🚀 Highlights
Drop a file, get a dashboard -- The upload tile on the start page is now a live drop zone. Drop, paste or pick a CSV, Excel or SPSS file and DataLion creates the project, imports the data, generates the codebook and assembles a starter dashboard in a single request -- then lands you on the finished charts. With an AI model configured it reads your data first and designs the layout for what the file actually is: survey files get one chart per question, with matrix and multiple-choice batteries fused into stacked charts; business exports get themed tabs of KPI tiles, breakdowns, metrics tables, a wordcloud of the main text column and -- where dates exist -- a timeline. Without a model, the rule-based planner builds the dashboard anyway. Accepted formats and the maximum file size are configurable, and a failed drop never leaves a half-built project behind.
Build your own surveys, end to end -- DataLion now has a full survey module. Design questionnaires in a three-pane editor with 23 question types (single/multiple choice, dropdown, picture choice, text, rating, slider, NPS, ranking, matrix/Likert, date, contact fields, consent and more), reorder by drag-and-drop, add skip logic and display conditions, and publish in a click. Publishing automatically spins up a DataLion project with a response dataset and a complete codebook, so results are chartable on the existing dashboard stack the moment the first answer comes in. Respondents fill it out on a mobile-first, Typeform-grade runner under a tokenized /s/{token} link -- no login required -- with animated transitions, auto-advance, progress bar and one-question-per-page mode.
Listen to what people actually wrote -- New Text analytics / NLP turns open-text answers into structured data. From Admin → Projects → Codebook → Tools, "Analyze open text" classifies every response by sentiment and an auto-discovered topic, then writes the results back as new categorical variables ({field}_sentiment, {field}_sentiment_score, {field}_topic) plus their codebook entries -- so they immediately work with charts, filters, cross-tabs and exports. A ready-made "Text analytics" report with a sentiment bar and a topic bar is created for you automatically.
Export to native Google Slides -- Dashboards, reports and single charts can now be exported as live, editable Google Slides decks into your project's connected Google Drive. Chart data lands in a companion Google Sheet and is embedded as native, editable Sheets charts with your DataLion colors, titles, legends, value labels and number formats applied; tables and KPI widgets render as native Slides tables and number slides. An optional Slides template skins the whole deck.
✨ What's New
📋 AI-built surveys: "Create survey with AI" generates a complete questionnaire -- title, welcome and thank-you text, typed questions with balanced scales and pages -- from a single topic description. "Optimize with AI" polishes draft wording, answer options and structure while keeping your variable codes intact.
📚 55 survey templates: A searchable gallery of ready-made, GDPR-friendly questionnaires reachable from Admin → Surveys → "From template" -- customer feedback (CSAT, NPS, CES, churn, support), employees & HR (engagement, eNPS, pulse, onboarding, exit, 360°, Gefährdungsbeurteilung psychischer Belastung), market & brand research (brand awareness, Van Westendorp pricing, concept/ad testing, product-market fit), events, education, public sector, healthcare and more. Pick one and you land straight in the builder, ready to customize. Templates ship bilingual (DE/EN).
🎨 Survey design themes: A Design tab with 17 ready-made themes (Classic, Connections, Midnight, Forest, Sunset, Ocean, Berry, Minimal, Warm, Chat, Poem, Twin, Giant, Paper, Blueprint, Candy, Carbon) shown as visual preview cards, plus a custom builder with accent/background/card/text color pickers and four font styles -- all applied live to the public survey.
🎯 Interactive question types: Three poll-style questions where respondents see live results -- a distribution question where you drag your ball into a swarm of previous answers, a gauge dial that shows earlier answers and their average, and an image-marker question that stores the tapped X/Y position. Plus a Gen-Z-friendly emoji scale with large tappable emojis.
🔗 Flexible distribution: Share surveys via QR code download, an iframe embed snippet, or one-time personal invite links exported as CSV for panels and mailing lists (each link accepts exactly one response). Capture URL parameters into dataset variables, set response limits and automatic close dates, and use screen-out disqualification with custom end text.
🏷️ Meaningful variable names: Rename the auto-assigned q1/q2 codes per question in the builder, so your dataset columns get names like
genderornps_score-- display and skip-logic references are remapped automatically.🧪 Conjoint & MaxDiff research: Surveys now support Choice-Based Conjoint and MaxDiff with balanced designs, runner tasks, R-backed analysis charts, subgroup comparison, a preference-share simulator and willingness-to-pay output when a price attribute is present. Two bilingual Market & brand templates ship with the new question types.
🧭 Draft results preview & runner controls: Draft surveys gain View results, building the analysis project, dataset, codebook and dashboard from current test responses without publishing. The runner can now be widened to 50% / 75% / 100%, and surveys add constant-sum questions, images on description blocks, per-question display logic and optional whitelabel removal of the public "Powered by DataLion" footer.
📊 Box Plot & Histogram charts: Two new distribution chart types in the chart-type picker. The histogram bins a numeric variable into a frequency distribution (automatic bin count, overridable via chart settings → Bins); the box plot draws a Tukey box-and-whisker with outlier points, one box per variable or one per group when you add a breakdown.
