Benefits 1. Don't have to implement the functionality yourself! 2. Has probably been pretty well tested by others and offers robust functionality 3. Often times libraries are supported and maintained by community with updates and bug fixes Disadvantages 1. May not do exactly what you need the way you want to do it 2. Time to come up to speed with 3rd party code 3. Overhead of including a library that may have more functionality that you require 4. If you are developing in Swift not as many libraries are written in Swift so you can still use them you are bridging between the two languages