Top 10 Best Product Management Tools for Smarter Decision-Making

Product managers take on a lot. 

In many ways, you’re responsible for the success (or failure) of a product. And as if that weren’t enough, you also have to juggle multiple teams, stakeholders, goals, and evolving strategies.

Phew… 😅

You need the right tools to handle all this. Otherwise, you risk slowing down your team and progress due to errors, miscommunication, and a lack of organization.

But are there any tools that'll actually help you?

In this post, you'll find 10 of the best product management tools that are truly effective. We've tested and handpicked each one, so let's get into it!

In short - top 10 product management tools of 2024:

1. Featurebase - All-in-one feedback tool, best value for money
2. ProductPlan - For issue management & roadmaps, poor collection features
3. Productboard - Best for issue management, poor collection features
4. Canny - For super small or enterprise companies, no in-between
5. Linear - modern project management and issue-tracking tool targeted at dev teams
6. Trello - For simple idea and task management, no feedback collection
7. Roadmunk - Focused on roadmapping, has basic feedback forms
8. Pendo - Complete customer experience software for enterprises
9. Jira - For enterprises, can be confusing and feel outdated
10. Aha! - Complete feedback suite for enterprise, complex & aged UI

What is a product management tool?

A product management tool is any software that helps PMs optimize their product management process. This can include tools for ideation, project management, market research, user feedback, and more.

Take Featurebase. We help PMs collect user feedback at scale and transform it into useful product insights. We’ll talk more about what we do later, but first, let’s delve into the different types of product management tools you’ll come across.

Types of Product Management Tools

As we said, there are all kinds of product management tools.

Here’s a breakdown of the main types:

• Project Management Tools: These tools help you juggle all the tasks and deadlines you’re up against. They also give your teams a central hub for project details.
• Analytics Tools: These tools measure success and track progress. You can use them to gather data and insights on user behavior and monitor your product’s performance.
• User Feedback Tools: These tools help you collect and analyze user feedback. They often include features like feedback widgets, roadmaps, and changelogs.
• Collaboration Tools: These tools help teams work together more effectively. They often include features like chat, video conferencing, and document sharing. They keep everyone on the same page and make remote collaboration easier.
• Prototyping Tools: These tools allow you to create interactive prototypes of your product. They help you visualize and test ideas before implementing them in the final product.

Benefits of product management tools (with data)

• Enhanced productivity: These tools foster enhanced collaboration and productivity among team members by enabling easy sharing of task details, status updates, and real-time progress tracking​​. Forrester reports that efficient team collaboration tools enhance productivity by 10%.
• Better decision-making: These tools offer valuable insights and data analytics that empower product managers to make informed decisions based on market trends, customer feedback, and performance metrics. Organizations that heavily rely on data are 3X more likely to achieve significant enhancements in decision-making.
• Efficient resource allocation: Product management tools help in prioritizing tasks, allocating resources effectively and improving efficiency. A study by the Project Management Institute found that 11.4% of every dollar is wasted due to poor project performance.

What to look for in a product management tool?

• Functionality & features: First, figure out exactly what you need the tool to do. If you don’t know yet, play around with a few different options and see what you actually need. Then, make a list of must-haves and use that to validate potential candidates.
• Integrations: A great PM tool should plug into your workflow and connect with all the tools you already use. This can be Intercom for pushing feature requests straight into your voting boards or Slack for syncing release notes into the announcement channel.
• Widgets: If you want to collect in-app feedback from your users, it's important to make it effortless for them. Many of these tools offer widgets, so users never have to leave your product to submit feedback.
• Scalability: Growth is usually a core product management goal. So, make sure your product management tools are designed to support that growth. Many tools offer limited dashboards that make it difficult to keep track of many ideas and feature requests. Look for bulk action and post-merging features to help with this. It's also important to consider the scalability of the plans.

10 Best Product Management Tools

1. Featurebase

Featurebase is one of the best product management tools. It gives product teams a centralized platform to gather and prioritize user feedback, requests, and bug reports.

It has a neat interface and many rich features, including voting boards, roadmaps, and prioritization matrices to make product management a child's play.

It offers affordable pricing and a Free plan that allows unlimited ideas. You can set it up in minutes and always get quick help through live chat. ⚡️

Featurebase's key features:

• Feedback boards: Collect feedback from your users on voting boards and host them on your custom domain.
• Public roadmaps: Show planned features and updates to a publicly accessible roadmap.
• Changelog: Keep users informed of product updates and changes with a public changelog and an in-app widget.
• Feedback widgets: Embed widgets on your website or app so users can easily submit feedback (see live demo).
• Surveys: Measure customer satisfaction and collect additional feedback with in-app surveys.
• Votes & comments: Collect user votes and comments on feature ideas for easy prioritization.
• Automation: Automatically update users on the status of their submitted feedback.
• User profiles: View detailed profiles of your users, including their MRR contributions and feedback history.
• Integrations: Integrate tools like ClickUp, Slack, and Intercom (+ over 5,000 more via Zapier) to centralize user feedback.