🔐 Google & Microsoft sign-in: Users can now log in and register with Google or Microsoft SSO from both the login and signup pages. An existing account is logged straight in; an unknown email registers a new workspace (when registration is enabled), skipping the activation email.
🏠 Redesigned start page:
/screen/startis now an onboarding hub -- a personalized welcome, a "your setup" progress tracker, a gallery of ready-made demos, create-a-survey and drop-your-data action cards, a "jump back in" list of recent work, and a consolidated help panel (tours, manual, FAQ, newsfeed). The newsfeed loads asynchronously so a slow source never blocks the page.🎁 Demo project gallery: Pick from up to six ready-made demos -- five generated studies (Mobility Brands, Coffee & Beverages, Remote Work Pulse, Streaming & Media, Travel & Tourism), each with its own visual identity and a mix of chart types, plus a real Global Market Tracker BI dataset with a filterable crosstab data table. Opening one hands you the demo project directly, with clean URLs like
demo-mobility-brands, and a Reset action on the start page rebuilds it from the sample data whenever you want a clean slate.🎨 Theme Studio: A new admin area for building your own look. Start from a preset or one of the built-in design templates, edit design tokens, custom CSS and custom JS with a live preview, apply the theme to any project, and export or import theme bundles to move them between instances. You can also generate a theme from your brand -- give it a website URL, logo, description or seed colors and let AI propose the palette and typography. Projects without a theme render exactly as before.
⌨️ Dashboard command palette: Press
⌘K/Ctrl+Kon any dashboard to refresh, toggle filters, add a chart, jump to My Reports or the admin BI screens, and search reports plus questions live inside the current project.⚡ Filters without the page reload: Global filters, date ranges, benchmark filters and chart filter dropdowns now redraw just the affected charts and text boxes instead of reloading the whole dashboard. The URL remains the source of truth, so shared and exported links behave exactly as before.
🔀 Research, BI or Hybrid workspaces: Each project gets a workspace mode under Admin → Projects → Settings → Display, with an optional per-user override under Admin → Users. BI mode applies business terminology (Field, Segment, Rows) consistently across every screen, in English, German and French.
🇳🇱 Dutch interface: Dutch joins English, German and French as a full interface language -- selectable from the language menu, your profile, the user admin, and the AI survey-generation language picker, with
nl-NLnumber formatting throughout.🖌️ Project design templates: The New Project page offers 17 design templates (Classic, Connections, Midnight, Forest, Sunset, Ocean, Berry, Minimal, Warm, Chat, Poem, Twin, Giant, Paper, Blueprint, Candy, Carbon) as visual preview cards that pre-fill page background, chart/text colors, title colors and a matching Google font -- all still editable under Admin → Projects → Content. Existing projects can switch templates later from Admin → Projects → Design → Visual style.
🌐 Browser branding: Configure the instance page title and favicon under Admin → System, and override the page title and favicon per project under Admin → Projects → General Settings. PNG and JPG favicon uploads are converted to ICO automatically.
↕️ Drag-and-drop codebook ordering: The codebook editor (Admin → Projects → Codebook → View) now lets you drag rows into a new order within their parent category -- changing the order both in the codebook and in the rendered charts.
📈 SPSS dataset export: A new SPSS export menu entry downloads each accessible data table as a labeled
.savfile, with variable labels and value labels taken from the codebook.🧩 BI modeling helpers: Admin → Projects adds drill paths, a data model diagram for joins, a raw-columns panel with Promote to question, and no-SQL Sum/Count/Average measures. Raw date columns can be grouped by time grain, and the Global Market Tracker demo now showcases those BI workflows.
🧠 Bring your own model & Ask your data: Admin → AI lets each workspace store its own HybridAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI or Mistral key, model and endpoint. The same area includes an admin-gated "Ask your data" chat that answers from project codebooks, reports and chart tables with grounded citations.
🌍 French & business vocabulary: French is now available across the app interface and number formatting. Users can also switch terminology between Research vocabulary (Question, Target group, Cases) and Business vocabulary (Field, Segment, Rows).
🤖 Claude Desktop, self-service: Admins can offer a self-service page where users download the DataLion MCP extension and create scoped API tokens. The bridge starts read-only, includes a connection test and gates write tools behind an explicit setting.
🧱 Build dashboards from Claude: The MCP integration gains higher-level authoring actions -- create measures, add text boxes, and place a widget by describing it ("a KPI of total revenue", "revenue by region as a bar chart") instead of hand-assembling codebook rows and chart parameters. A re-import can no longer silently wipe a project's codebook.
🛡️ Signup spam protection: The registration form is now protected against automated spam signups with a human-verification challenge (Cloudflare Turnstile).
📈 Improvements
📝 Streamlined trial signup: Signup now has localized copy, customer logos, generated workspace suggestions, live availability checks and a queued provisioning progress screen, so workspace setup no longer holds the registration request open.
