Productboard vs Canny: Which Product Management Software Tool Should I Choose?

productboard vs canny image

Canny.io and Productboard are two leading product management software tools. Both aim to help B2B SaaS product teams define, prioritize, and communicate their product vision and strategy. And both have similar features:

Idea portals and feature voting boards to centralize customer feedback
Tools to surface and prioritize feature requests
Tools to build visual product roadmaps
Tools to communicate changes to customers

So which one is right for you?

In short:

Canny is best if you want to build in public. It does offer private boards, but this isn't where it shines. It lets you segment your user feedback based on customer data and it’s also less expensive than Productboard for most teams.
Productboard is better for building multiple product roadmaps. Canny offers multiple roadmaps, but it isn't as powerful as Productboard's offering).

But the best tool for you really depends on the functionality you need, so let’s dive into the details.

Note: Savio* helps you build the right product with customer feedback. Our tool could replace Canny and Productboard, but we promise not to let that bias our evaluation in this article* 😉.

Disclaimer:* We wrote this based on the features page of each tool, and were careful to ensure that everything below was accurate at the time of writing. But features change over time. Let us know if you notice an error and we’ll update the article.*

Feature Comparison

Here’s a high-level comparison of Canny and Productboard features. More in-depth discussion is added below. (We’ve thrown Savio in there to help you see how they all stack up).

	Productboard	Canny	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	✅ + Added cost	✅ + Added cost	✅
Collect feedback from HubSpot CRM	❌	✅ + Added cost	✅
Collect feedback from Help Scout	❌	✅ + Added cost	✅
Collect feedback from Slack	✅	✅	✅
Collect feedback from Microsoft Teams	✅	✅	❌
Collect feedback from Gong	✅	✅ + Added cost	❌
Collect feedback from Chrome extension	✅	✅ + Added cost	✅
Forward feedback via email	✅	❌	✅
In-app feedback widget	❌	✅	❌
Zapier connection	✅	✅	✅
API	✅	✅	✅
Analyze and prioritize
Link feedback with account data	❌	✅	✅
Feedback segmentation	❌	✅	✅
Sort by MRR impact	❌	✅	✅
Prioritize features	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Segment	❌	✅	✅
Roadmaps and development
Build visual public roadmap	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Jira	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Shortcut	✅	❌	✅
Integrate with GitHub	✅	✅	❌
Communicate with customers
Changelog tool	❌	✅	❌
Send email updates to customers	✅	✅	✅
Personalized close-the-loop message	❌	❌	✅
Pricing
Free trial	✅	✅	✅
Limited free plan	✅	✅	❌
Paid plans	$20/m/editor to $80/m/editor	$400/m (+$40/editor after 5)	$49/m - $299/m for first editor (+29/m/editor - $59/m/editor)
Annual cost for 5 PMs (entry level paid plan)	$4,800	$4,800	$1,980
Annual cost for 15 PMs (entry level paid plan)	$14,400	$9,600	$5,460

Canny vs Productboard: What are the differences?

Both Canny and Productboard were built to help PMs decide what to build next, collaborate to build it, and then communicate with stakeholders. They also both recognize that building good software requires a customer feedback system.

Here are the critical factors of a solid customer feedback tool:

Centralization: Collect feedback and new feature ideas from any channel
Prioritization: Analyze features to decide what to build next
Communication: Communicate your strategy to stakeholders and customers
Coordination: Coordinate the development process with you dev team
Close the loop: Tell customers when you build their feature
Value: More features, fewer dollars (or pounds or euros)

Here’s how Productboard and Canny stack up for each of those tasks.

1. Centralization

Neither Canny nor Productboard is clearly better when it comes to gathering product feedback from customers and centralizing it.

Voting boards: Both of them use a voting board for feature collection, which we see problems with. Neither can be configured to minimize the pitfalls of feature voting, such as vote counts or feature request order biasing feedback.

