Appsmith for building pretty dashboards

For small businesses when starting out, its super important to stay lean and validate your hypothesis as quickly as possible. This is only possible if you are churning out ideas and concepts quickly, and putting them in front of the user and gauging their response.

This calls for a light weight frontend and backend layer. While there are tons of technologies out there for fast frontend development (like Nextjs, React, Svelte etc.), recently people have started realizing the value of having a simple drag and drop widget like dashboard builders like Appsmith, Retool, Bubble and Tooljet.

We recently comparared multiple dashboarding tools, and we decided to go ahead with Appsmith. Some of the deciding factors were:

1. Super easy to build a dashboard
2. Appsmith is open source (hence trustworthy)
3. Appsmith can be easily self hosted

Self hosting

It was actually pretty easy to deploy a docker instance of Appsmith locally, build a dashboard with metrics, tables and charts with data coming from backend apis, and show a demo to customers within a day. Imagine if we had tried to build this in Nextjs ourselves, we'd have taken a couple of days just to finalize the designs.

Speed is the biggest advantage startups have !

One of the biggest benefits of existing widgets is that you dont have to design the UI, its kind of comes pre-existing. It also gives you a good way of putting together a design in a matter of minutes, and see for yourself how it looks.

Using Appsmith, we were able to create our Whatsapp scheduler and automation dashboards in under 2 hours:

and this:

Here's a dashboard for image analysis on the group:
Another dashboard for measuring actively engaged audience and read times across multiple groups:

Since Appsmith is open source, worst case if it comes to it, you can just fix the bugs yourself and deploy. Also, most dashboarding tools have a user based pricing, which means if your team size or your customer's team size is more than 5 people, you end up paying quite a lot of money. Self hosting Appsmith is also super easy.

While this may not be what Appsmith had in mind, but lets be thankful to the wonderful piece of technology they have created. And we're happy to contribute back .

Widgets

Here are some widgets we found super useful:

• Left bar navigation for multiple pages within the same app. This makes it easy to navigate between pages without having to build a custom component yourself.
• Dropdowns for filtering are super easy
• Tables are super easy. For dummy data, configuring columns are a little painful, but if your data comes from a datasource (API, Database ...), it works out of the box very well. We hooked up our JSON api to tables, and it just worked.
• Tabs works really well, its super easy to setup multiple tabbed content without requiring complex javascripts
• Charts work out of the box. While the options are limited, but I found them super easy to setup and get a gist of whats happening
• Export and import of dashboards works really well
• Very easy to add users to apps
• Great set of data source integrations. It was super easy to start with Google sheets to get a preview of what our dashboard could look like, and then move it to an API

Limitations of Appsmith

While Appsmith is a great tool, there are some limitation we came across:

• The dashboard isn't responsive (mobile layout)
• Current selected row JS doesn't work well in tables
• Pie charts and line charts need more config options

But overall I would rate Appsmith above any other dashboarding tools because of the design philosophy and the open source approach they have taken. Open source adds a lot of trust in the mission statement of the product.

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