Best alternatives to DAC - Dashboard-as-Code in 2026

Building a dashboard usually means dragging chart widgets around in a tool like Tableau or a BI platform, which works fine until you need to tweak it later, share exactly how it was built, or let an automated system update it. DAC treats a dashboard like a recipe written down on paper: you describe it in plain text files, and the tool reads that recipe and serves the actual charts. Because it's just text, it can live in the same place as your other code, get reviewed before it changes, and — increasingly relevant — be written or edited by an AI agent instead of a human clicking through menus. Technically, DAC defines dashboards in YAML (for structure — tabs, loops, conditionals) and TSX (for dynamic chart components), with a built-in semantic layer that turns named business metrics into SQL automatically generated against your warehouse — Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks. It's AGPL-3.0 open source, built by Bruin (a data pipeline company) and integrates with the Bruin CLI, with the explicit design goal of being something an AI agent can generate and modify reliably, not just a human-authored config format.