When two or more people open the same Atlas project at the same time, the project becomes collaborative in real time. You can see who else is in the project, where their cursor is, what they have selected, and follow them as they pan across the map. No setup is required — collaboration is on by default for any project with at least two viewers.
Presence (avatars and cursors)
The avatar bar in the project header shows who else is currently viewing the project. Each collaborator gets a coloured avatar; click an avatar to jump to that person's current map position.
Each collaborator also has a coloured cursor on the map, with their name attached. The cursor follows their pointer and updates several times per second.
Collaborators are considered "active" if they've moved their cursor in the last three minutes; older sessions drop out of the avatar bar and cursor list automatically.
Selection sync
When a teammate selects a feature on the map or a row in the data table, you see their selection highlighted in their colour. This makes it obvious when two people are looking at the same feature, and reduces the chance of conflicting edits.
Real-time basemap and edits
Layer style changes, basemap switches, drawn features, and edits to popups appear immediately for everyone in the project. There's no "save" step — what you do is what your teammates see.
How it differs from comments and threads
Real-time collaboration is synchronous — it shows what's happening right now. Comments and threads are asynchronous — they persist on features and are read later. Use both:
- Real-time when you're working together live (a screen-share replacement).
- Comments/threads when leaving feedback for someone who isn't online.
Disable for a project
If real-time updates aren't useful (for example for performance reasons on very large projects), an admin can disable multiplayer for a specific project from project settings. With multiplayers disabled, the avatar bar, cursors, and selection sync are turned off; comments and threads still work.
Limits and notes
- Real-time data lives in a Firestore-backed cursor channel; transient network drops cause cursors to flicker. They re-sync as soon as the connection recovers.
- The avatar bar shows up to three collaborators by default; click the +N chip to expand the list.
- Cursor updates are scoped per project — you only see other people who have the same project open.
- Collaborators with viewer access still appear in the avatar bar but cannot make edits, so you won't see edits from them.