How to sync Canny feedback into Linear
Canny is where your users vote; Linear is where your engineers work. Without a sync, someone copies posts into Linear by hand, and — worse — nobody remembers to update the Canny post when the work ships, so voters conclude the board is where requests go to die.
The native integration fixes both directions. Here's the setup, and the two gaps it leaves.
“we need SSO before rollout”
“any update on single sign-on?”
“SSO came up twice on this call”
Linear issue, quotes attached
insight report in Notion1. Connect the integration
The Canny integration for Linear is installed from the Canny side. You need owner-level admin permissions in Canny and admin access in Linear, per Canny's setup docs. It's available on all Canny plans, though running more than one integration requires the Growth plan.
Once connected, every Canny post gets a "Create Linear issue" and a "Link Linear issue" option.
2. Decide your linking policy
The integration gives you two moves per post, and it's worth deciding up front which one is the default:
- Create a new Linear issue from a Canny post. Use this when the post describes work that isn't tracked yet.
- Link the post to an existing Linear issue. Use this when engineering already has the issue — which is common, because bugs usually get reported in support before they get posted on a board.
The failure mode to avoid is create-always: you end up with two Linear issues for the same bug, one from Canny and one from the support ticket, and the status sync only updates the voters attached to one of them. A quick search in Linear before creating is the whole discipline.
One rough edge worth knowing from Canny's own documentation of its Linear integration family of features: merging two Canny posts drops the Linear link on the post that gets merged away. Re-link after merges.
3. Map statuses so voters hear about ships
This is the step that pays for the whole exercise. In the integration settings, map Linear statuses to Canny statuses — for example:
- Linear Todo → Canny Planned
- Linear In Progress → Canny In Progress
- Linear Done → Canny Complete
When an engineer moves the issue to Done, the Canny post flips to Complete and Canny notifies the voters. Nobody on your team had to remember anything, which is the only version of closing the loop that survives a busy quarter. If your workspace uses Canny Ideas, the same status mapping works there — you link ideas directly to Linear issues, per Canny's help center.
Resist the urge to map every intermediate Linear state. Voters care about three transitions: we're doing it, we're on it, it shipped. A board that flickers through "In Review" and "QA" reads as noise.
4. Cover the feedback that never becomes a post
Here's the first gap: the sync only carries what's on the board. On most teams, the board holds a minority of the feedback — the rest arrives in Slack threads, support tickets, and sales calls, phrased as complaints rather than votable posts. Canny's Autopilot can pull feedback in from sources like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gong so it reaches the board at all.
We build Modem, which approaches the same gap from the other side: instead of routing conversations onto a board first, it captures feedback from chat, support, and email directly, dedupes it into topics, and files tracked issues with the requesters attached — see feedback aggregation for the shape of that. Under the topics sits a context graph, so the same person asking in two channels stays one person and ship-time follow-ups are a lookup rather than a search. If your board is the center of gravity, Canny plus this integration is the right stack; if the board is an afterthought and the real feedback is conversational, a board-first pipeline will always be syncing a partial picture. Our Modem vs Canny comparison covers where each fits.
5. Close the loop past the status change
The second gap: a status flip notifies voters, but a "Complete" email with no context is a missed opportunity. When something ships, take five minutes to write two sentences on the Canny post — what shipped, what changed from the original request. Voters who get a human sentence come back and vote again; voters who get a bare status change mostly don't. The broader practice is covered in close the loop.
The smallest version to start this week
Connect the integration, map just three statuses (Planned, In Progress, Complete), and adopt one rule: search Linear before creating. That alone ends the copy-paste and gets voters notified on ship. Handle merges, Ideas, and the off-board feedback stream once the basic sync has run for a few weeks. If you're weighing whether Linear-side tooling should do more of this work, see the best tools to turn customer feedback into Linear issues.
