Comparison Shiny / rmarkdown::render_site() & flexdashboard

0
votes

A high level question from someone new to the activity of building websites based on R code:

I am trying to understand the relationship between Shiny and the facilities offered by rmarkdown to render interactive and/or web content (e.g., using rmarkdown::render_site(), flexdashboard).

What triggered this question is reading on the rmarkdown documentation that:

R Markdown documents are a perfect platform for interactive content.

Plus seeing these great dashboards made with flexdashboard.

To navigate the various options available to building websites based on R code, I would like to know:

  1. how Shiny articulates with the capabilities offered by rmarkdown?

  2. how Shiny programming compares, in terms of ease/scalability/flexibility, with rmarkdown / flexdashboard?

I have done a fairly big shiny app and want to know whether I should try to migrate to e.g., flexdahboard.

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rr-markdownshinyflexdashboard

1 Answers

2
votes

Shiny came first, and after a while they added some of shiny's capabilities to markdown. In order to use interactive markdowns, notice that you need to use runtime: shiny which means that it DOES need shiny to run on the backend, it's no longer than a pure standalone HTML document.

However, what I just said doesn't explain anything about what you asked, just wanted to point that out! This is indeed a great question, and there is an open issue on shiny's github to try to explain the difference between them, and other similar formats, because I agree it's very overwhelming to see all these options and have to choose which one to go with. Just to add to the complexity - you can in fact write/embed shiny apps inside Rmd documents :)

(I couldn't submit this as a comment because it's too long)