Building KPI Visualizations in Laravel Without a BI Team

How many times have you been asked to "just add a quick dashboard" to your Laravel application?

If you're a Laravel developer working with stakeholders who need visibility into business metrics, you've probably heard this request more times than you can count. And if you've ever tried to deliver on it, you know there's nothing "quick" about it.

The Challenge We All Know

Here's the scenario: You're building or maintaining a Laravel application. The data is there—orders, users, transactions, whatever matters to the business. Stakeholders need to see this data. They need charts. They need trends. They need KPIs they can actually understand.

But here's what you don't have: a dedicated BI team, a data warehouse, or the budget for enterprise tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Mixpanel. What you do have is your Laravel application and a deadline.

This is where most of us start down a familiar path.

The Usual Approaches

Over the years, we've tried just about everything. We've built custom chart implementations, pieced together dashboard widgets, and written countless one-off queries to satisfy reporting requirements. Each approach worked—sort of—but came with its own set of headaches.

Custom implementations are time-consuming and hard to maintain. Every new metric means more code, more testing, and more technical debt. When stakeholders inevitably ask for "one small change" to how a chart displays, you're back in the codebase making modifications that feel disproportionate to the request.

The core problem isn't the charting libraries or the tools themselves. It's the gap between the data sitting in your database and getting it visualized in a way that non-technical stakeholders can actually use. That translation layer—from raw data to meaningful insight—is where all the friction lives.

What We Actually Needed

After years of building these solutions project after project, we started asking ourselves: why isn't there a package for this?

Laravel has excellent tooling for almost everything else. We have Laravel Novafor admin panels, Laravel Horizonfor queue monitoring, Laravel Telescope for debugging. These are drop-in solutions that integrate seamlessly with our applications and just work.

We wanted the same thing for dashboards and KPIs. Something Laravel-native. Something that understands Eloquent models. Something that lets us go from "I need to see monthly revenue trends" to an actual chart without writing a custom implementation every single time.

Introducing Lucid

So we built it.

useLucid.dev is a Laravel package designed specifically for this problem. It's built for developers who need to create dashboards and visualize KPIs without the overhead of custom implementations or external BI infrastructure.

The idea is simple: your data already lives in your Laravel application. Lucid helps you surface it as charts and dashboards with minimal friction. It works with your existing authentication, understands your Eloquent models, and installs the same way you'd add Nova or Horizon to a project.

We're not trying to replace enterprise BI tools. We're solving the problem for teams like ours—Laravel developers who need to deliver insights to stakeholders without spinning up a separate analytics infrastructure.

Join the Waitlist

We're opening up useLucid.dev to early users this January. If you've ever struggled with the dashboard dilemma in your Laravel projects, we'd love to have you try it.

Visit useLucid.dev to join the waitlist and be among the first to get access.

We're curious: what's been your approach to building dashboards in Laravel? What worked, what didn't? Drop us a line—we'd love to hear your stories.

‍

‍