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This article will be focusing on why you need a dashboard and how it is best for you to set it up. To make your job easier, we have also created a list of free resources that can speed your development process. So let’s take it to step by step.
What is a dashboard?
A dashboard is a set of pages that are easy to read and offer information to the user in real time regarding his business. A dashboard usually consists of graphical representations of the current status and trends within an organization. Having a well-designed dashboard will give you the possibility to act and make informed decisions based on the data that your business provides.
To be more precise, a dashboard is a graphical, real-time representation of a report. People have always had their data shown in a meaningful, only it has been on paper. Having your business on the web requires you see the back process in a dashboard.
Driving a car requires you to see a control panel, that way you find out about your speed, mileage, how much gas you have left. You can consider having a software business the same way: you need to know how every part is behaving and when you need to take action.
You need dashboards for human resources, managing operations, recruiting sales, information technology, project management, customer relationship management, and the list could go on. If you find yourself in any of these fields, you have probably already felt the need to have your admin functions put together in a friendly interface.
How do you go about it? First thing first, don’t reinvent the wheel. Since everyone needs a dashboard, dashboards are already made and available on the web. You just need to customize it. The other advice is that you should best keep it simple. Only keep the functions that you need.
Our own example
We needed to create a dashboard for our personal admin and for the users too. So we thought of the best solution. We didn’t want to recreate the wheel, but we didn’t want to go with something bloated up and full of functions. So we used pre-defined widgets and put them together in a meaningful way. We found that it was the best way for us, but it is essential that you find the best way for your business.
To make your process more comfortable, we have put together a list of useful free resources for you to choose from. If you know of other tools that have helped you, please leave them in the comments below.
Impact Design System
Impact is an Awesome Design System carefully designed for your online business showcase. Impact Design System was developed in collaboration with Themesberg and it comes as a complete solution, with front pages and dashboard pages included.
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Now UI Dashboard
Now UI Dashboard is a beautiful Bootstrap 4 admin dashboard with a large number of components, designed to look beautiful and organized.
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Light Bootstrap Dashboard
Light Bootstrap Dashboard is a Bootstrap 4 admin dashboard template designed to be beautiful and simple. It comes with a big collection of elements that will offer you multiple possibilities to create the app that best fits your needs.
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Volt
Volt is a free and open-source Bootstrap 5 Admin Dashboard featuring over 100 components, 11 example pages, and 3 plugins with Vanilla JS. It is built using the latest version of Bootstrap 5 and because jQuery is no longer required as a dependency, Volt has been built using only Vanilla JS.
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Material Dashboard
Material Dashboard is a free Material Bootstrap Admin with a fresh, new design inspired by Google’s Material Design. Material Dashboard was built over the popular Bootstrap framework, and it comes with a couple of third-party plugins redesigned to fit in with the rest of the elements.
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Paper Dashboard
Paper Dashboard is a Bootstrap Admin Panel which combines soft colors with beautiful typography and spacious cards and graphics. It is a powerful tool, but it is light and easy to use.
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DashGum – Free Dashboard
DashGum is a simple & elegant admin panel. With DashGum you have charts, tables, a lot of panels, calendars, notifications, to-do lists, and more. Grab our free theme and enjoy it.
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SB Admin
SB Admin is free to download Bootstrap admin template. This template uses the default Bootstrap 3 styles along with a variety of powerful jQuery plugins to create a powerful framework for creating admin panels, web apps, or back-end dashboards.
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AdminLTE Control Panel Template
Best open source admin dashboard & control panel theme. Built on top of Bootstrap 3, AdminLTE provides a range of responsive, reusable, and commonly used components.
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Responsive Bootstrap Admin Template – Edmin
Edmin is a Bootstrap Admin Template with jQuery plugins that are perfect for your projects. It provides an easy to use modern and flat user interface design and a fully responsive layout that is compatible with handheld devices such as phones and tablets.
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Matrix Bootstrap Admin Template
Matrix Admin is a modern, clean, and powerful ready to use responsive admin template with amazing charts and graphs.
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Free Admin Template PSD
The admin template provides you a dashboard that you can use to manage and run your web application. The easier it is to use an admin template, the better experience it offers its users.
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Infinite Admin – Free PSD Web Admin
They are giving away two versions (regular and slim dashboard) free PSD web admin, called Infinite Admin. All layers are well organized in groups. Enjoy it, cause it’s free!
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Vue Light Bootstrap Dashboard
Vue Light Bootstrap Dashboard is an excellent resource built over Bootstrap 4 and Vuejs. It will help you get started developing dashboards in no time.
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Light Bootstrap Dashboard React
Light Bootstrap Dashboard React is an admin dashboard template designed to be beautiful and simple. It is built on top of Light Bootstrap Dashboard and React JS, and it is fully responsive.