Integrations: Canny has a few more integrations to pull in feedback (9) than Productboard (6), but both connect to Zapier and also have Chrome extensions. (Savio has 8 native integrations, as well as the Zapier connection and a Chrome extension)

Other channels: You can email feedback to Productboard; you can’t with Canny. But Canny has a feedback widget; Productboard doesn’t. Both have APIs that let you put feedback in automatically.

Overall:* Canny and Productboard are about the same—both make it pretty easy to collect feedback from a bunch of channels. (Savio is a bit better).*

2. Prioritization

Next, you need to synthesize your feedback data to be usable so you can make product decisions.

Productboard has what they call a “flexible product hierarchy”, which basically lets you drag and drop features up and down based on what you think is more important. It also prompts you (or users) to score features on a scale from 0 to +3 on how critical the feature is. That way, you can get a breakdown of how many people rated each feature, say, “Critical” i.e. +3. Adding the features up gives you a “User Impact Score”.

Productboard’s user impact score.

The big downside to Productboard is that you can’t segment your user feedback by any useful customer date—just geography, industry, and market size. If you want to segment by MRR or plan, you’re out of luck.

Canny (and Savio) lets you enrich your feedback with data (like MRR) from your customer source of truth. That lets you see not just how important a feature is to each customer, but also how important it is to, say, your Enterprise clients, or your prospects, or your churned customers. It also lets you attach customer data like MRR, so you can see how much revenue is tied to a feature.

Canny lets you segment your feature requests by customer attributes. (So does Savio).

Overall:* Canny is better. Since it has an “impact” scoring feature as well as better segmentation, in our opinion, Canny is superior for analyzing and prioritizing features.*

3. Communication

The next step is communicating what you’re going to build to your stakeholders. Both Canny and Productboard do that primarily with product roadmaps and with customer notifications.

Roadmaps: Canny’s roadmap is fairly basic—it’s basically just a list of features in categories like “Planned” or “Under Review”.

Canny’s roadmaps are meant for your customers and users. Canny is really meant to be a tool to collaborate with customers—or anyone else who can access your roadmap—in public* (Canny also has private boards.)*

Screenshot of Canny roadmap.

Productboard has a public roadmap but (like Savio) it also lets you create private ones for internal consumption. It’s meant more as a line-of-business tool for product managers, so the majority of the tool is private, with the option to make your voting board public. Categories are organized like different tabs, and each feature has an image, almost like a blog post.

Screenshot of Productboard 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.

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

We don’t think one is necessarily better than the other—it’s a matter of preference.

Other communications tools: Both Productboard and Canny (and Savio) let you also post updates through other tools, like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Overall:* Productboard and Canny are about the same on communication—neither is clearly better than the other.*

4. Coordination

Ideally, your feedback inbox and roadmaps will connect to your dev workflow.

Both Canny and Productboard (and Savio) let you sync with common dev and project management tools. Canny links to Jira, GitHub, ClickUp, Azure DevOps, Linear, and Asana. Productboard (and Savio) links to Jira and Shortcut. These integrations help make it so that the status of your features update automatically through the development workflow.

Overall:* Productboard and Canny (and Savio) are about the same on this dimension. One may be better for your needs depending on what tool your devs use to organize their work.*

5. Close the loop

Closing the loop means sending personalized messages to customers to let them know you built a feature they asked for. It’s a simple way to significantly boost loyalty and engagement.

Canny doesn’t have a way send personalized close-the-loop messages. Their solution is to use their changelog to send updates about new features. You also get the option to notify voters and send an automatic email.

Productboard doesn’t have a changelog. They do have a feature where you can send an update message to everyone following a card. Those updates are visible to anyone who can see the card, and also get emailed to card followers.

Email update are useful, but there are a couple of problems with it. For one thing, it’s not personalized for each requester and you can’t choose who to update. That’s an important feature—sometimes you want to close the loop with some customers, while your colleague closes it with others. Or, you might want to send one email to lost deals inviting them back, while sending another to active customers, and another to churned customers.

