what is the difference between canvas and dashboards in kibana?
Canvas is a free form pixel perfect presentation tool. It's a good bit more flexible with the layouts you can achieve and looks its best on a monitor or as a presentation (slides that are bound to the underlying data and can be interactive). It's worth noting it takes a good bit of time for an author to get the right look and feel in canvas but the options they have are more robust and extensible. For example, you can use data to conditionally show different images or markdown, edit an underlying Elasticsearch query, or even integrate javascript directly. There's a lot you can do but you need to have a good working understanding of programming concepts to do those most advanced things.
Dashboards are above-and-away the more widely used presentation tool. They are the go-to option for many crafting interactive day-to-day analytical tools or just a one time exploration. You can craft more workflow-style chains of dashboards with drill downs. The authoring experience is more straightforward. You do lose some of the advanced flexibility but for many the trade off is worth it for the usability. Dashboards are not as free form and respond to a grid so it's a certain look and feel that's separate to canvas. Try running the stack locally or spinning up a quick cloud trial to give them both a test drive with sample data!
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Thank you, excellent explanation
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