Before you begin
Owner/Manager-level admin permissions are required to delete a user
Users can be managed in Canny via the Users page.
User feedback is most valuable when it comes from a broad, representative group of customers. The more users you track in Canny, the clearer your understanding of what people want and which improvements matter most. With Canny’s tracked-user pricing, every tracked user contributes to your overall cost. As your product grows, lots of people may engage with your Canny account, but not everyone needs to stay tracked forever. Reviewing your user list from time to time keeps your data clean and also helps you keep your tracked user count (and cost) where you want it.
There are also strategic reasons to spend time managing your user base. For example, understanding your users can also help you identify product champions and create meaningful engagement opportunities, like including them in a beta or requesting focused feedback on a feature.
That is where managing tracked users comes in. By reviewing and organizing the users you track, you can:
Keep your Canny workspace clean
Ensure tracked users represent real, active customers
Control spend without losing valuable insights
Maintain high-quality, actionable feedback
Ways in which you can review your users:
Segments: User segments are one of the best ways to review groups of users who all share a common attribute, eg "free customers".
Date Range: Filters users based on when their last activity (post, vote, comment, or insight) occurred. To understand the results correctly, you must also apply a sort. The Date Range limits which users appear, and Sort determines how they are ordered.
Sort: this includes Least recent activity, Most recent activity, Top Poster, Top Voters
Activity: See what the users you have selected with the above options did: Post, Vote, or Comment.
Most recent activity: Shows users whose last activity falls within the selected date range, sorted from newest → oldest.
Least recent activity
Shows users whose last activity falls within the selected date range, sorted from oldest → newest.
Use these options when you want to identify users who haven’t been active since a certain time.
Top voters or Top posters: Shows users who cast the most votes or created the most posts within the date range, regardless of when they were last active.
Example:
If you filter 2024-01-01 → 2024-12-31 and sort by Most recent activity, you’ll see users whose last activity occurred in 2024, starting with the most recently active.
Sort by Least recent activity to see the same users, but beginning with those who became inactive earliest.
Top tips for user management:
Use Date Range and Sort together for accurate recency filtering.
The Date Range filter alone is not enough to understand when users were last active. Pair it with Most recent activity or Least recent activity to see users whose last activity falls within the selected period.Most recent activity: shows users who last interacted near the end of the range.
Least recent activity: shows users who last interacted near the beginning of the range.
This is the most reliable way to identify users who haven’t been active since a particular time.
Review inactive users regularly.
On a quarterly or yearly basis, filter by a past period and sort by Least recent activity to surface users who stopped engaging earliest. This helps you focus cleanup efforts without re-reviewing older valuable users whose feedback you’ve already decided to keep.Use segments to refine your cleanup.
Filtering by segment (e.g., “Free customers,” “Trials,” “Internal users,” “Churned”) helps you focus on groups where removing users is lower risk. Combine segments with Date Range + Sort for highly targeted review.Choose the right sort for your goal.
If you care about recency, use Most or Least recent activity.
If you care about engagement level, use:
• Top voters: users with the most votes during the selected period
• Top posters: users with the most posts during the selected period
These sorts highlight high-volume contributors, but do not indicate when they were last active.
Check the relevance of each user’s activity.
If a user only engaged with posts that are now Complete or Closed, they may be a good candidate for deletion. If their activity is tied to active or strategic discussions, consider keeping them to retain useful context.Ensure your workspace has strong user data.
Proper segmentation and cleanup rely on accurate attributes. Make sure you're sending user data to Canny through the Canny Identify SDK, Segment, the Canny API or your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot) so you can understand each user’s plan, MRR, company, and lifecycle stage.Use bulk selection to move quickly.
After narrowing your list with filters, use Shift+Click to bulk-select users for deletion. Sorting by Least recent activity is especially useful when performing focused cleanup.Revisit your cleanup criteria periodically.
As your product and customer base evolve, your definition of a “valuable” user may shift. Review your user management strategy every few months to ensure it matches your current priorities.
Understanding identified vs tracked users
If you are identifying users via a CRM, the Canny SDK, Segment or another tool you will see two numbers.
In this example image, you see:
348 users
191 tracked users
Tracked users are users who have posted, commented or voted.
Users are also known as identified users; they are all the users which you have synced with Canny. They only count as a “tracked user” when they have posted feedback, commented or voted within your Canny account.
Deleting a user will also delete ALL of that user's:
Votes
Comments
Posts that have no votes or comments
(We will keep posts open that have votes/comments from other users)⚠️ Warning: Deleting a user cannot be undone! ⚠️