We’re streamlining the dashboard experience in Holistics 4.0.
To ensure every user starts with our most powerful tools, new 4.0 accounts will now work exclusively with canvas dashboards.
New 4.0 accounts (signed up after Feb 10, 2026): You’ll work with canvas dashboards only – no quick dashboard option in the UI.
Existing 4.0 accounts: Nothing changes. Your quick dashboards continue to work as they do today. If we make any future changes, we’ll give you at least 6 months advance notice.
Recommendation: If you’re an existing user, consider using canvas for any new dashboard work to take advantage of our latest capabilities.
Why we made this change
Previously, Holistics 4.0 offered a dual-track system of Canvas dashboard and Quick dashboard, which often created an unnecessary hurdle for new users. Sometimes, it even led them toward legacy dashboard version by mistake.
By deprecating the old dashboard, we’re ensuring that everyone experiences the full potential of our modern dashboarding capabilities such as version control, flexible layout and customization, etc. from day one.
For more information on these two dashboard types, refer to our public docs:
I know this won’t apply to us since we’re an already existing account, but it seems like holistics is moving away from quick dashboards overall, so I’ve got a few questions related to that.
First off, our data team LOVES canvas dashboard, especially for customer-facing work. It’s great to have fully reviewable changes tracked in git that goes through the full process of review, approve, merge, release, and it’s also SOC II compliant! However, our company also makes a LOT of quick dashboards, and has a pretty open approach to dashboarding across most of the company (rather than being limited to only the analytics team). These are mainly used for quick scratch work that doesn’t need a full review. Additionally, a lot of our non-technical users would struggle with making a PR (and most don’t have github accounts or seats within our github organization) and our small data team would struggle to review all of the less important dashboard changes in a timely manner.
Are quick dashboards planned to be deprecated for existing accounts? And if so, can we have ample notice?
If we are recommended to move away from quick dashboards (or for new accounts that don’t have access to quick dashboards), does holistics have recommendations for how to balance full review process for our data models and customer-facing dashboards, while not getting bogged down with endless reviews of every user’s minor dashboard changes on internal-only dashboards? We’ve really liked the ability to allow some dashboards to be edited by most users without constant review, but keep other dashboards locked down.
Hey @anya.conti, so glad your team is loving the Canvas dashboard. That really does mean a lot to our dev team!
On your questions:
1/ Quick dashboard deprecation for existing 4.0 accounts
As noted in our FAQs, there’s no confirmed deprecation date yet. The earliest we’d consider retiring Quick dashboards is end of 2026 — and even then, we’re leaning toward making it opt-in, so existing users can choose to keep both dashboard types running in parallel, or reach out to us to turn off the legacy one.
Either way, we’ll give at least six months’ notice before anything changes, so there’s no rush.
That said, for any new work, we’d recommend going with Canvas to get the most out of our latest features.
2/ Balancing the review process
Before suggesting anything, we want to make sure we have your setup right:
Your team uses Holistics for both internal and external analytics
For customer-facing dashboards, the Data team reviews all changes to avoid mistakes
For internal dashboards, it depends — some still need Data team sign-off, others don’t
Did we get that right?
If so, we are wondering if the internal dashboards that don’t need review could live in a user’s Personal workspace instead of the Public one?
Thanks for the information, that’s helpful! For #2, that looks right. Ideally we would not want to use personal workspaces, we have a number of team members making a LOT of dashboards, and often they need to share those dashboards with each other and keep dashboards for a certain purpose all organized in one shared space. With the personal workspaces, there’s no good way to keep all the dashboards for customer A together in one folder, all the dashboards for customer B together in another folder, all the eng dashboards together in a separate folder, and all the support dashboards together in another folder.
Thanks for sharing your use case with us! We really appreciate the feedback.
Since Quick dashboard are still functional, you can continue using them for workflows that don’t require a data team review. However, please keep in mind that this is a legacy feature with limited functionality; we are no longer developing new features for it, though we will continue to provide bug fixes.
If you are looking to gradually migrate to Canvas dashboard while maintaining control over the review process, here is a setup we recommend:
1. Enable PR workflow: This ensures that all changes made in development branches must go through a formal review.
2. Enable Edit in Reporting & Disable Branch protection: This allows users to make direct changes in the Reporting (the master branch) without an enforced review, ensuring the system doesn’t block quick updates.
3. Manage permissions:
Assign most users the Explorer role, limiting Admin/Analyst roles to a smaller group.
Move customer-facing dashboards into a dedicated folder and restrict “Edit” permissions for Explorers. This prevents them from modifying these dashboards directly in Reporting.
For dashboards that don’t require review, place them in a public folder where Explorers have “Edit” access.
Note: This setup isn’t 100% foolproof, as Admins and Analysts can still bypass the review process by editing customer-facing dashboards directly in Reporting. We’ve noted your specific case as an opportunity for us to improve this workflow in the future.
Appreciate the suggestion, however this proposal has a few different issues for us:
We cannot disable Branch protections due to SOC II compliance
We need a way for non-technical users to review data-team PRs of proposed changes to dashboards before the branch is merged which requires access to development mode, which I believe would not work with the Explorer role.
I do understand that we can still use quick dashboards but that they are a legacy. I just want to make sure that any attempt to remove them entirely comes after corresponding changes to this flow that make this work for us, without a huge burden on our whole team. I figure it’s better to communicate early! Transparently, the flexibility of both types of dashboards was one of the reasons we were excited to switch to holistics in the first place.
What’s new?