Do you build your own admin dashboards?

I used to buy admin templates, because why reinvent the wheel, right? But all pre-made things have their limitations. Everything feels awesome until you hit those limits. It usually becomes a struggle to make that template work after that.

With modern tools like Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js and Vue though, it became way easier to build your stuff from scratch. Because you're not stressing over CSS hierarchy and fragile DOM manipulations. I've built my product with TW and Alpine. It was unbelievably fast. I'm never going back to 3 megabytes of JavaScript per page templates.

We're running on https://retool.com for about 2 months and loving it so far! It's nothing short of amazing. Time to create and maintain internal tools was cut to almost nothing. It's super easy to create dashboards with their editor and they have a super generous free plan (we're using it).

I'm trying to leverage as much https://tailwindui.com/components as I can and build the rest by myself. Give it a look.

I see a lot of frontend guys here so a lot of frontend technologies.
I'm an old-school PHP guy so I always go with a Laravel Nova instance for an admin Dashboard. You have BACKEND + FRONTEND in the same platform. (Laravel PHP + VueJs). Basically you just define your models and actions - after that, you can put filters, charts, stats with one line of code.

I have limited design skills so I heavily lean on sites like www.wrapbotstrap.com for Bootstrap templates. Also Bulma has been good for me.

I would usually slice-and-dice the individual html & css components, rather than go through the whole client side scss->webpack->transpiling->css build process. Kind of old-skool I know but it works for me since I never want to change the designs beyond a little in-lined css here and there.

However, next time around I am going to go with TailwindUI. I didn't grasp the benefits of utility css at first but having watched the videos - and heard a huge amount of good things about it - I think its the way forward for me to give the flexibility I miss with templates and, at the same time, constrain my ability to mess up design!

I personally don't really like to use existing templates as I find it more time consuming than using just UI libraries. The issues with these templates are usually to be able to customize how to fetch the data you want and might take a while to learn about it.

My recommendation, take a UI library and build with that. I used many times https://vuetifyjs.com/en/ for the UI and https://nuxtjs.org/, a vue framework and it's quite efficient.
Otherwise, if you don't really mind about the design of your dashboard and you really want just focus on the data that are important for you and your product, I would definitely advise you to look at existing dashboard solutions where you can connect everything you need such as https://www.geckoboard.com/. You will not be able to customize the design much but you might be able to have all the data that you need.

Good question, this crossed my mind as well. So far, I've been building my own. I haven't researched too much for this specific topic, but I find most templates to look great, but as soon as you want to tweak it a bit for your own needs, you spend far more time trying to so than just building something from scratch.

For Seodity we've built custom Admin Panel using our app as a starting point. Little customization was needed to make it functional. Of course it would be best to design and create it from scratch, but it's more than enough when you're in the beginning of getting users.

It pains me to waste resources on building product that isn't customer-facing, I've been trying these admin panels: https://www.forestadmin.com/ and https://www.internal.io/

Hey @Mantelijo! I work at Retool (https://retool.com/) - it's a tool that helps engineers save time and build internal tools quickly. Admin panels are one of our most popular use cases, and we even have ready made, usable templates (like our Firebase Admin Panel template – https://retool.com/templates/firebase-admin-panel/). You can customize Retool apps with Javascript anywhere, add components like text inputs and buttons from our library, and connect any data source from MySQL to a REST API.

I built my own for Chiffre.io using ChakraUI. It started small, only showing a few key metrics, then it grew up to be a real-time monitoring tool for usage.

I've looked at using pre-made templates, but they often are clumsy to integrate and hard to think about. React-admin looked very promising though, but it might be too early to integrate that yet in my case.

At work, we would buy a template or do it from scratch from the same site design.

At home, I build from scratch, but I think this depends on the project.

I usually buy pre made (from WrapBootstrap and other sources). As a single developer startup, it is just so much faster to get something out there using a pre made template. Plus you know that it is usually tested and working on various browsers and form factors.

However with our next iteration of our web app, I am thinking of building the interface from scratch using TailWind CSS or similar. That way we can make it look exactly how I'd like, instead of compromising to fit someone else's idea of what a dashboard should look like.

I think it is important to split the concerns of 'admin' and 'dashboard'.

For an admin, which probably exists to give unencumbered CRUD access to your data, then I use whatever is quick and capable. I'm lucky to have access to the Django admin for this kind of acitivty; it's mature enough that you can hand it to non-technical people to use.

For dashboarding, and live reporting, then typically I'd use something like Google Sheets, communicating with my APIs. Sheets has excellent capabilities around data capture, and can poll an API and live-update the spreadsheet. Plus you have built-in access to most of the Google Charts API. I've not found a faster way to build than this.

I build my own. It doesn't need to be pretty, just functional enough to get you the data and controls/knobs that you want.

I think it depends on what the admin solves. For my last startup, we built one for managing the marketplace and doing some very basic data analysis.

For reviewing stats and trying to dig into deeper data, I would never build another admin dashboard again. Instead, I'd pick a Business Intelligence (BI) service and connect my data stores to it. It's some work to setup in the beginning if you're not familiar, but worth it once you want to dig into data and visualize it. Looker was the last BI tool I used, but there a lot of companies in the space now.