How to Build Fast-Loading Dashboards with Recharts

Whether you’re a developer or a decision-maker, delivering meaningful insights through dashboards is critical for you and your business. With the right tools, you’ll be able to focus on the data instead of struggling to build the perfect dashboard.

One such tool is Recharts, a popular, open-source charting library. In this article, we’ll explore:

• Recharts’ capabilities
• Its pros and cons
• How pairing it with Embeddable will help you create efficient, native-feeling dashboards

We’ll also discuss how to install Recharts and integrate it into your projects so you can work smoothly from the start.

Build dashboards with Recharts and Embeddable

Get access

What is Recharts?

Recharts is a simple-to-use yet powerful charting library designed for React developers. It’s built on React and D3, combining the declarative nature of React with D3’s robust charting capabilities. 

As a fully open-source project managed by a small group of contributors, Recharts is lightweight, easy to use, and flexible for creating interactive data visualizations.

What sets Recharts apart from other libraries is its simplicity and React-specific design. Unlike more complex libraries like D3, Recharts abstracts much of the technical complexity, making it accessible even to developers with limited experience in data visualization. 

Recharts is also known for its simple, declarative syntax, which removes many of the struggles typically associated with building visualizations. A library like D3.js, for example, provides great customization and control, but has a steep learning curve and needs extensive coding. 

Recharts simplifies the process with a declarative API, allowing developers to define their charts based on what they want to achieve, rather than how to achieve it. Plus, it is completely free, unlike a library like Highcharts, which requires a paid subscription if you want to access all its features.

In terms of front-end framework compatibility, Recharts is designed specifically for React, and integrates seamlessly with its component-drive model. While this focus ensures Recharts works perfectly with React apps, it also means the library isn’t natively available for frameworks like Angular or Vue.

Recharts components 

Recharts follows a component-based architecture, where each chart element is modular and reusable. There are five main component categories:

1. Charts. These are the primary containers for rendering different visualizations. Examples include line charts, bar charts, and scatter charts. Each chart component provides core functionalities, such as accepting data via the data prop and laying the foundation for additional customization. For instance, a line chart serves as the base to which you can add lines, tooltips, or axes to display trends.

2. General components. General components add auxiliary features that enhance the usability and readability of charts. Examples include tooltips, legends, and axis labels. You can easily customize these components, adjusting their styles, behavior, or positioning.
‍

3. Cartesian components. You can use these components when you need to work with layouts in Cartesian coordinates. For instance, “<xAxis>” and “<yAxis>” define the horizontal and vertical axis respectively, supporting ticks, labels, and grid lines. Using the Cartesian system helps you plot data points accurately and create a structured and visually consistent layout.
‍

4. Polar components. These components enable circular charts like pie or radar. They are useful for visualizing proportional or multivariate data, and make it easy to create and customize charts.
‍

5. Shapes. These are the building blocks of visual elements in Recharts, allowing developers to create custom elements. For instance, you can use the “rectangle” element to create bar segments or custom background elements. This category is perfect if you want to make advanced customization to your charts and creative designs.

Recharts—chart types

Recharts offers a wide variety of charts that cater to diverse data visualization needs. These fall under the following categories, with multiple variations therein:

• Line charts: Ideal for visualizing trends over time, such as sales growth or temperature changes.
  ‍
• Bar charts: Perfect for categorical comparisons, like showing revenue across different regions.
  ‍
• Pie charts: Great for displaying proportions or parts of a whole, such as market share.
  ‍
• Area charts: Aesthetic and informative for overlapping data series, often used in financial or demographic analysis.
  ‍
• Scatter plots: Useful for visualizing relationships between variables, such as height vs. weight.
  ‍
• Radar charts: Ideal for multivariate data, especially when comparing metrics across different categories, such as skill assessments.
  ‍
• Treemaps: Excellent for representing hierarchical data in a compact and visually engaging way. Treemaps display hierarchical data using nested rectangles, showing proportions within categories, like expenses or file sizes.

Should you use Recharts?

If you need a charting library, how can you know if Recharts is the right one for you? It’s excellent for a developer or team looking for a highly accessible, quick way to present data. However, its simplicity can limit projects requiring extensive customization or advanced charting features.

Recharts Pros:

• It is open source and free. There are no license costs and you can take full advantage of all its features right from the start, making it ideal for those working with a low budget.
  ‍
• Extensive chart types. From line charts to scatter plots and treemaps, you can build a wide variety of charts.
  ‍
• Ease of use. Recharts has a component-driven approach that simplifies chart creation.
  ‍
• Great documentation. Recharts comes with clear and concise documentation, perfect for beginners and experts alike.

Recharts Cons:

• React-only. Recharts is made for React, and sadly, that means it’s not suitable for non-React projects.
  ‍
• Limited customization. Its charts and customizations are generally great for most use cases, but more complex visualizations will require additional libraries or custom development. 
  ‍
• Volunteer support. The group behind Recharts is small, which may limit support availability for advanced issues.

Recharts reviews

Users find Recharts easy to use and perfect for basic dashboards. Since this is a relatively small library compared to others like Highcharts or amCharts, there aren’t many official Recharts reviews online. 

But if you look around on forums or platforms like GitHub, you’ll find people who love how lightweight Recharts is and comment that it’s the perfect charting solution if you’re working with React. Some users also like its comprehensive documentation, which makes it easy to learn even if you’re a beginner. 

Complaints usually relate to the lack of customizations available and the fact that it’s “nearly impossible” to get a native look when using the charts in your own applications. Others also say it’s difficult to use Recharts if you want to build complex dashboards or have a large dataset.

