This article we 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 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, milage, 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 nice 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 second 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 own 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 was the best way for us, but it is important that you find the best way for your business.
To make your process easier, 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.
1. 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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2. 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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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. SB Admin
SB Admin is a 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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7. 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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8. Responsive Bootstrap Admin Template – Edmin
Edmin is a Bootstrap Admin Template with jQuery plugins that is 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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9. 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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10. Angular Material Dashboard
Responsive Angular admin dashboard with material design based on Angular Material. Check it out!
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11. 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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12. Infinite Admin – Free PSD Web Admin
They are giving away two version (normal 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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13. Free PSD Dashboard
Hope you all enjoy the free dashboard.
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14. Analytics Dashboard UI KIT
Here is a freebie set. Check the attachment for full versions. Feel free to download and enjoy it!
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15. Smart Admin Dashboard
Download and enjoy it!
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16. Futani Admin Dashboard
Futani is a unique and trendy admin dashboard. It’s a perfect combination of modern design and unique authentic look. It’s fancy and functional in the same time.
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17. Vue Light Bootstrap Dashboard
Vue Light Bootstrap Dashboard is a beautiful resource built over Bootstrap 4 and Vuejs. It will help you get started developing dashboards in no time.
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18. 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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19. Admin DashBoard Free UI
Admin DashBoard. Manage like a boss with your personal special DashBoard.
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20. 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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21. Evernote Dashboard
Using Evernote just stuck an idea in mind to reskin to make it more live, just made with some more iconic base, change some UX view for users, hope you will enjoy it.
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22. 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. The license type is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
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23. 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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24. 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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25. Light Bootstrap Dashboard Angular2
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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26. Material Dashboard Angular2
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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27. 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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28. 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.
29. 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.
You will save a lot of time going from prototyping to full-functional code, because all elements are implemented. This Dashboard is coming with pre-built examples, so the development process is seamless, switching from our pages to the real website is very easy to be done.
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nice
thanks
I would also include downloadSoho.com, Scarab13.com, ScaryPoster.com, CreativeArtMarket.com. Also great sites with some cool freebies…
that’s the most valuable thing I’ve seen in the new year.
thanks a lot for creating such an amazing templates and utilities, I spend lots time on building kinds of dashboard in the past months, https://github.com/litaotao/IPython-Dashboard , the dashboard templates here seem so great, but I want to know is there any tutorial on building personal/productional dashboard using these templates? thanks a lot
Yes we have
Great ^^
What’s up to all, it’s truly a fastidious for
me to visit this site, it consists of useful Information.
Things are all very open with a clear description of your issues.
It had been really informative. Your website is
extremely helpful. Many thanks for sharing!
Great article. I’m experiencing a few of these issues as well..
You said
“We needed to create a dashboard for our own admin and for the users too.”
So where did you find pre-defined widgets in order to put them together in your USERS’ dashboard?
Thanks in advance, for advice!
All of the Templates are Really awesome and User Friendly. Thank you for this Free template thats are Really Helpful to anyone.
Thanks!
Thanks for these wonderful templates
thanks a lot …
Great templates
Nice !
thanks
Hello, do you allow guest posting on blog.creative-tim.com ? 🙂 Let me know on my e-mail
do you have tutorial for Dashboard Templates thanks
very goood
NiCe
very beautifull..
very nice themes , i was looking for admin panels
Looks awesome collection of dashboard templates.
These 2 link are broken, you can consider to update and fix
9. Director Responsive Admin Template Free
18. YONO Dashboard UI Kit
Regards
Wonderful themes
very nice and beautiful themes
very thanks for publishing
beautiful themes
very thanks for publishing
i will use its in my new site
can i download this theme
Nice!
thanks for your article best articles
Hello,
Now UI Dashboard looks amazing.
Keep up the good work guys!
thank you , i was looking for admin panels
Things are all very open with a clear description of your issues.
It had been really informative. Your website is
extremely helpful. Many thanks for sharing!
Hello guys!
Check this out: Light Dashboard designed by @CreativeTim and coded in two languages:
#Php @CodeIgniter and #Python #Flask.
Goodies: Auth, Register, #ORM, MIT license. Github sources:
Php / CodeIgniter: http://bit.ly/2IeXOQm
Python / Flask: http://bit.ly/2FPhWKV
🙂
thanks gan.
Of course, now there are a lot of free panel templates that can help almost every user. Let’s not forget that the main task that faces a free panel is to create user convenience. For me, a great panel, this one that has all the tools I need to work, as well as the ability to customize the panel. After all, not every panel can accommodate all the tools you need, or it can contain a lot of unnecessary things, personalization will help you get the panel you need, thereby meeting all your needs. I used the Light Bootstrap instrument panel, and I think that the developers worked well on it. As you said in the article, she is beautiful and simple, but can you really want more?
Nice Article !! Thank You for sharing this article. it is very useful !!
Whoaouuu, so great and clear this post ! thank you so müch !
Things are all very open with a clear description of your issues. It had been really informative. Your website is extremely helpful. Many thanks for sharing!
Hi Diana,
This is a great resource for those looking for beautiful and responsive Dashboard themes and templates. Thanks for compiling this list. Really useful!
Great Article, Your website is extremely helpful. Many thanks for sharing!
That’s so amazing we now have a possibility to use already made templates and not to create them from scratch. Thanks for good article.
I like this site. I get many information from this blog.
Great piece of work
Very impressive and interesting blog,
Very impressive and interesting blog,
It looks awesome! but can I integrate this with SharePoint? and I want to present my SharePoint list items to this dashboards. Is it possible? can some one please guide me here.
It is a lovely article. The article gives you 27 Free Dashboard Templates. This article concentrates on why you need a dashboard and how it is best for you to set it up. According to the article, ‘A dashboard is a set of pages that are easy to read and present 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’.
Impressive blog.
Good one! this article gives impressive knowledge.
thanks admin u site good
very good ,
thanks you
Awesome list of dashboard templates. Thanks for sharing with us!
Nice collection of dashboard themes. Material Dashboard looking good.