An ideal Canny.io alternative should help you collect, prioritize and manage user feedback and share product roadmap and announce updates via changelog, all at an affordable price.
User feedback is a vital asset for a company. It helps them understand their customers and provide better products and services. The main goal of user feedback is to create a more personal experience for users.
However, Canny might not be the best choice for every product team; with the cluttered user experience, no way to remove visible branding and pricing focused on enterprise software companies is a deal-breaker.
So, if you are looking for an affordable and modern Canny alternative, look no further because we’ve compiled a list of top 5 Canny alternatives with their pros and cons and pricing to help you choose one.
What is Canny. io?
Canny.io is a user feedback management solution that helps companies collect, prioritize, and track customer feedback. Identify which customers want which features to help your team make robust product decisions.
Canny.io Pricing
Starts at $400/month (Canny’s too expensive)
What is Canny. io Used For?
Best for feature request management, and roadmapping.
Does Canny. io offer free plans?
Yes. Canny does offer a free plan for users, but with very limited features.
Does Canny. io have a free trial?
Yes. Canny offers a free trial of 14-days.
Pros of Canny
- Canny is a feedback forum software that helps you capture customer feedback, prioritize it, and make better product decisions.
- Since it’s a forum, your customers can see other people’s suggestions and help each other before the team can get involved.
- They are a good fit for large enterprises and SaaS software companies.
- Making product maps public in Canny allows companies to engage and interact with their users transparently, which helps build customer loyalty.
Cons of Canny.io
- Pricing is focused mainly on more high-end companies, targeting enterprise companies. The available expensive plans make it costly for small and medium businesses and thus unusable.
- The user interface feels cluttered in many places, making the experience complicated and clumsy.
- Canny is stringent in many cases. They force you to use their fixed pre-set defaults in the feedback portal and roadmap even if it makes no sense.
- Canny often doesn’t listen to their customers’ requests on their public portal, leaving feature requests hanging for a few years without a proper response.
- When integrating with other tools other than Intercom & Slack, one has to be their default API.
- Canny does not support the white-labeling of its services. You can’t remove “powered by Canny” even in their high-end plans.
Saasfe: Never Build A Wrong Feature Again
Saasfe helps product teams understand what customers need by tracking feature requests and ideas, analyzing & prioritizing what to build next, creating a roadmap backed by customer insights, and communicating new features with release notes.
Understanding customers begin by collecting their feedback in a centralized app. Rapidr helps you capture product ideas, requests, and feedback from colleagues and customers with their customer portal and in-app widget.
Next, for analyzing and prioritizing the roadmap based on customer insights, Saasfe helps you slice and dice feedback by customer attributes and sorting by votes.
Lastly, inform your roadmap with the most critical feedback, and let your customers know what’s new with release notes.
Saasfe Pricing: Starting from $25/month.
Use Case: Best for product feedback, road mapping, and feature request tracking.
Pros of Saasfe
- Saasfe is an end-to-end feedback solution, which means you don’t have to glue together multiple apps yourself. With it, you get feedback collection software, roadmapping software, and release notes software.
- Saasfe is one of the most affordable and cost-effective solutions that offer excellent value for money stacked against the other enterprise options on this list. Saasfe pricing is based on the value you’re deriving from the software instead of per-seat pricing.
- Saasfe hosted feedback portal is lightweight, easy to use, and customizable, fitting in perfectly with your existing workflows and brand design.
- Saasfe is built to support varying workflows and to match different product development terminology across companies. It’s built to be customizable from day one.
Cons of Saasfe
- At the time of writing, Saasfe has a few integrations such as Slack, and Intercom, and many are on the way.
- Saasfe is relatively new in the market, and many features are still being built. But with features rivalling Canny at a much lower price and in the hands of trusted people, it’s an excellent option for anyone looking for a lean, simple, and clean user feedback alternative.
Trello: Helps teams move work forward
Trello is a collaboration and project management tool that provides a kanban style roadmap to arrange and manage project tasks. Your team could also create a public board where customers can log in, submit their own feedback as comments on existing cards and vote for their favorite features.
Trello Pricing: Free with limited features.
Use case: Best for project management, roadmapping, and to-do list.
Pros of Trello
- Trello allows you to create closed boards with a limited group of members within the company and public boards that anyone can view, including your customers.
- Basic functionality in Trello is available for free, which includes unlimited boards, cards, and users, but as for adding more team members, it charges per seat and extra charges for power-up features.
- It has a perfectly built responsive design that works fine on a computer, mobile, or tablet, without any issue.
Cons of Trello
- Trello is basically built for project management purposes, including a Kanban Board to keep track of todos and other tasks. However, when you try to manage customer feedback on a larger scale, you’ll be held back by its generic user interface and lack of extensibility.
