Aha! vs ProductPlan Comparison: Which Product Management Tool is Better?

Aha! and ProductPlan are both robust software tools for roadmapping and product development. They could both be useful to you if you’re looking to coordinate your product development and align your team around a single product vision.

But which one would be better for you?

Here is the high-level difference:

• Aha! is a full suite of PM tools, including those for creating product roadmaps, collecting customer feedback and feature requests, prioritizing features, collaborating with your teams, and even organizing your dev workflows. The platform is modulated, so you can pick between sets of features a la carte.

• ProdcutPlan is just a roadmapping tool. You can use it to create a variety of roadmaps from user experience to HR to marketing roadmaps. It doesn’t collect feedback, but it can help you prioritize features and connect with your development tool stack.

This article presents a full comparison of ProductPlan and Aha! so you can choose the most appropriate one for you.

Note: Savio is another product management tool specifically aimed at helping B2B SaaS companies build better software via product feedback. You can use our tool in place of both Aha! and ProductPlan, but we promise not to let that bias this article 😉.

Feature comparison: ProductPlan vs. Aha!

Here’s a high-level comparison of Aha! and ProductPlan features. A more in-depth discussion is added below.

(Quick disclaimer: This list was accurate when we wrote it, but features change over time. If you see something that isn’t quite right, send me an email and I’ll fix it.)

	Aha!	ProductPlan	Savio
Centralize feedback
Public feedback board	✅	❌	✅
Feedback board is optional	✅	❌	✅
Make feedback board private	✅	❌	✅
Hide feature vote counts	❌	❌	✅
Randomize feature order	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Intercom	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Zendesk	✅	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Salesforce	✅	❌	✅
Collect feedback from HubSpot CRM	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Help Scout	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Slack	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Chrome extension	❌	❌	✅
Forward feedback via email	✅	❌	✅
In-app feedback widget	✅	❌	❌
Feedback polls	✅	❌	❌
Zapier connection	✅	✅ (It doesn't let you collect feedback)	✅
API	✅	❌	✅
Analyze and prioritize
Link feedback with account data	✅ (Only from Salesforce)	❌	✅
Feedback segmentation	✅(Basic, and not with customer account data like plan)	❌	✅
Sort by MRR impact	❌	❌	✅
Prioritize features	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Segment	❌	❌	✅
Roadmaps and development
Build visual internal roadmaps	✅	✅	✅
Build visual public roadmap	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Jira	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Shortcut	❌	❌	✅
Integrate with GitHub	✅	✅	❌
Integrate with Azure DevOps	✅	✅	❌
Integrate with Microsoft Teams	❌	✅	❌
Integrate with Confluence	❌	✅	❌
Integrate with Pivotal Tracker	✅	✅	❌
Integrate with Trello	❌	✅	❌
Integrate with GitLab	✅	❌	❌
Integrate with Rally	✅	❌	❌
Integrate with Redmine	✅	❌	❌
Integrate with FogBugz	✅	❌	❌
Integrate with Bugzilla	✅	❌	❌
Communicate with customers
Send updates to customers	✅	❌	✅
Personalized close-the-loop message	❌	❌	✅
Pricing
Free trial?	✅	✅	✅
Price range	$59/m/user to $149/m/user	$39/m/editor to $69/m/editor	$23/m/editor to $79/m/editor
Annual cost for 5 PMs	$4,740	$2,340	$2,820
Annual cost for 15 PMs	$14,220	$7,020	$7,500

So what does that actually mean? Here are what those different features would mean for your team.

ProductPlan vs. Aha!—What are the differences?

To evaluate these tools, we’ve come up with the following criteria for what a good product management tool would do.

1. Centralization: Collect feedback and new feature ideas from any channel

2. Prioritization: Help you analyze features to decide what to build next

3. Communication: Empower you to communicate your strategy to stakeholders and customers

4. Coordination: Coordinate the development process with your dev team

5. Close the loop: Tell customers when you build their feature

6. Value: More features, fewer dollars (or pounds or euros)

Here’s how ProductPlan and Aha! stack up for each of those tasks.

1. Centralization

Your user feedback comes in from everywhere—customer support, your Sales team, social media, etc. A useful tool will gather that feedback and collect it in a single place for you to analyze.

Voting boards: One common way to collect customer product feedback is with a feature voting board. Aha! calls their feature voting board a “feedback portal”. It’s a list of features that your customers can add to or upvote.

Aha!’s voting boards display a list of features, together with vote counts. Your customers can also add new ideas.

Like Aha, Savio also has a voting board. It’s similar to Aha’s in that it’s a list of features that customers can upvote or submit their own new feature ideas.

Savio’s voting board is optional and can be configured to minimize bias by hiding vote counts and randomizing the feature list.

But it’s also designed to eliminate potential bias because you can hide upvote counts and also randomize the order of the feature list. Aha!’s boards don’t have that ability, so they could distort the feedback you receive through your voting boards.

ProductPlan doesn’t have a voting board. It doesn’t have any mechanism to collect feedback.

Integrations: Aha! has several connections to apps where feedback commonly comes from—Zendesk and Salesforce. It also connects to Zapier, which enables it to connect to many other apps, too.

Savio connects to 6 apps for collecting feedback—Intercom, Help Scout, Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce, and HubSpot. It also connects to Zapier.

ProductPlan doesn’t have any integrations for feedback.

Other channels: Aha! also has a number of other ways to receive feedback: via email, through an in-app feedback widget, through feedback polls, and with an API.

Savio is similarly flexible, allowing you to forward emails to your feedback inbox or use an API. It also has a Chrome extension that lets you receive feedback from any web-based app.

