Need advice about hair animation

I'm making character with dreadlocks, and my question is, how to solve the animation? Should I use bones in blender? I need the dreads to act naturaly by movement, and animating every hair seems like the most difficult way to do this. I would use some cloth asset for it but dreads are thick, not actually like normal hair.

 

I would look into mesh deformation. There are some assets in the asset store that do it out of the box.