A react-grid-layout alternative for dashboards that outgrow the grid — and React

Honest framing first: react-grid-layout is the standard React dashboard grid — draggable, resizable, responsive breakpoints, MIT, millions of weekly installs — and if you are all-React and a layout engine is all you need, use it. Grafloria Dashboards is for the moment the grid becomes an application: undo, nesting, persistence of the whole board, a splitter layout, and the same board in Angular and Vue.

The comparison here is with React grid layout engines. Where a BI product such as DevExpress Dashboard comes up below, it is only for how its designer aligns widgets — a splitter surface that is always covered — which the kit's split layout reproduces. Data sources, query builders and the rest of a BI suite are out of scope on both sides of this table.

When to stay with react-grid-layout

You are all-React and need exactly a grid: place, drag, resize, compact, responsive breakpoints with a layout per breakpoint. react-grid-layout does all of it, small and focused, and its item array is plain state you already own.

Feature by feature

✓ built in · DIY possible, but yours to build · — out of scope. Both columns are meant to be true, including the rows we lose.

The same dashboard, both ways

react-grid-layout lays out children you render; the layout array is your state:

import GridLayout from 'react-grid-layout';

const layout = [
  { i: 'rev',   x: 0, y: 0, w: 3, h: 1 },
  { i: 'trend', x: 3, y: 0, w: 8, h: 2 },
];
<GridLayout layout={layout} cols={12} rowHeight={30} width={1200} onLayoutChange={save}>
  <div key="rev" className="kpi">Total revenue</div>
  <div key="trend"><canvas id="trend" /></div>   {/* chart wiring is yours */}
</GridLayout>

Grafloria declares the widgets too — the chart is the declaration — and in React it is one component:

import { GrafloriaDashboard } from '@grafloria/react';
import { dashboard } from '@grafloria/dashboard';

// <GrafloriaDashboard views={views} layout="grid" sizing="fit" onReady={h => (handle = h)} />
// …or without React, the same board:
const SPEC = dashboard({
  columns: 12,
  widgets: [
    { id: 'rev',   kind: 'kpi',  span: 3, rows: 1,
      data: { label: 'Total revenue', value: '$6.81M', delta: 12.4 } },
    { id: 'trend', kind: 'line', span: 8, rows: 2, title: 'Revenue vs target',
      data: { series: [{ name: 'Revenue', values: [420,455,512,588,648] }],
              labels: ['Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May'] } },
  ],
});
render(SPEC, document.getElementById('canvas'));
// SPEC.handle.toJSON() round-trips the WHOLE board — widgets, nesting, data

How the concepts map

See the difference in one demo

The clearest way to judge the boundary: react-grid-layout gives you the grid geometry; this demo is a dashboard whose sections are containers — drag a tile across a section boundary and the other grid adopts it live, one undo restores the whole gesture, and toJSON() serializes the nesting. The grid options demo shows column counts, packing and responsive re-flow driven as data, and the fluid dashboard has Fit / Grow, Grid / Split and the drag-handle modes in one toolbar.

Pricing and feature cells reflect vendor pages and shipped type definitions as of July–September 2026 — always confirm on the vendor's site. Corrections welcome on GitHub; this page aims to stay honest, not to win.