Author: David Omotayo

Introduction

Admin dashboards play a crucial role in the success of B2B businesses. These dashboards are designed to provide a personalized overview of key performance indicators, data accuracy, and administrative actions, all of which have a significant impact on the decision-making process of a business administration, either positively or negatively.

Due to the crucial role played by admin dashboards in the success of any serious business, developers are often tasked with integrating these tools into websites. However, creating effective React admin dashboards is no small feat, as it requires extensive use of advanced data management, data visualization, and routing systems to ensure proper functionality. For those with limited time on their hands, using a library to quickly bootstrap a dashboard application may be the preferred option.

This leads us to the next challenge: selecting the appropriate React admin dashboard library for your application. Choosing a React admin dashboard library involves many considerations, and while visualization is important, it is not the only critical factor. A quality dashboard library should not only be visually attractive, but also integrate seamlessly with various backend technologies, be responsive, and possess other essential features.

In this article, we've curated a compilation of the 5 best React admin dashboard libraries that encompass all the essential features needed to create modern and feature-rich dashboards with minimal effort.

refine

At the top of the list is refine, a comprehensive, open-source library for developing data-driven React admin dashboards with features you wouldn’t typically find in other dashboard libraries.

Similar to several React-based admin dashboard libraries, refine is built on the React framework. However, refine is not a self-contained meta-framework, allowing it to function in any environment capable of running React, including CRA, Next.js, Remix, Vite, and others.

This lets refine leverage the wide range of features these frameworks has to offer, including support for SSR as well as various advanced state management, data management, and routing technologies within the React ecosystem - such as React Query, React Router or the Next.js routing system, and React Hook Form. This enables refine to construct perceptive analytic react admin panels and dashboard applications with intuitive and visually appealing interfaces, equipped with the ability to perform CRUD operations amongst many other functionalities.

One unique feature distinguishing refine from other admin libraries is its headless design. This attribute allows it to seamlessly integrate with custom design or user interface (UI) libraries, such as Material UI, Mantine, Ant Design, and Chakra. Consequently, you can fully personalize the appearance of your application according to your preferences and business model.

Additionally, refine provides an array of helper hooks, components, and data providers that provide complete control over your application's user interface and can easily adapt to different backend architectures like GraphQL, REST, and SOAP, and for seamless authentication and access control flow.

Features

• Open-source
• UI-agnostic
• SSR support
• First-class Typescript support
• Backend-agnostic
• Authentication
• Easy learning curve
• Internationalization ( I18n )
• Accessibility
• CRUD operations

Quick start

npm create refine-app#latest my-project

Stats

• GitHub stars: 8.5k
• License: MIT
• Links: Demo | Documentation | GitHub

Ant Design pro

Ant design pro is an open-source UI library for building production-ready enterprise-level web applications and React admin dashboards.

The library is based on the Ant Design principles and includes a higher level variety of pre-built components, layouts, and design kits. This makes it extremely adaptable, extensively documented, and easy to learn.

Since Ant Design is owned and managed by the Alibaba Group, the library undergoes constant updates and maintenance to ensure it is up-to-date. This means that you can be confident in the library's security and focus your efforts on building top-notch applications.

Features

• Internationalization ( I18n )
• Theming
• Preset style
• Responsiveness
• Typescript support
• Open-source
• Easy learning curve

Quick start

npm i @ant-design/pro-cli -g
pro create my-app

Stats

• Github stars: 33.8k
• License: MIT
• Links: Demo | Documentation | Github

Tremor

Tremor is an open-source library for quickly building insightful React admin dashboards. It provides modular components that can be combined to build highly customized dashboards or analytic interfaces.

Tremor is an opinionated and low-level UI library that provides a variety of components, including layouts, charts, texts, and cards. These components can be quickly combined and arranged by prototyping and organizing them in the appropriate sequence, with minimal requirement for exact calibration.

As one of the first dashboard libraries to adopt Tailwind as its primary theming system, Tremor's components come with stunning built-in styles. Yet, the library also permits the utilization of native CSS as supplementary add-ons for managing minor layout aspects.

Features

• Fast workflow
• Responsiveness
• Easy learning curve
• Open source

Quick start

npm install @tremor/react
//install tailwind and it’s peer dependencies
npm install -D tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer 
npx tailwindcss init -p

Stats

Github stars: 6.6k
License: MIT
Links: Demo | Documentation | GitHub

Material Dashboard React

Material Dashboard React is an open-source admin dashboard template built using React and the material design framework.

The library provides a set of UI components and pre-built pages to help developers create professional-looking admin panels and dashboards quickly.

The template includes various UI components, such as tables, charts, forms, and cards, which can easily be used to build complex interfaces. It also offers multiple color schemes and customization options, allowing developers to tailor the dashboard to their project's needs.

Features

• Responsiveness
• Authentication
• Theming
• Easy learning curve

Quick start

npm i material-dashboard-react

Stats

Github stars: 2.4k
License: MIT
Links: Demo | Documentation | GitHub

Volt React

Volt is an open-source admin dashboard template built with Bootstrap 5 and designed with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind.

It provides a clean and modern UI with over 100 elements, which includes widgets, charts, and data visualization tools to help developers build powerful and responsive admin panels.
Volt’s structural design simplifies the visualization of data acquired from backend technologies. Through an array of objects, the library efficiently transfers data between pre-built components, including form elements and other UI elements. This enables easy integration and customization of data display within the React admin dashboard.

Features

• WCAG Accessibility
• Responsiveness
• Creative asset rights
• Mapbox integration
• W3C validated pages

Quick start

//clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/themesberg/volt-react-dashboard.git 
//then 
Yarn start
Or
npm run start

 Stats

• Github stars: 728
• License: MIT
• Links: Demo | Documentation | GitHub

Conclusion

You may have noticed that some of the libraries mentioned in this article are free versions of paid templates. While these open-source libraries can be enhanced by adding required features, they may not meet your needs. Therefore, if you are searching for a library that can assist you in creating advanced React admin dashboards with all necessary features for free, I would recommend considering refine or Tremor.
However, If you are looking to create something minimal quickly, the rest of the libraries mentioned would suffice. Ultimately, it depends on your specific project requirements and complexity.