You don't need to use Babel, though we do recommend it. We're just no longer going to maintain our own JSX transformer since there's no point. (If you want just

You don't need to use Babel, though we do recommend it. We're just no longer going to maintain our own JSX transformer since there's no point. (If you want just Babel's JSX transformation without any other features, that's possible too.) There's a CoffeeScript JSX transformer here if you're interested: https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react and we'll continue to support using React without JSX, and though we use Babel now internally, we compile React itself to ES5 before putting it on npm so you don't need to use Babel if you don't want to.