🧭 Admin UX refresh: A command palette (
⌘K/Ctrl+K) jumps to admin pages and projects, the top bar has a clear Back to app control, Maintenance has a real log viewer, connector secrets are masked, admin row actions move into overflow menus, settings track unsaved edits and saves appear as toasts.✨ A calmer look, everywhere: The back office moves to the DataLion brand palette -- one action blue, a warm gold wash on sidebars and table heads, a real project header with a "Go to project" exit, and matching error pages. Dashboard chart cards follow the same language, with quiet headers, soft hover states and skeleton loading placeholders. Blunt browser confirm dialogs give way to dialogs that name what you're about to change and what happens next.
🗂️ "Dashboard" is now "Tab": A single page inside a report is called a Tab throughout the interface (EN/DE/FR), so "report" and "tab" no longer both get called a dashboard. Nothing about your saved reports changed -- only what we call them.
🗣️ Admin tables speak your language: Table search, pagination, empty states and date columns are now localized -- relative phrasing within the last week ("2 hours ago"), a short localized date beyond it -- instead of raw timestamps and hardcoded English.
🧰 Project admin workflow polish: Project Settings, Design and Codebook now use one-section-at-a-time navigation. Settings and Design save per section with Save/Cancel, while the Codebook keeps one save for the category tree.
💳 Smarter billing & seats: The Billing upgrade options are now coverage-aware -- a workspace whose license already meets or exceeds a self-serve plan no longer sees a misleading "Upgrade" to a smaller plan, and enterprise licenses route plan changes to a contact link instead of self-serve checkout. Adding a user now respects your plan's seat limits (admin/editor/viewer), blocking over-limit roles with an "upgrade your plan" message. The license name on the Billing page is configurable, and the usage history gains a year selector so wide multi-year tables no longer overflow.
☁️ Google Drive via service account: Google Drive import and Google Slides export now use the instance service account instead of per-customer OAuth apps. Admins share the Drive folders with the shown service-account email, and existing connections keep their folder configuration.
📥 Smarter SPSS import: SPSS imports now choose better default chart types from variable types and labels, fold multiple-response sets into one question, and recognize common multiple-choice battery naming patterns.
⚡ Immediate export feedback: Downloading a dashboard or report as PDF or PNG now shows the standard download notification the instant you click, and closes the download menu -- no more wondering whether anything is happening while the file generates.
🚀 Snappier dashboards: Static assets are now aggressively cached in the browser, so dashboards load noticeably faster.
🗂️ Clearer data source preview: The data source preview is now split into a Data tab (the row preview) and a Columns tab listing every column with its data type, length and scale, linking straight to the column settings.
📤 Upload progress & admin notifications: Data source Upload Now uses the standard popup service for running, success row count and error states, and Discord admin notifications now cover new registrations, tenant creation and email confirmations.
🎀 Login page refresh: The login page now shares the start screen's visual language -- a warm gold-tinted gradient, a frosted login card, rounded inputs with a brand focus ring and a centered footer.
🇪🇺 New footer tagline: The footer now reads "Made with ♥ in Germany 🇪🇺".
🐛 Bug Fixes
Full-width chart titles: Chart headers reserved space for the hover toolbar even while it was invisible, truncating every title ("Total Av…"). The toolbar now overlays the header, so titles use the whole card width.
Stacked charts with significances: Turning on significances for a stacked chart crashed the chart instead of rendering it.
More accurate significance letters: Z-tests on tables now use the square-rooted standard error, directional one-tailed p-values and weighted column bases, so fewer differences between table columns are marked significant than really are.
SPSS labels for dotted variables: Variables named like
Q1.1now import their variable and value labels instead of showing bare column names and raw numeric codes.Exports at the right resolution: PDF and image exports render at the intended viewport again, and the admin-configurable PNG resolution (1x/2x/3x) is actually applied.
Duplicated projects keep their tabs: Cloning a project (and opening a demo) now attaches the copied tabs to the copy instead of leaving them on the original.
Sum and count measures render: Measures created through the Measures form now produce values instead of empty charts.
Multi-select filter dropdowns: Every value picked in one dropdown session survives the submit, clearing all values removes the filter as expected, and legends read "Item 1 or Item 2" for combined values.
Excel exports of mean charts: Numeric mean charts export the mean under a "Mean" header instead of a meaningless percent value that didn't match the dashboard.
Working social sign-in buttons: The Google/Microsoft login and registration buttons now use a properly URL-encoded authorize request, replacing the previous buttons whose malformed redirect URL never worked. Microsoft registration reads the verified email from the OIDC endpoint, and disabling registration now closes the SSO signup path too.
A signup flow that finishes: A double-clicked signup can no longer create two workspaces, the provisioning screen stops spinning once you confirm your email and offers an "Open DataLion" button, and each email problem gets its own accurate message instead of a blanket "enter a valid business email".
Safer saved layouts: Corrupt dashboard grid layouts are now rejected on save instead of being stored and breaking the dashboard on the next load.
Stronger passwords: Existing passwords are transparently upgraded to a modern hash on the next successful login, and password resets reject reuse of your recent passwords.