Productboard vs ProdPad: Which Product Management Tool Should I Choose?

Productboard and ProdPad are both software tools designed to help product management teams organize their building process and figure out what features to build next. They also both support customer-centricity by enabling PMs to collect customer feedback and analyze it.

They’re quite similar tools with similar features. While both could be reasonable product management tool choices, one may be better suited to your needs.

Here’s a high-level overview of each:

• Productboard is a bit better at centralizing. It has more native integrations with feedback tools.

• ProdPad is a bit better at prioritization. We like that it can tie into an OKR system and that its AI tool could help you surface insights.

But there’s a lot to know about both products, and the right one for you will probably depend a lot on your design preferences and the tools you’re already using.

Read on for our deep dive comparing ProdPad and Productboard.

Note: Savio is another product management tool that helps B2B SaaS companies build better software. Our tool is an alternative to both ProdPad and Productboard, but we promise not to let that bias our evaluation in this article 😉.

Feature comparison between ProdPad and Productboard

Here’s a high-level breakdown of ProdPad’s and Productboard’s features in a quick-view table. Check out the discussion below for a more detailed comparison. (We’ve thrown Savio in there, too, to help you see how they all stack up).

Disclaimer: We wrote this based on the product’s website as well as taking the tool for a test drive. We were careful to ensure that everything was accurate at the time of writing, but features change over time. Let us know if you notice an error and we’ll happily update the article.

	Productboard	ProdPad	Savio
Centralize feedback
Public feedback board	✅	✅	✅
Feedback board is optional	✅	✅	✅
Make feedback board private	✅	✅	✅
Hide feature vote counts	❌	✅ (They stay hidden)	✅
Randomize feature order	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Intercom	✅	✅	✅
Collect feedback from Zendesk	✅	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Salesforce	✅ + Added cost	✅	✅
Collect feedback from HubSpot CRM	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Help Scout	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Slack	✅	✅	✅
Collect feedback from Microsoft Teams	✅	❌	❌
Collect feedback from Gong	✅	❌	❌
Collect feedback from UserVoice	❌	✅	❌
Collect feedback from Chrome extension	✅	✅	✅
Forward feedback via email	✅	✅	✅
In-app feedback widget	❌	✅	❌
Feedback forms	❌	✅	✅
Zapier connection	✅	✅	✅
API	✅	✅	✅
Analyze and prioritize
Link feedback with account data	❌	❌	✅
Feedback segmentation	✅ (Only by market size, industry, or geography)	✅ (Only by customer, company, or persona)	✅
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	✅	✅	✅
Price range	$20/m/editor to $80/m/editor	$72/m/editor to $116/m/editor	$23/m/editor to $79/m/editor
Annual cost for 5 PMs	$4,800	$5,040	$2,820
Annual cost for 15 PMs	$14,400	$15,120	$7,500

ProdPad vs Productboard: What are the differences?

Both ProdPad 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:

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

2. Prioritization: Analyze features to decide what to build next

3. Communication: 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, etc.)

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

1. Centralization

Productboard is the superior tool when it comes to centralizing customer feedback into an idea backlog.

Voting boards: Both Productboard and ProdPad have a version of a feature voting tool where customers vote on potential ideas. Productboard’s (and Savio’s) is more standard in that it’s constantly accessible and it includes all the features that you make public.

Productboard’s public feedback portal and voting board.

ProdPad’s voting board is unique in that its feedback portal is essentially a feedback form and an in-app widget to collect feedback. Then, you can share up to 9 ideas with people that fill out the form, and they can vote on the ideas. In other words, the voting board isn’t static—it appears for customers after they leave feedback. And they can’t vote on everything, just a maximum of 9 ideas that you choose.

ProdPad’s public voting board.

Integrations: Productboard has more integrations (6, the same as Savio) to centralize feedback into your Productboard database. ProdPad has fewer (3). This makes it much easier for your frontline teams—Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Customer Support, etc—to send feedback to your feedback vault.

Interestingly, ProdPad also connects to UserVoice, another customer feedback management tool, which suggests that some companies use UserVoice to collect feedback and then ProdPad to organize it and build roadmaps.

Other channels: Both Productboard and ProdPad have a Chrome extension, an integration with Zapier, and an API. They also both accept feedback sent via email. ProdPad has feedback forms and an in-app feedback widget tool, while Productboard doesn’t.

