shinydashboard is an R package by RStudio that provides a dashboarding framework for Shiny, turning R code into an interactive admin-style web dashboard with a layout of boxes, sidebars, and value boxes.
What is shinydashboard?
shinydashboard is an R package that extends the Shiny web framework with a dashboard layout system. It is developed in the rstudio/shinydashboard repository and distributed on CRAN, so you can install it with install.packages("shinydashboard"). The package's full documentation is available at http://rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/. It is described in the repository metadata as a "Shiny Dashboarding framework" and carries topics such as admin-dashboard, reactivity, and web-development, which reflect its role in building reactive, web-based admin interfaces entirely from R.
What makes shinydashboard stand out?
- CRAN distribution — Install directly from CRAN with
install.packages("shinydashboard"), no build from source needed. - Documentation site — The package has a dedicated documentation site at rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/ covering layout functions and examples.
- Continuous integration — The GitHub repository runs an R-CMD-check workflow, shown by the badge on the repo, so the package is actively tested on commits.
- GitHub project — Hosted by RStudio, the repository has 927 stars and includes topics like admin-dashboard, dashboard, and web-app.
- Shiny framework — Built specifically for Shiny, it brings a structured dashboard template (header, sidebar, body) to R Shiny applications.
- Reactive design — Topics including reactivity indicate native integration with Shiny's reactive data flow for live-updating outputs.
Who should use shinydashboard?
- R developers building Shiny apps who want a ready-made dashboard layout instead of hand-writing HTML/CSS.
- Data analysts who need to present KPIs and metrics in an admin-style interface with boxes and sidebars.
- Shiny developers who want to quickly stand up a dashboard skeleton and then populate it with plotly or htmlwidgets visualizations.
What can you do with shinydashboard?
- Data science teams: Assemble internal monitoring dashboards that show live metrics with value boxes and reactive charts.
- Shiny app authors: Convert a existing Shiny app into a dashboard by restructuring the UI with dashboardPage, dashboardHeader, dashboardSidebar, and dashboardBody functions.
- Prototyping: Build a professional-looking admin interface in minutes, then iterate on the layout with tabs, collapsible boxes, and menu items.
Alternatives
- flexdashboard — An R package for creating dashboards from R Markdown, which uses a different workflow based on markdown documents rather than a Shiny UI layout.
FAQ
How do I install shinydashboard?
Use install.packages("shinydashboard") in R to install the package from CRAN. The installation command is shown on the repository README.
Is shinydashboard free?
shinydashboard is an open-source R package distributed on CRAN, so it is free to use and modify. It is maintained by RStudio.
What kind of dashboards can shinydashboard create?
It creates web-based admin-style dashboards for Shiny applications, featuring a sidebar, header, and body area where you can place boxes, value boxes, and reactive plot outputs.
Where can I find documentation for shinydashboard?
Documentation is hosted at http://rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/, which includes examples and reference for the package's layout functions.
Pricing
shinydashboard is free and open source.