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Admin DashBoard Free UI
Admin DashBoard. Manage like a boss with your personal particular DashBoard.
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Material Dashboard React
Material Dashboard React is a free Material-UI Admin with a fresh, new design inspired by Google’s Material Design. It was built over the popular Material-UI framework.
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Evernote Dashboard
Using Evernote just stuck an idea in mind to reskin to make it more live, only made with some more iconic base, change some UX view for users, hope you will enjoy it.
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Dashboard UI Elements
Glad to share with you the 1st part of great UI Kit. This is the dashboard consisting of 16 elements. The font used is Montserrat free
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Paper Dashboard Angular
Paper Dashboard Angular is a Bootstrap Admin Template which combines soft colors with beautiful typography and spacious cards and graphics.
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Vue Paper Dashboard
Vue Paper Dashboard is a beautiful resource built over Bootstrap and Vue. It will help you get started developing dashboards in no time. Vue Paper Dashboard is a Vue ported version of the Original Paper Dashboard.
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Light Bootstrap Dashboard Angular 2
Light Bootstrap Dashboard Angular 2 is an admin dashboard template designed to be beautiful and simple. It is built on top of Light Bootstrap Dashboard and Bootstrap 3, and it is fully responsive.
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Material Dashboard Angular 2
Material Dashboard Angular 2 is a free Material Bootstrap Admin with a fresh, new design inspired by Google’s Material Design.
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Vue Material Dashboard
Vue Material Dashboard is a beautiful resource built over Vue Material and Vuejs. It will help you get started developing dashboards in no time.
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Argon Dashboard Pro Laravel
Start your development with a Bootstrap 4 Admin Dashboard built for Laravel Framework 5.5 and Up. Creative Tim partnered with Updivision to provide a fully coded “frontend + backend” solution for you.
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Vue Argon Dashboard
Vue Argon Dashboard is built with over 100 individual components, giving you the freedom of choosing and combining. All components can take variations in color, that you can easily modify using SASS files.
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Argon Dashboard PRO React
Argon is a completely new product built on our latest re-built from scratch framework structure that is meant to make our products more intuitive, more adaptive and, needless to say, so much easier to customize. Let Argon amaze you with its cool features and build tools and get your project to a whole new level.
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Argon Dashboard Pro Nodejs
Start your development with a Bootstrap 4 Admin Dashboard built for Node.js framework, the newest go-to technology for top companies. Creative Tim partnered with Udevoffice to provide a fully coded “frontend + backend” solution for you.
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Black Dashboard Laravel
Black Dashboard Laravel includes 16 fully implemented components and 3 customized plug-ins designed to speed up your development. And make everything look amazing in the process.
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Black Dashboard Angular
Black Dashboard Angular is a beautiful Bootstrap 4 Admin Dashboard that uses Angular with a huge number of components built to fit together and look amazing. If you are looking for a tool to manage and visualize data about your business, this dashboard is the thing for you. It combines colors that are easy on the eye, spacious cards, beautiful typography, and graphics.
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Light Bootstrap Dashboard Laravel
Light Bootstrap Dashboard Laravel is a free frontend preset for Laravel. Starting from scratch is time-consuming, so we partnered with UPDIVISION to provide you with a free and easy way to jumpstart your next project: frontend and backend.
Light Bootstrap Dashboard Laravel is designed to be clean and simple. We only included components that you actually need in an admin dashboard, without compromising flexibility.
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White Dashboard Laravel
White Dashboard Laravel is a free frontend preset for Laravel.
Kickstart your next project with the Bootstrap 4 Admin Dashboard built for Laravel 5.5 and up. White Dashboard Laravel combines colors that are easy on the eye, spacious cards and beautiful typography, making it a great tool for managing and visualizing data.
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Now UI Dashboard Laravel
Now UI Dashboard Laravel is a free frontend preset for Laravel.
Build immersive experiences with NOW UI Dashboard Laravel, a responsive Bootstrap 4 admin dashboard with an integrated Laravel backend provided by UPDIVISION. The dashboard's look & feel is inspired by NOW UI Kit, a beautiful cross-platform UI kit we developed together with Invision, the design platform powering the world's best user experiences.
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Paper Dashboard Laravel
Paper Dashboard Laravel is a free frontend preset for Laravel.
There’s more to simple design than you think. Especially when there is a lot going on beneath the surface. That's why we partnered with UPDIVISION to give you the best of both worlds: clean, elegant design built on top of Bootstrap 4 with a Laravel backend.
Top comments (1)
I created a library: github.com/SebastienBtr/vue-dashboard to easily create a dashboard app, my motivations for this library is that I didn't want to use a big dashboard template that you can find online, where you always have to do some refactor and remove all the things you don't need. Instead my library just give you a vue component to have a dashboard layout setup. Feedback would be appreciated, and of course, a star if you think it's great :)