Overall: Aha! is much better for feedback collection than ProductPlan. Savio is even better because it has more integrations with apps where you receive feedback.

2. Prioritization

Once you’ve got your backlog of product ideas, you need to decide which ones are most important so you focus your resources on building them.

Aha!: Aha! lets you score your features on a number of dimensions, including effort, population, need, strategy, and confidence. It then turns those scores into an overall priority score. Then you can sort your list of feature requests by priority score and have an ordered list of what to build.

Aha!’s feature scoring card.

Aha! also lets you segment your feedback by things like industry and location. You can connect your feedback to customer data from Salesforce and import data. However, you can’t yet quickly see which features have the highest cumulative MRR or are most popular among, say, churned customers.

ProductPlan: ProductPlan’s prioritization framework is very simple. You score the feature on value and effort. It then calculates a total score, which you can use to prioritize. ProductPlan doesn’t let you segment by customer type, and you can’t use your customer attributes to help you prioritize features.

ProductPlan’s feature scoring card.

Savio lets you easily prioritize features with scores for value, effort, and a host of other attributes that you can customize. It’s also very easy to filter and sort your feature requests to see things like:

• What features have the highest cumulative MRR

• What features your enterprise clients want

• What features are trending

• What features your prospects are asking for

And many more.

With Savio, you can quickly sort by MRR to find your most valuable features.

It can also pull customer attributes from more apps than just Salesforce, including HubSpot, Zendesk, HelpScout, and Intercom.

Overall: Aha! has a more advanced prioritization framework than ProductPlan, including good segmentation ability. Savio’s is even better because its segmentation engine is more powerful and can pull in customer data from a number of different apps.

3. Communication and team alignment

Once you have your product strategy firmed up, you’ll want to get all your teams on the same page and align them on a unified product vision.

Roadmap software: This is where ProductPlan really shines. It has a ton of features that let you build a variety of roadmap types for any use case. It’s got lots of templates and offers advanced features like swim lanes, milestones and goals, dependencies, and more. It also offers a number of layouts, from table views to Gantt charts to Kanban boards.

Another useful feature is custom views. These let you change how a roadmap appears for different audiences—execs, your product team, and even your customers.

ProductPlan roadmaps are complex and flexible with lots of features.

Aha!’s roadmaps are also quite complex and feature-rich. Similar to ProductPlan, there are a number of different styles you can use, including Gantt charts and lists. You can build them for a number of audiences. Note, though, that Aha!s roadmaps are primarily designed for internal teams rather than customers.

A screenshot of Aha!’s roadmap.

Savio’s roadmaps are super flexible—you can fully customize them, including as many or as few features as you need to suit your audience. They also are unique in that they display evidence to justify your product decisions.

For example, you can quickly see the number of requests for a feature or each feature’s cumulative MRR. That helps reduce disagreement (or conflict) about roadmapping decisions.

Savio roadmaps display feedback data so you can help others understand why you made your product decisions (and minimize roadmap disagreements).

Other communication tools: Aha!, ProductPlan, and Savio all let you post automated updates on feedback and roadmaps to a dedicated Slack channel. Aha! and ProductPlan also let you post to Microsoft Teams about roadmap changes.

Overall: ProductPlan has the most advanced features here, and we like the UI a bit better.

4. Coordination with development

Next, your feature list goes to the engineering team. Ideally, your PM tool will sync with the project management tool used by your devs, so you can follow each feature as it's built.

Aha! connects to 9 development tools: Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Rally, GitLab, Pivotal Tracker, Redmine, FogBugz, and Bugzilla.

ProductPlan is second, with 6 integrations: Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal tracker, Trello, and Confluence.

Savio integrates with 2 tools: Jira and Shortcut.

Overall: Aha! wins because it has the most integrations. ProductPlan comes second. But obviously, the best one for you depends on the tool your teams use. For example, if you use Shortcut, Savio would be the best choice.

5. Close the loop

Closing the feedback loop is about following up with customers when you build a feature they asked for.

Aha!: Aha! closes the loop with automatic notifications. The notifications keep customers up-to-date on the status of features they’re following. The notifications aren’t personalized, and they go to everyone—you can’t send them to some customers and not others.

ProductPlan: Product Plan doesn’t have a system for closing the loop with customers.

Savio: Savio lets you send personalized close-the-loop emails. You create a template email and then you can send it to any of the customers that you’d like to. Importantly, you can send messages to some people and not others. This is handy, for example, if you want to send a different message to your active customers than your prospects or churned customers.

Overall: Aha! is better than ProductPlan because it has notifications. Savio is the best, though, because it lets you personalize your close-the-loop messages.

6. Value

What does each tool cost?

Aha! Pricing: Aha! splits up their features into different modules. If you want to be able to do the basics (collect customer feedback, prioritize them, and create roadmaps) you’ll need the Premium Roadmaps module ($59/user/month) and the Advanced Ideas module ($20/user/month add-on). That’s $79/user/month in total.

• A team of 5 PMs would pay $4,740 per year

• A team of 15 PMs would pay $14,220 per year

A screenshot of Aha!’s pricing for their roadmaps module.

ProductPlan pricing: ProductPlan’s pricing is quite simple. You’re looking at $39/month/editor for the Basic plan and $69/month/editor for the Professional plan. Most companies will probably only need the Basic plan. So:

• A team of 5 PMs would pay $2,340 per year

• A team of 15 PMs would pay $7,020 per year

A screenshot of ProductPlan’s pricing page.

Savio pricing: Savio is the best value of the three. Pricing starts at $39/month on the Essential plan.

• A team of 5 PMs would cost you $2,820

• A team of 15 PMs would cost you $7,500