When comparing Tipboard vs Smashing, the Slant community recommends Tipboard for most people. In the question“What are the best open source dashboard frameworks?” Tipboard is ranked 1st while Smashing is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Tipboard is:
Tipboard is straightforward to configure — you define your dashboard's layout with YAML, specify what tiles you want in there (text, pie chart, line chart, bar chart, listing, etc.), give it a unique ID, and that's all you need for a complete dashboard. The only step left is to push your data to Tipboard's tiles, which can be done over an HTTP API.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Straightforward and config-based, nothing much to code
Tipboard is straightforward to configure — you define your dashboard's layout with YAML, specify what tiles you want in there (text, pie chart, line chart, bar chart, listing, etc.), give it a unique ID, and that's all you need for a complete dashboard. The only step left is to push your data to Tipboard's tiles, which can be done over an HTTP API.
Pro Can build and display multiple dashboards from a single Tipboard instance
As of version 1.3.0, you can define multiple dashboards and serve them from a single Tipboard instance by creating one layout config file for each dashboard, and your dashboard will be available at http://your_url.com/ <name_of_layout_config_file>
.
Pro Open source & self-hosted
You don't have to hand over your data to a third-party — you own your data, and you're in full control over the dashboarding system.
Pro Provides an HTTP API for pushing data to dashboard
Tipboard provides an HTTP API for pushing data in JSON format to the dashboard. This gives you the ability to wire up your data source in any way you like — the only thing you have to do is POST
the data to your tile's endpoint.
Pro Build dashboard layouts with YAML
Tipboard's dashboard layouts are defined in YAML. It follows a grid-based approach where the user defines which tile should go into which column, and which row the column should be in.
Pro Huge library of widgets available
Smashing has a huge library of user contributed widgets available.
Pro Open source & self-hosted
You don't have to hand over your data to a third-party — you own your data, and you're in full control over the dashboarding system.
Pro Comprehensive docs with many examples
The wiki on Smashing's Github page includes many examples and how-to's, e.g. How-to: Add-authentication.
Pro Write custom widgets in HTML/ERB, SCSS, and CoffeeScript
Smashing is based on Ruby / Sinatra. Its widgets are essentially a collection of Ruby erb templates for layout, SCSS for styling, and CoffeeScript for data polling/interactivity. If you have worked with Rails, Sinatra, or any other Ruby-based web framework and CoffeeScript, customizing widgets shouldn't be hard.
Pro Drag & drop interface for re-arranging widgets
You can re-arrange your dashboard widgets by dragging them around.
Pro Easy deployments to Heroku
You can deploy Smashing to Heroku easily with a few commands, as documented on How to: Deploy to Heroku of their Github's wiki.
Pro Can feed data to widgets directly through Ruby
You can feed data to widgets directly from a Ruby script/app. Smashing uses job scheduling (rufus-scheduler) to update widgets, and it also provides a command to generate a template for jobs: dashing generate job sample_job
. This is convenient if you have an application written in Ruby, or interacts with your data source using Ruby.
Pro Provides an HTTP API for pushing data to dashboard
Smashing provides an HTTP API for pushing data in JSON format to the dashboard. This gives you the ability to wire up your data source in any way you like — the only thing you have to do is POST
the data to your widget's endpoint.
Cons
Con No recent activity
Last commit on GitHub was 3 years ago.
Con No Python 3 support
Tipboard is Python 2.7 only.
Con No easy way to deploy
Tipboard's docs covers installation/deployment comprehensively, but they do not offer a way to easily deploy to a PaaS (e.g. Heroku) or similar.
Con Does not work on IE
Smashing's dashboard does not work on any version of Internet Explorer, even IE Edge, because it relies on Server-sent Events which IE does not implement.
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