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React Dashboard Libraries: Which One To Use in 2024?

August 2, 2023

Mieke Houbrechts

Want to add interactive analytics dashboards to your Angular app? Discover the best Angular dashboard libraries to use in 2023.

React has earned its status as one of the most popular web development frameworks. In 2023, over 40% of developers are using React to build front-end SaaS applications. All these apps generate a boatload of data, but turning that data into visual dashboards for your app users can be a challenge.

How can SaaS developers build a React dashboard quickly and easily? In this article, we’ll compare the most popular React dashboard libraries, and walk you through the steps to build an insightful dashboard for your customers.

What is React.js?

React.js is a front-end web development framework, developed by Facebook. It’s one of the most popular open-source JavaScript libraries for building interactive user interfaces or front-end web applications. Other examples of front-end frameworks are Angular, Vue.js and React Native.

To create powerful web applications, developers often use React.js in combination with Node.js. While React.js is responsible for the front-end and user interface, Node.js takes care of the back-end: server-side logic, handling requests, and performing operations on the server.

With React, developers can create reusable UI components, which makes it a quick and effective way to build apps. Using modular React components requires way less code than developing something from scratch with vanilla JavaScript. This can save your development team tons of time.

What are React UI components?

React UI component libraries are ready-to-use, reusable pieces of code. You can use a UI component to add a specific functionality or visual element to your web app quickly. Buttons, forms, tables, charts and modals are all examples of specific user interfaces you can add with these components.

Imagine React components as a sort of UI kit, similar to a lego kit. Just like you have a bunch of lego blocks to choose from, you can pick out the code blocks you need, and easily plug them into any web application you’re building.

Instead of coding elements from scratch, developers can speed up development with React libraries. Without compromise, because you can adjust the styling to your liking and keep a consistent look and feel across your application.

Why use React libraries for analytics dashboards?

Analytics dashboards are just one of the many features you can build using React components. But it’s a great use case, because building reporting tools for your app users is a time-consuming job. Especially if your users need advanced, interactive charts, and you want them to match your platform’s branding seamlessly. So why go through all that effort if you can use an off-the-shelf React component?

More and more developers are using open-source React libraries to speed up the development and launch of their dashboards. Let’s look at some top open-source libraries, including some specific libraries for data visualization.

React analytics dashboard vs admin dashboard

Before diving into specific React dashboard libraries, it’s worth noting the difference between analytics and admin dashboards. If you’re researching React dashboards on Google, you will likely get two different results:

  • React analytics dashboards: UI elements to build charts and reporting dashboards
  • React admin dashboard templates: templates for your React application’s home screen (often called a dashboard)

In this article, we will focus on React analytics dashboards only. If you’re looking to build an admin dashboard, the following free React libraries are open-source and worth further exploring. Some React admin dashboard libraries also have UI elements for data visualization, but they are limited.

  • Ant Design Pro: great for building admin interfaces for enterprise applications, supporting both TypeScript and React
  • Argon: a library based on Reactstrap and Bootstrap 4, with a range of fully coded components to choose from
  • Material UI (MUI): a developer-friendly admin dashboard library, based on Google Material Design and React
  • Material Dashboard 2: a React admin dashboard template inspired by MUI, built by Creative Tim
  • Volt React Dashboard: a React.js admin dashboard template and UI library based on Bootstrap 5, using React Hooks. Bonus: it can easily visualize data pulled from your backend.
  • Mosaic Lite: built on Tailwind CSS and React, this responsive dashboard template offers pre-coded charts and widgets for your web app’s admin panel.

Best React dashboard libraries

If you want to add advanced analytics features to your web application, React data visualization libraries are the best place to start looking. Below, you’ll find a few React components that were specifically built for adding charts and analytics dashboards to apps. Most of them are available through GitHub or npm packages.