Overall: We think Productboard is more flexible for collecting feedback and idea management than ProdPad. It has more integrations and the voting board is probably closer to what most people are looking for. But if an in-app widget is important to you, then maybe you’d prefer ProdPad.

2. Prioritization

You’re getting a steady stream of product feedback from customers. Now, how do you use that to inform your product roadmap?

Productboard has a “user impact score” that your product management team or the customer assigns to each piece of feedback. The scores range from 0 to +3. Then, Productboard adds up the scores to come up with a total score for each feature. The idea is that you can sort by score and have the highest impact features at the top of the list. You can also drag features up or down to finalize the priority.

Note: Productboard lets you segment features by things like geography and industry, but it doesn’t let you filter or sort by customer data like MRR or plan. That weakens their method a bit.

Productboard’s user impact score ranges from 0 to +3.

ProdPad’s system is pretty similar. The difference is that you score both effort and impact. Then, it calculates a total effort score based on that.

ProdPad gets PMs to rate each feature on a score from 0 to 100 for Impact and Effort.

It also puts the feature in a chart so that you can see how it ranks compared to other features, and identify more low-hanging fruit.

ProdPad shows you a chart to visually see which features are high impact and low effort.

ProdPad also lets you segment your features by customer data, although it’s very limited—you can only segment by very basic information like the customer, the company, the customer persona, or who on your team added the feedback. It also has AI functionality that helps surface insights and can fit into an OKR framework, both of which could be useful.

Overall: ProdPad wins here. It’s nice to score based on both impact and effort and it can segment features by persona, even if it’s super basic. We also think the tie to OKRs is useful. We’re not sure how useful the AI bot would be, but we’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Savio’s prioritization is even better because you can enrich your feedback with customer data like MRR, plan, stage in the customer journey, and more. Then, you can use all those variables to slice and dice your data to see which features are the highest impact.

3. Communication and team alignment

Ideally, your product management tool will help you communicate your product strategy to your internal stakeholders and customers. Here’s how each tool does that.

Roadmaps: Both Productboard and ProdPad offer roadmap software tools. Prodpad’s is a Kanban board-style board with literally just three columns “Now/Next/Later”. You can make it public or private, or just make it accessible to some people and not others. There aren’t any options for fancier roadmaps, though, like Gantt charts or swimlanes.

Screenshot of a ProdPad roadmap.

Productboard’s is a little more complex. The public roadmaps are like a blog, where each feature has a cover image and title. You can click on it to get more details about the feature. For internal roadmaps, you can use more complex views, such as projects per quarter, swimlanes, and dependencies between tasks. It also offers roadmap templates for different use cases.

Screenshot of a public 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. 

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

Other communication tools: Productboard and ProdPad (and Savio) let you notify your teams of feedback activity in Slack. Productboard also lets you post updates to Microsoft Teams.

Overall: Neither tool is necessarily better than the other. ProdPad’s “lean” roadmaps may be exactly what you’re looking for. But if you want something more complex, Productboard is probably a better choice.

4. Coordination with development

A useful product management tool will dovetail into your development team’s workflow so you can keep track of new features as they’re being built.

Productboard integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal tracker, Trello, and Shortcut.

Prodpad integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal, Trello, Dropbox, Rally, and TFS.

Savio integrates with Jira and Shortcut.

Overall: Neither tool is necessarily better than the others, it really just depends on your dev tool stack. Savio has slightly fewer native integrations here.

5. Close the loop

Once you’ve built a feature that a customer asked for, you’ll want to close the feedback loop and let them know.

Productboard: Productboard lets you send automated updates when you launch a new feature. The updates aren’t personalized, but at least everyone that asked for the feature gets a notification.

ProdPad: Prodpad is very similar—it lets you send notifications to contacts who have given feedback on a feature. You can ask them for more feedback on how they think the feature should work or send a notification when you build the feature. Again, the messages aren’t personalized, so it’s not the ideal way to close the loop.

Overall: It’s a tie. Productboard and Prodpad can both send notifications to customers when you build a feature they ask for. (Savio is even better because you can personalize those messages.)

6. Value

What’s the best bang for your buck? Productboard and Prodpad are actually pretty similar in terms of price.

