ProductPlan vs Productboard: Which Product Roadmapping Tool is Best?

productboard vs productplan image

Productboard and ProductPlan are both powerful tools that can be usefully added to the product manager’s tool stack. But while they have similar names, they’re quite different tools—and one may be a significantly better fit for your needs.

Here are the differences between them at a high level:

ProductPlan is a product roadmapping tool. If you just need to make roadmaps that align stakeholders on your product strategy and connect to development tools, it’s a great option. It’s aimed at a wide variety of types of businesses, not just SaaS companies.
Productboard is a more complete product management tool. It’s better if you need to collect and centralize product feedback and use that feedback to build customer-centric products. Productboard is also more targeted at SaaS companies.

In this article, we dive deeper into the differences between these two tools and look at which is better for various uses.

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

Feature comparison between ProductPlan and Productboard

Here’s a high-level comparison of ProductPlan and Productboard features (find more in-depth discussion after the table). We’ve also thrown Savio in there to help you see how they all stack up against one another.

	Productboard	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	✅ + 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 Chrome extension	✅	❌	✅
Forward feedback via email	✅	❌	✅
Zapier connection	✅	✅	✅
API	✅	❌	✅
Analyze and prioritize
Link feedback with account data	❌	❌	✅
Feedback segmentation	✅ (Only by market size, industry, or geography)	❌	✅
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
Send email updates to customers	✅	❌	✅
Personalized close-the-loop message	❌	❌	✅
Pricing
Free trial	✅	✅	✅
Price range	$20/m/editor to $80/m/editor	$39/m/editor to $69/m/editor	$23/m/editor to $79/m/editor
Annual cost for 5 PMs	$4,800	$2,340	$2,820
Annual cost for 15 PMs	$14,400	$7,020	$7,500

Let’s dive into the differences.

Productboard vs. ProductPlan—what are the differences?

Both ProductPlan and Productboard aim to help product teams develop a product strategy and align their teams around it. And both of these tools emphasize visual product roadmap documents as the main tool by which to do that.

But they’re quite different in how they implement their solution.

At Savio, we think of a successful product management tool in terms of the following 6 factors:

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

A good tool will be able to do the first five of those and it will be good value for the features it provides. Here’s how Productboard and ProductPlan (and Savio) stack up for each of those factors.

1. Centralization

To build a product that has market fit—that customers want to buy—you have to know what your customers actually want. That means having your ear to the ground with a steady drumbeat of customer feedback.

Feedback comes in from a number of different channels—your support tool, your CRM, email, social media, and more. A good tool will be easy for all your frontline teams—Customer Success, Customer Support, Sales, Marketing, etc.—to use to collect feedback and centralize it in one place.

Voting boards: Many product management tools give customers the opportunity to submit feature requests and vote on features through a feature voting board. Productboard (and Savio) have this feature.

Productboard’s public feedback portal and voting board.

ProductPlan doesn’t have a voting board. In fact, ProductPlan doesn’t collect or centralize customer feedback at all.

Integrations: Productboard has 6 integration to feedback channel tools including Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. (Savio also has 6). Again, ProductPlan doesn’t do product feedback, so it doesn’t have any.

Other channels: Productboard (and Savio) has a Zapier integration, a Chrome extension, and an API. Together, these let you flexibly pull in feedback from just about anywhere. Both Savio and Productboard also easily let you centralize feedback received via email.

Overall:* Productboard wins here, hands down. If you care about understanding what your customers want and using that to inform your product strategy, Productboard is superior to ProductPlan.*

Savio is even better than Productboard on this point. One reason is that Productboard’s integrations aren’t necessarily automatic. Their Salesforce integration requires you to manually push feedback data into Productboard. With Savio, it’s imported automatically so your data is updated in real-time.

2. Prioritization

Once you’ve got your idea backlog sorted, you need to figure out which features to build next. Feature prioritization is one of the most challenging product management tasks.

ProductPlan: ProductPlan offers you the ability to score features on value and effort. From there, it uses a formula to calculate a total priority score. Sort by that score, and you have your priority list.

ProductPlan’s feature priority score.

Productboard: Productboard is similar. It lets you (or the users who gave the feedback) score features using something called a user impact score. Each user that submits a feature request scores the feature from “Not important” (with a score of 0) to “Critical” (with a score of +3). Then, each of those user impact scores is summed up across all the people that voted for the feature to arrive at a total user impact score.

Productboard’s user impact score.

Productboard also lets you segment features by very basic customer data, like geography and industry.

Overall:* Productboard and ProductPlan have similar prioritization frameworks, but we think Productboard’s is a little superior because it allows you to segment by some customer data. That lets you delve deeper to really find the highest-impact features to prioritize. (Savio is the best option for prioritization because it lets you slice and dice all your feedback to really target your product strategy to your business goals.)*

3. Communication and team alignment

Once you have your product strategy, you’ll want to communicate it, both with your internal team members and your customers. This is where roadmaps come into play.

