The fastest way to get started is via CLI. This will spin up an isolated browser instance which you can interact or use React Scan with.
The issue is that component props are compared by reference, not value. This is intentional – this way rendering can be cheap to run.
However, this makes it easy to accidentally cause unnecessary renders, making the app slow. Even in production apps, with hundreds of engineers, can't fully optimize their apps (see GitHub, Twitter, and Instagram).
This often comes down to props that update in reference, like callbacks or object values. For example, the onClick function and style object are re-created on every render, causing ExpensiveComponent to slow down the app:
React Scan helps you identify these issues by automatically detecting and highlighting renders that cause performance issues. Now, instead of guessing, you can see exactly which components you need to fix.
React Devtools aims to be a general purpose tool for React. However, I deal with React performance issues every day, and React Devtools doesn't fix my problems well. There's a lot of noise (no obvious distinction between unnecessary and necessary renders), and there's no programmatic API. If it sounds like you have the same problems, then React Scan may be a better choice.