You can’t do that with either Productboard or Canny.

Note:* In contrast, Savio lets you send custom, personalized emails to quickly close the loop in just a few clicks. It lets you select who to send to, and then keeps track of who you closed the loop with.*

You can send close-the-loop emails in Savio in just a few clicks.

Overall:* Productboard and Canny are about the same. (Savio is even better).*

6. Value

So what about price?

It’s hard to know what you’ll pay until you are paying because it depends on how many seats you need and what plan you want. But both are quite expensive.

Canny pricing is relatively simple. It only has one plan with the features that you’ll really need, so it’s a bit easier to understand. It’s $400/m for 5 editors and $40/m for each additional editor seat. There is also a more limited free plan.

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $4,800
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $9,600.

Note: that’s the base price. If you need more advanced features, like Salesforce or HubSpot integrations, you’ll need the enterprise plan. So think of the above as the minimum you’d pay per month.

Screenshot of Canny pricing.

Productboard pricing is much more complicated. There are 2 plans with prices—the Essentials and the Pro. Like Canny’s free plan, the Essentials plan is missing key features that almost anyone that gets feedback will need: capturing feedback, a feedback portal, key integrations and the Chrome extension, and more.

So the Pro is the only real option.

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $4,800
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $14,400

Note: Even the Pro plan is quite limited. If you want the Salesforce integration, feature prioritization, multiple products, or customer segmentation (which is key) you would need the “Scale” plan. The price isn’t published publicly, but would be even more expensive than the above listed prices.

Screenshot of Productboard pricing.

**For contrast, **Savio is much better value. It gives you similar features to Productboard and Canny, for a much smaller chunk of your budget.

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $1,980
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $5,460

Savio Pricing

Overall:* Canny is less expensive than Productboard, especially for larger teams. Savio has the best value of the three.*

The takeaway: Canny is better for building in public, Productboard is better for roadmapping

Both Canny and Productboard can be a useful addition to your product management tool stack. Here’s our summary:

Centralization: It’s a tie. One may be better for you depending on the other tools you use for customer support and sales. (Savio is the best at this)
Prioritization: Canny wins because it lets you segment based on customer data (Savio does this, too). Productboard doesn’t.
Communication: It’s a tie. Look to see which style roadmap you like better.
Coordination: It’s a tie. One may be better for you depending on the dev tools you use.
Close the loop: It’s a tie. Canny has a changelog, which is nice, but neither let you send personalized close-the-loop messages. (Savio does).
Value: Canny is less expensive for about the same features. It becomes even better value as team member size increases. (Savio is even better value than Canny.)

	Productboard	Canny	Savio
Centralization	🥈	🥈	🥇
Prioritization	🥉	🥇	🥇
Communication	🥇	🥇	🥈
Coordination	🥇	🥇	🥇
Close the loop	🥈	🥉	🥇
Value	🥉	🥈	🥇

Overall, all three tools have similar functionality, but some are better for particular aspects of your workflow.

Savio has most of the same features as the other tools while being significantly better value. It also has better centralization and a powerful prioritization engine.

It could be just the tool you’re looking for.

Take it for a spin to see if it’s the right fit.

Note: Savio helps you centralize, organize, and prioritize product feedback from your GTM team, by integrating with Slack, HubSpot, Intercom, Zendesk, SFDC, Help Scout, and more. Learn more about Savio.

More resources and customer feedback tool comparisons

Still not sure what tool is best for you? Check out these resources to help you decide.

Product management software tools

Learn more about Canny

Learn more about Productboard

Last Updated: 28-04-2023

Kareem Mayan

Kareem is a co-founder at Savio. He's been prioritizing customer feedback professionally since 2001. He likes tea and tea snacks, and dislikes refraining from eating lots of tea snacks.

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