Roadmaps: ProductPlan bills itself as a product roadmap software tool, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it really shines at roadmaps. It has a ton of templates for different project management use cases, from agile work templates, to UX/UI roadmaps, to digital marketing roadmaps. It is also very flexible with how you set up your roadmaps, letting you switch easily between Kanban boards, Gantt charts, lists, and table layouts. It’s easy to add milestones or objectives, and even filter and share your roadmap with different audiences.

Productboard also has product roadmaps, although they are a bit simpler. The public version of the roadmap looks almost like a blog—each feature has a cover image and displays the number of votes. Internal roadmaps are more complex and flexible, and allow you to present timeline views as well as list views.

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: Both ProductPlan and Productboard (and Savio) let you push roadmap updates to Slack so everyone can see what’s changed.

Overall:* ProductPlan really shines here. We think it’s better than Productboard because it has more templates and its customer-facing roadmaps are more flexible.*

4. Coordination with development

Everyone’s aligned on your strategy, so now you have to build the thing. You’ll want to make sure your product management tool is connected to your development team’s workflow and tools.

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

ProductPlan integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal tracker, Trello, and Confluence.

(Savio integrates with Jira and Shortcut.)

Overall:* ProductPlan and Productboard are virtually the same here. If you use Shortcut, Productboard (or Savio) would be better. If you use Confluence, ProductPlan would be better.*

5. Close the loop

Once you build a new feature, you want to let your customers know. You especially want to follow up directly with anyone that asked for that feature (that’s called “closing the feedback loop”).

ProductPlan: ProductPlan can’t update your customers and doesn’t send personalized close-the-loop emails.

Productboard: Productboard lets you send updates to customers who are associated with a feature. Those updates aren’t personalized, but at least they get notified.

(Savio lets you quickly send personalized close-the-loop emails to customers when you build a feature they asked for.)

Overall:* Productboard is better. It lets you update your customers, whereas ProductPlan doesn’t. (Savio is the best).*

6. Value

What’s the easiest tool on your budget for the features it gives you?

ProductPlan pricing: ProductPlan’s pricing is very simple. The Basic plan is $39/month/editor. There’s also a Professional plan for $69/month/editor, which gives you a portfolio view and access to the integrations. It also gets you access to better training options and support.

Assuming you only need the Basic plan:

A team of 5 PMs would cost $2,340 a year
A team of 15 PMs would cost $7,020 a year

ProductPlan’s pricing model.

Productboard pricing: Productboard has four plans. The Essentials plan is $20/month/maker, but it really only gets you the roadmapping features. You need the Pro plan, $80/month/maker, if you want to capture feedback, have a feedback portal, use the Chrome extension, and so on.

We think virtually everyone except the smallest startups will want to collect feedback, so the Pro plan is probably the best bet for most users.

A team of 5 PMs on the Pro plan would cost $4,800 a year
A team of 15 PMs on the Pro plan would cost $14,400 a year

Note:* if you want to prioritize features, segment feedback, or use the Salesforce integration, you’ll actually need the Scale plan, which would be more expensive.*

Productboard’s pricing model.

Savio** is much better value.** Savio gives you all the same features as Productboard but for a much lower price.

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $2,820
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $7,500

Savio’s pricing model.

Overall:* ProductPlan is less expensive than Productboard, although it only gives you roadmap features. Productboard is more expensive, but you can also collect customer feedback. (Savio has the best value—you get roadmapping and customer feedback functionality for a lower price than Productboard and a similar price to ProductPlan.)*

The takeaway: ProductPlan is better for roadmaps, Productboard is better for customer feedback and prioritization.

ProductPlan is purely a product roadmapping tool—it does that really well. But it’s not as good at the full set of product management tasks, like collecting customer feedback or prioritizing features. Productboard is better at these (although it’s still not as good as Savio).

Here’s a recap of our analysis:

Centralization: Productboard wins here. It can collect and centralize customer feedback—ProductPlan can’t. (Savio is the best of the three at centralization.)
Prioritization: It’s close, but Productboard wins. Both let you assign priority scores but we like that Productboard also lets you segment features by some customer attributes, like geography. (Savio is best because it lets you segment based on a ton of additional customer attributes, like MRR).
Communicating product strategy: ProductPlan wins. Its roadmaps are more flexible and it has tons of cool templates.
Coordination: It’s a tie. They have virtually identical integrations.
Close the loop: Productboard wins. 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.)
Value: It depends. ProductPlan is less expensive but also has many fewer features. Productboard is more expensive but gives you better features. (Savio is the best value because it can do everything Productboard and ProductPlan can do—often better.)

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

Either Productboard or ProductPlan (or Savio) could fit into your tool stack—it just depends on what you need. If you care about customer feedback, ProductPlan is not the best choice. But if you really just need a great roadmapping tool, it could be perfect.

Savio has an edge over the other two for several reasons: 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.

Not ready? Learn more here.

More resources and tool comparisons

Still not sure which tool is best for you? Here are some more resources you can use to find the right fit.

Product management software tools

Learn more about Productboard

Learn more about ProductPlan

Last Updated: 27-04-2023

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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