- Trello is free to start with, but once you start using advanced features or power-ups, the per-seat pricing won’t scale with your team, and it quickly becomes costly.
- It is suitable for smaller projects. However, feedback tracking becomes complex with limited functionality as the user base, and the team grows.
- Closing the user feedback loop becomes a tad harder in Trello as you can’t quickly contact customers for more feedback, and there are no notifications for any update on feature status.
UserVoice: Product feedback management software
UserVoice was launched in 2008; the service is said to have many customers worldwide (the actual number is unknown) and caters to enterprise companies that want to gather customer feedback, process support requests, and increase customer satisfaction.
With UserVoice, companies can create feedback boards for customers to share their opinions with the company and rate various products or services of the company.
UserVoice Pricing: Contact Sales
Use Case: Best for product feedback management.
Pros of UserVoice
- It provides feedback software that gathers data from its customer base, analyzes it, and then presents it to them to make informed decisions about what should be improved or changed.
- It creates a feedback loop by providing forum software enabled with roadmap functionality.
- They have streamlined communication with customer-facing and product teams and keep all product feedback in one location to increase transparency.
- They allow product teams to see how many customers requested a particular feature and its importance to their business goals. They allow segmentation and create cohorts for different types of users.
Cons of UserVoice
- The app was built in 2008, and the user interface shows. Every simple task is made complicated by a half-thought and glued-together interface. It’s hard to navigate and has a steep learning curve.
- It is bloated with features; one can easily get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of features wrapped in the bloated user interface that feels like an afterthought.
- Other than not being a cheap option, you would have to talk to a salesperson even to sign up and give it a try it is not self-serve.
- Time-consuming and complicated onboarding requires much learning to understand the functionality and complete the setup, even collecting user feedback.
Productboard: Customer-Centric Product Management Platform
Productboard is a project management tool that helps product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap. It consolidates feedback from customers into a prioritized roadmap that’s based on data.
Productboard Pricing: Starts at $20/month per teammate.
Use Case: Best for project management, and roadmapping.
Pros of Productboard
- Productboard is a project management tool that combines a user feedback voting board and inbox with prioritization methods and roadmaps.
- Key features include collecting product feedback from email, prioritizing features with a set of frameworks, various product roadmap templates, etc.
- Many integrations such as Slack, Zapier, and Salesforce are supported to manage projects and customer feedback.
Cons of Productboard
- Productboard feels like an overly complex project management tool, much less of a feature tracking tool. No doubt, it’s great consisting of all the customizations, but configuring the right setting for managing user feedback feels like a chore.
- A complex interface with a complicated user experience, one where you would get lost configuring. It feels overly engineered, making it cumbersome.
- As a user stated, “The primary method of capturing customer input (insights) does not link to the process of evaluating potential features in the features section, requiring this tracking to be performed manually. This limits the ability to tie development directly to user input”.
- It is expensive. At the time of writing, prices start from $20 a month for one admin, five contributors with limited admin rights and restricted features compared to other feedback management tools.
ProdPad: Feedback management that ties actions to outcomes
ProdPad is a product feedback and road-mapping tool where product teams can share feedback about the product and upvote on features with a feature voting board. It helps create a neatly structured roadmap for multiple products with a timeline view that showcases the updated announcements of a particular product.
Prodpad Pricing: Starts at a whopping $1899 per month.
Usecase: Best for product feedback and roadmapping.
Pros of ProdPad
- The tool seems to be easy to use and supports the ability to build roadmaps to communicate with both engineers & executives at the same place.
- It also allows users to create multiple ideas and feedback that can be later used based on priorities. Users love the visualization charts inside the tool, which help teams prioritize projects better.
- Its interface has a reasonably intuitive design that allows me to perform multiple tasks and activities relatively quickly.
- ProdPad helps customers to visualize, collaborate and easily maintain their roadmaps, in one place, replacing spreadsheets.
Cons of ProdPad
- Users complain that it’s challenging to browse through all the feedback and feature ideas in the software using search and scanning through duplicates is also not consistent with product updates. Needs external tools to utilize the client feedback feature fully.
- Customer support looks lacking in many senses; customers complain it is buggy making collected ideas disappear and re-appear out of the blue.
- It’s a little hard to navigate and feels clunky. ProdPad captures so many details, which are great but lacks proper help articles making it harder to set up and challenging to use.
- Users complain of feeling slightly overwhelmed and lost and quoted it to be simple but noisy at the same time. ProdPad has a steep learning curve and can be overwhelming to handle for new users.
- Their pricing model seems different as they don’t charge per individual seat but on bundles of seats that work out to $50 per user.
