Hey everyone,
I wanted to share something we put together based on conversations with hundreds of Dash developers: The Plotly Publishing Playbook.
It covers the different ways to publish and share your Dash applications, from publishing apps quickly on Cloud to full Enterprise infrastructure. But I also wanted to address something I see come up a lot in the forums.
“Why would I use Plotly Cloud when I can deploy elsewhere?”
Fair question. Here’s my honest take.
If you’re comfortable with infrastructure and enjoy that part of the work, DIY deployment can be rewarding. You learn the stack deeply, you control everything, and you’re not dependent on a vendor.
But many of the data scientists and analysts I talk to would rather spend their time perfecting their craft than debugging deployment pipelines. The playbook has a whole section on what DIY actually costs in terms of time and focus, but the short version is: it adds up fast.
The vibe debugging nightmare
A lot of folks are using AI to help code now (which is great), but then they hit the deployment wall. The AI helped you build the app, but now you’re troubleshooting why dependencies won’t resolve, why the containerization is failing, or why environment variables aren’t being read correctly. You’re debugging infrastructure instead of improving your analysis.
With Plotly Cloud, if it runs locally, it runs when published. We’ve spent the last year making that statement as close to universally true as possible. The dependencies install correctly, the build system understands Dash patterns, and when something does go wrong, the logs tell you what actually happened.
What you get with Plotly Cloud
Plotly Studio and Cloud are designed to work together. You can build apps with natural language in Plotly Studio (using AI that is actually trained on Plotly and visualization best practices), then publish with one click.
Even if you’re coding Dash by hand, the new Dash 3.3.0 release means publishing is literally a button click from your dev tools. Make a change, republish, it’s live. No context switching, no upload flows, no deployment config.
We offer a free trial specifically so you can evaluate whether this approach works for you.
When to go Enterprise
The playbook also covers when simple sharing isn’t enough anymore. If you’re dealing with regulated data, building customer-facing apps, or need enterprise integrations, that’s when Dash Enterprise makes sense.
Why I’m sharing this
I genuinely think the community benefits when people can focus on building and sharing great applications instead of becoming infrastructure experts. That’s why we built Cloud and wrote this playbook.
If you’re curious about the different publishing options and what actually works at different scales, the Plotly Publishing Playbook has real examples and comparative breakdowns.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you’ve been wrestling with deployment decisions lately.
Download here: The Publishing Playbook