Luzmo

If you want a comprehensive analytics module for your software, Luzmo’s embedded analytics platform is the right choice. They have data visualization libraries available for all major front-end frameworks, including React. After installing their React npm package, it lets you embed stunning visualizations in any React application with just a few lines of code. It comes with many customizable styling options, and secure authentication that is easy to set up. Using their API, you can set up deep interaction with other parts of your application.

Luzmo's dashboard interface

A major advantage is that non-developers can create and manage in-production dashboards with a simple drag and drop editor. At the same time, developers can customize everything to their liking with just a few lines of code. This combination makes it stand out from other chart libraries, because you don’t have to build and manage everything on your own as a developer.

Recharts

Recharts offers a set of reusable components to create responsive and interactive charts. It’s built on top of D3.js, a popular JavaScript chart library, with some adjustments for React developers. Its charts are responsive, interactive, and you can choose from basic chart types like bar charts, area charts, and pie charts. Although they have more advanced data visualizations like the Sankey diagram and radar chart, Recharts has less options than specialized analytics platforms like Luzmo.

If you’re looking for something very lightweight to get started, Recharts is a good option.

Recharts dashboard example
Source

Victory

Victory is an open-source collection of data visualization components for React. It’s designed and maintained by Formidable Labs, an engineering consulting firm. Similar to Recharts, it’s also built on top of D3.js. Victory offers great customizations: you can change the appearance, colors, and labels to match your platform’s design. It has a wide range of chart types to choose from.

Victory is a great choice if you want something more robust than Recharts. On the flipside, that means the learning curve is slightly steeper.

Example of charts in Victory
Source

Nivo

Nivo is another React dashboard library similar to Victory and Recharts, since it’s also built on top of D3.js. However, Nivo is probably the most feature-rich library of the three. It has the most extensive catalogue of chart widgets, with heat maps, treemaps and more. With its customizable API, it’s more suitable for data-heavy applications and dashboards. However, its learning curve is a little steeper because of its many powerful features. For full-stack developers who are using React chart libraries for the first time, Luzmo is a great alternative that is both feature-rich and user-friendly.

Example of Nivo chart library
Source

How to build a React dashboard with Luzmo

This quick tutorial will show you the key steps to add customer-facing dashboards to your React apps using Luzmo. Note that you may need a few different or extra steps when using a different library.

1. Install npm package

To start using the library in your React project, you’ll first need to install the npm package. If you don’t have a Luzmo account yet, you’ll also need to create one (free trials are available).

2. Connect data

You can connect any data source using out-of-the-box connectors for popular databases like MongoDB or PostgreSQL, or data warehouses like Snowflake or BigQuery. If we don’t support your favorite data source yet, you can easily plug them in with Luzmo’s plugin API.

3. Create dashboard

Once you’ve created your first dataset, you can create interactive charts and dashboards with a simple drag-and-drop interface. For developers, this is great to avoid a lot of maintenance and updates. Instead, customer success team or account managers can easily make modifications and publish them to your app, without having to touch the code.

4. Embed dashboards in your React app

When your dashboard is ready, you’ll use the React library to embed dashboards into your application. You can customize the fonts, colors, background, spinners, as well as timezone you want to show the dashboard in. Using Luzmo’s React library, you can also set advanced access rights to show personalized dashboards depending on the user who is logged in. Or if you want to make the dashboards interact with other parts of your applications, you can easily do so by adding just a few lines of code.

You can find more instructions to set these up on npm and in Luzmo’s developer documentation.

5. Publish

You’re all set to launch analytics dashboards for your SaaS app users in your next deploy!

Getting started with React dashboard libraries

The amount of options to build dashboards in React can be overwhelming. Embedded analytics tools are a great future-proof solution. As your customer base grows, you can scale up your dashboards, and add more features if your customer needs change.

Luzmo integrates seamlessly with React applications. With its easy-to-use React library, you’ll get the job done in days, not months. The intuitive BI interface is a huge advantage if you don’t want to worry about maintenance and dashboard upgrades. Your client-facing team members can manage everything without writing a single line of code.

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