements, including concurrent rendering, streaming server-side rendering (SSR), and transitions.

These features offer better performance and user experience, but they also expose the limitations of libraries that weren't built with async or out-of-order rendering in mind.

react-helmet, while reliable in traditional setups, was not designed with concurrency in mind. In React 18+, it can lead to issues like:

Hydration mismatches, where the content rendered on the server doesn’t match the client during hydration.
Lost or incorrect head tags when components render asynchronously.
Race conditions in concurrent environments, where multiple renders overwrite each other's head state.

This is where react-helmet-async becomes essential. It was specifically designed to handle React's new rendering model, ensuring that head tags are collected and rendered deterministically, even when parts of your component tree load out of order or with async data.

By using a shared context via HelmetProvider, it ensures consistent, isolated collection of head elements during SSR, preventing the kinds of subtle bugs that can be extremely hard to debug in production SEO environments.

When to Use Each

Feature	`react-helmet`	`react-helmet-async`
Client-side Support	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Server-side Rendering (Basic SSR)	⚠️ Limited	✅ Fully Supported
React 18 Concurrent Rendering	❌ Not Recommended	✅ Designed for Concurrency
Asynchronous Rendering Compatibility	❌ No	✅ Yes
Requires `HelmetProvider` Wrapper	❌ No	✅ Yes
Streaming SSR Support	❌ No	✅ Yes
Community Support & Stability	✅ Mature, but older	✅ Actively maintained fork
Syntax/API	✅ `<Helmet>`	✅ `<Helmet>` (identical API)
Use Case Recommendation	Pure client-side apps	SSR, SEO, modern rendering setups

Use react-helmet if your application is purely client-side and you do not require advanced SSR support.
Use react-helmet-async for server-rendered applications or when building with frameworks that leverage concurrent rendering or data fetching.

Conclusion

While both libraries serve the same purpose, react-helmet-async offers enhanced flexibility and reliability for modern React applications, especially those that rely on server-side rendering.

For new projects, especially those targeting SEO optimization or using frameworks like Next.js, react-helmet-async is generally the recommended choice.

Walter Guevara is a Computer Scientist, software engineer, startup founder and previous mentor for a coding bootcamp. He has been creating software for the past 20 years.

Last updated on: June 09 2025