[acemarke]

Personally, I'd say the biggest similarity between Redux and Backbone is that both are simple, minimal, "no-magic" implementations of a few specific concepts, and have communities that have built addons to fit additional use cases.

Backbone is really just an event bus, some smart wrapper logic around updating an object and an array, and a nicer setup syntax for jQuery event handlers for a particular element tree. People have then built addons that handle relational models, derived data, view lifecycles, and so on.

Redux is just putting all/most your data in a single "model", making sure all writes happen explicitly and immutably, and firing a single "change"-like event. From there people have built various ways of organizing side effects, listening for specific changes, and hooking into other libraries.

So, both simple libraries that form the basis for an ecosystem, and let you pick-and-choose the pieces that you specifically need.

[danabramov]

Yes, exactly. I would argue that Redux has an even smaller scope than Backbone (e.g. it doesn’t handle views or AJAX) but the landscape has changed enough that this is not necessary for a state management library. But it definitely fills the same niche.