Dataviz cloud service Plotly wants to put its dashboard capabilities front and center — and start competing in the business intelligence (BI) space.

The company began life focusing on creating stand-alone visualizations with a focus on offering serious statistical analyses as well as basic visuals. More recently it has been testing out dashboards with its users and plans to launch a site devoted to dashboards at dashboards.ly. Plotly has also open-sourced the code behind its dashboard creator.

A drag-and-drop interface lets users add and arrange Plotly charts in dashboards, which allow end users see multiple visualizations on a single grid instead of having to flip through a report or click through HTML pages. However, the dashboards currently lack more sophisticated options such as linking multiple plots on a dashboard, which would allow a click on one to also show specific data on another. That is coming in Plotly 2.0, expected to debut to Pro users in March, company co-founder Chris Palmer said in an email,. And, connectors to SQL and Google Analytics are slated for release this summer.

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