The Shiny-verse
As you explore more of what Shiny has to offer, you may run across other packages that are a derivative of Shiny such as Shinydashboard and Flexdashboard, which may leave you wondering, what’s the difference between Shiny and these off-shoot packages?
Shiny
Shiny, being the original package, has a lot of the infrastructure and pieces needed to create a customized app. Shiny can implement any layout and requires a server behind it to run R code.
Shinydashboard
A common UI design among Shiny apps is the dashboard–a layout providing an at-a-glace view of information. Shinydashboard was created to make it easier to create a dashboard that worked on top of Shiny.
Shinydashboard also has unique widgets of its own that give it a more ‘classic’ dashboard look. It includes a variety of boxes (display, info, and value) to embed and comprises a header, sidebar, and body.
Since it requires Shiny, running a Shinydashboard will require a server.
Flexdashboard
Flexdashboard is another package to easily create dashboards but there are a couple of things that set it apart from shinydashboard.
- It uses .Rmd files instead of .R files.
- It can be a static dashboard (standard web page) or
- a dynamic (interactive) document with Shiny and a server.
