You don’t have to use either. This is how I write components: https://medium.com/@baronmaximilianwilleford/react-without-this-39a76b8f2160

You don’t have to deal with ‘this’ at all and stateful components look a lot more like stateless components (making it easier to switch back in forth when you’re deciding what you really need). Overall, I think it makes it easier to reason about your code than either ‘class’ or ‘createClass.’