Productboard pricing: Productboard has four plans. The top two—Scale and Enterprise—don’t have a listed price, so we can’t tell you what they cost. And the Essentials plan, at $20/month/maker, is too limited to be useful (it doesn’t let you capture feedback, have a feedback portal, use the Chrome extension, or other critical features).

The least expensive plan that’s actually viable for teams that want to build better products is the Pro plan. It costs $80/month/maker:

• A team of 5 PMs would cost $4,800

• A team of 15 PMs would cost $14,400

Note: If you truly want to be customer-centric, you might actually need the Scale plan. For example, if you want to prioritize features, have multiple products, use customer segmentation, or use the Salesforce integration, you need the features on the Scale plan. We don’t have an exact price for that, but it would obviously be higher than the prices listed above and more expensive than ProdPad.

Productboard pricing.

ProdPad pricing: is a bit more complicated because you have to choose between three different modules: Roadmaps, Ideas, and Feedback. To get the basic features you need to collect feedback and use it to inform your product strategy, you would need Roadmap Essentials ($24/month/editor), Ideas Essentials ($24/month/editor), and Feedback Advanced (at $36/month/editor). The total would be $84/month/editor.

• A team of 5 PMs would cost $5,040

• A team of 15 PMs would cost $15,120

Note: You would need the Feedback Advanced plan to use the integrations to bring feedback into ProdPad from apps like Intercom. But if you’re a small startup that’s fine with just feedback forms, you could stick with the Essentials plan.

ProdPad pricing.

In contrast, Savio is much better value. To get the same features as Productboard and Prodpad:

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

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

Savio pricing.

Overall: ProdPad and Productboard are about the same price, although Productboard is a bit less if you need the basic features. On the other hand, if you only need one or two of the modules, ProdPad gives you more flexibility. Savio has the best value of the three.

The takeaway: Productboard is better for building in public and centralizing feedback; ProdPad is better for prioritizing features

Productboard and ProdPad are actually quite similar in functionality and price. Probably the biggest difference is really “mouth feel”—which particular design elements you prefer.

1. Centralization: Productboard wins here. It has more integrations which we think makes it more flexible, and the voting board is better. But if you want feedback forms or a widget, ProdPad may be more appropriate for you. (Savio is the best at centralization.)

2. Prioritization: It’s close, but ProdPad wins. Both let you assign scores and segment based on basic variables, but we think that the ability to tie prioritization to your OKRs and the AI tool puts ProdPad ahead a bit. (Savio is best because it lets you segment based on customer attributes like MRR).

3. Communicating product strategy: It’s a tie. Look to see which style roadmap tool you like better.

4. Coordination: It’s a tie. One may be better for you depending on the dev tools your team members use.

5. Close the loop: It’s a tie. Both let you send notifications to customers when you launch a feature they asked for. (Savio is even better because you can send personalized close-the-loop emails.)

6. Value: They’re pretty close in price, although Productboard is a little cheaper unless you need more advanced features on the Scale plan. On the other hand, if you only need one or two of the modules, ProdPad has more flexible pricing. (Savio is the best value).

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

Prodpad and Productboard (and Savio) are product team tools that could fit into your workflow. The best one for you really depends on you: which channels you receive feedback in, how important advanced prioritization and segmentation are, which tools your dev team uses, and your design preferences.

Savio has quite a few advantages over the other two—it’s more flexible for centralizing user feedback, it has a more powerful segmentation engine, and you can send personalized close-the-loop messages. It also has the advantage of being significantly better value.

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

Sign up for a free trial.

Not ready? Learn more here.

More resources and tool comparisons

Still not sure what tool is best for you? Here are some resources to help find project management tools and evaluate them against their competitors:

Product management software tools

• Product management tools [Ultimate Guide]

• 11+ feature voting board tools

• 12+ powerful feature request apps for software development

• 10+ Best In-App Feedback Tools for SaaS Companies

• 12+ Powerful Feature Request Apps for Software Development

Learn more about Productboard

• 14+ alternatives to Productboard

• Productboard vs. Savio

• Productboard vs. Canny

• Productboard vs. Aha!

• Productboard vs. ProductPlan

• Productboard vs. UserVoice

Learn more about ProdPad

• The Top 12+ alternatives to ProdPad

• ProdPad vs. Canny

• ProdPad vs. UserVoice

Last Updated: 27-04-2023

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