We look at how to manage these issues below in our section on headless embedded analytics.

How to use Recharts

Getting started with Recharts requires a few easy steps.

1. Installing Recharts

The easiest and fastest way to install the library is using npm, with a simple line of code:

npm install recharts

Alternatively, you can find the umd build on unpkg.com.

2. Import components

Next, you’ll need to decide what type of chart you need and import its components. For instance, if you want a line chart with xAxis, yAxis, and a Cartesian grid, you’ll need the following line of code: 

import { LineChart, Line, CartesianGrid, XAxis, YAxis } from 'recharts'

3. Add data

The third step will usually be creating a sample dataset. For example, this could look something like:

const data = [

  { name: 'Jan', sales: 400 },

  { name: 'Feb', sales: 300 },

  { name: 'Mar', sales: 500 },

];

4. Customize the chart

Once you have your data, you can start customizing your chart. This can look like adding props of some components and adding interactions. You can also modify various components like editing the axis labels or creating custom shapes.

5. Next steps

The above steps help you install and create a chart in Recharts, but that only gives you the frontend components, and frontend components alone do not make a dashboard—you’ll then need to think about transforming, modeling, and presenting the data. 

And, depending on your project, the next steps could involve setting up interactions between charts and other components like data range filters and drop-downs;  setting up caching to optimize performance; and adding additional features like exporting and scheduling functionality for your users.

Benefits of headless embedded analytics

Building charts with Recharts is just the start. Creating a fully functional dashboard involves significant engineering effort. This is where headless embedded analytics solutions like Embeddable come into play. Here’s how it can help.

Build without complexity

Tools like Embeddable allow you to use whatever front-end charts you like (including Recharts), while it handles backend processes such as SQL query execution, caching, and advanced interactive features. You won’t need to spend days writing code from scratch to ensure high performance and security of your dashboards. 

Instead, you can have a complex app with a dashboard that loads perfectly and is fully native-feeling, with minimal effort.

Have complete front-end control

Standard embedded analytics tools require you to embed their charts, and don’t give you much flexibility on the UX and UI that you present to your customers. 

Conversely, Embeddable lets you bring in any chart you like, from any charting library, and use it within a fully-managed embedded analytics environment that lets you deliver those custom charts in a simple, scalable and secure way with low-engineering effort. 

Embeddable’s headless embedded analytics give you that native app feel, providing a seamless experience for end-users, with minimal effort for you and your developers.

Embed Securely and Natively

Unlike other tools, Embeddable uses a web component or native react embed to allow you to easily deploy dashboards into your application with a few lines of code. The charts will load natively into your DOM, meaning it’s more secure, faster to load and results in a more seamless experience for your end users. No more clunky iframes!

Additionally, whether you’ve got a single-tenant or multi-tenant database architecture, you can ensure customers only see the data they are supposed to by leveraging the simple and elegant row-level security features.

Save engineering time

Since you’re not spending time writing code and customizing everything step by step, you can save time and resources. With Embeddable, you can easily achieve the fast-loading, user-friendly dashboards you need in a fraction of the time vs. a custom in-house build.

How to use Recharts with Embeddable

Once you've installed Recharts and created your desired charts, Embeddable streamlines the rest of the building and maintenance, ensuring dashboard performance and scalability. It ensures a native feel and provides full control over your UI/UX. Here’s how to use the two together.

1. Create your visualizations

Follow the steps outlined above to create and customize your charts. If in doubt, you can refer to Recharts’ docs for help.

2. Integrate with Embeddable

Push your charts to Embeddable using the SDK. The no-code builder makes everything easy from here and you’ll get your charting elements as reusable components with which even non-technical members of your team can easily build new variations of dashboards whenever you need one.

3. Configure your dashboards

Using the no-code builder, create your dashboards. Test out different configurations and layouts, preview in-app and add features like exporting and Custom Canvas that will give your users the possibility to build their own views right from the app.

4. Embed with a web component

Finally, embed dashboards directly in your application using Embeddable’s lightweight and secure web component (no clunky iframes, here!). A few lines of code and you’ll quickly be providing users with a powerful analytics experience. 

Quickly build dashboards with Recharts

Recharts is a fantastic tool for building charts quickly and effectively in React applications. It is free and open source, comes with comprehensive documentation, and is perfect for building basic charts. 

However, further development, such as integrating it into your app, adding it to your dashboards, and customizing it for a native look, will require additional expertise, including manual coding.

Alternatively, you can pair Recharts with a headless embedded analytics solution like Embeddable, which will allow you to build comprehensive, fast-loading dashboards with minimal backend effort.

Build dashboards with Recharts and Embeddable

Get access

Frequently asked questions about Recharts

What types of data visualization can be created with Recharts?

Recharts supports a variety of charts, including line, bar, pie, scatter, area, and radar charts. These cover the most common data visualization needs but for advanced charting options and more flexibility you may want to explore other charting libraries.

Is Recharts compatible with React, Angular, Vanilla JS, and Vue?

Recharts is designed exclusively for React, making it incompatible with frameworks like Angular or Vue without significant modifications. If you want to use Recharts in your Angular or Vue app, then you can use a headless embedded analytics tool like Embeddable which will render the react-based charts in any frontend application, whilst providing a secure, scalable and performant data service.

How customizable are the charts in Recharts for specific styling needs?

Recharts allows basic styling through props and components, but for highly customized visualizations, you may need to extend its functionality or use additional libraries. If you need to create interactions between charts and add advanced features for your users, though, you’ll either need to write manual code or pair it with a tool like Embeddable, which will help you deliver native-feeling dashboards to your customers with minimal effort.