Advantages of Featurebase:

• Intuitive interface - a neat and easy-to-use design for you and your users with gamified features like leaderboards to incentivize feedback
• AI duplicate post-detection - users & admins will see relevant similar posts before posting to reduce duplicates
• AI-powered search - always find that idea that you were looking for, even if you don't remember the exact wording
• Gamification: Leaderboards for incentivizing user engagement
• Lots of customizations - have your dashboard look exactly the way you want by changing the colors, theme, text, and much more

Drawbacks of Featurebase:

• No HubSpot & Salesforce integrations (see existing integrations)

Featurebase's pricing

• Free Plan - unlimited posts, all basic features like a feedback board, roadmap, and changelog to take your product to the next level
• Growth Plan ($40/month) - 4 managers, all integrations and widgets, custom domain, and seamless user login
• Premium Plan ($124/month) - 8 managers, API, SSO, and user segmentation

All plans let you collect unlimited feedback, and you can try the paid ones with a 10-day free trial. See pricing here →

Conclusion

Featurebase is one the best product management tools available. It offers affordable pricing with a free plan that allows for unlimited ideas.

It comes with in-app widgets, voting boards, a roadmap, surveys, and a changelog. It also lets you prioritize feature requests based on your customers' revenue and automatically sends users updated notification emails.

The onboarding is amazingly quick and you can automatically migrate your existing product backlog from other tools in seconds.

Learn more here →

2. ProductPlan

ProductPlan is a visual product roadmapping tool. It’s designed to help product teams organize user feedback and prioritize features based on business goals. The roadmaps themselves are highly detailed, and there are tons of useful features for prioritization and collaboration under the hood.

Key Features

• Custom views & filters: Tailors information for different stakeholders by customizing views according to specific needs.
• Flexible Layouts: Supports various layout options like Timeline and List, aiding in better visualization and planning​​.
• Integrations: Seamlessly integrates with popular tools such as Jira, Slack, Trello, and more, to ensure data flows smoothly across your most essential tools​​.
• Launch dashboard & checklists: Facilitates the creation of detailed launch plans and helps keep track of deliverables to ensure smooth product releases​​.

Advantages of Productplan:

• Great looking visual roadmaps
• Wide range of views and standardization tools
• Nice prioritization tools

Drawbacks of Productplan:

• Key features are gated behind expensive tiers
• Very expensive
• No changelog
• No feedback boards, no upvoting
• Complex user interface with a steep learning curve
• No commenting for engaging with users
• No embeddable widgets

Pricing

ProductPlan offers three pricing plans—Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. 

Basic ($49/editor/month) offers unlimited roadmaps and access to basic features. Professional ($89/editor/month) offers some useful extras like portfolio view, SSO, and key project results tracking. Finally, there’s a custom Enterprise plan that offers full access to the platform.

Read the full in-depth analysis of ProductPlan's pricing →

ProductPlan reviews:

• G2 - 4.4/5
• Capterra - 4.5/5
• GetApp - 4.4/5

Conclusion

ProductPlan is an enterprise alternative to 23tool23. It has advanced roadmaps and prioritization features, making it perfect for task management.

However, with no feedback boards and upvoting, it's not intutive for collecting new ideas and only has a very basic form to do so.

Their pricing is also high and for smaller startups there are more affordable alternatives to ProductPlan →

3. Productboard

Productboard is a customer-driven product management platform designed to help teams deliver the right products faster. It aims to achieve this by understanding user needs, prioritizing what to build next, and aligning everyone around the roadmap.

It's highly regarded for its ease of use, comprehensive feature set, and the ability to integrate into existing workflows. 

Key Features

• User Feedback Portal: Lets you collect user feedback from multiple channels and turn them into actionable insights.
• Roadmap Visualization: Visualize your product roadmap in a variety of views, like a timeline, list, and board.
• Prioritization Frameworks: Use the impact-effort matrix, scorecards, and other tools to prioritize features based on their potential impact on users.
• Product Management AI: Ask a chatbot questions about your product and get data-driven recommendations for what to build next.

Advantages of Productboard:

• Wide range of integrations
• Emphasis on direct user feedback 
• Features prioritization matrix 

Drawbacks of Productboard:

• Has a steep learning curve due to its wide array of features
• Limited customization and collaboration tools 

Pricing

Productboard offers three pricing plans—Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise. 

The pricing ranges from $19 to $75 per maker per month, depending on the plan selected. Each plan offers different features and capabilities to cater to the varying needs of product management teams.

The total cost of Productboard depends on how many 'Makers' you have in your team. For example, five users on their Pro plan will cost $400 a month.

Productboard reviews:

• G2 - 4.3/5 (see complaints)
• Capterra - 4.6/5
• GetApp - 4.7/5

Conclusion

Productboard is an enterprise customer feedback suite focusing on issue tracking and roadmaps. You can do a lot, but figuring out how to use it is a project on its own.‌ It allows users to only see and upvote admins' posts, making it unideal for feedback collection.

If you're a smaller startup, we recommend checking out these affordable Productboard alternatives →

4. Canny.io

Canny is a comprehensive customer feedback management platform that facilitates collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing user feedback. It's designed to help businesses of all sizes capture product feedback in one centralized location, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks.

By analyzing feedback, Canny enables businesses to prioritize their product roadmap effectively and keep users engaged with updates on new features​​.

Key Features

• Feedback Collection and Analysis: Allows for the systematic collection and analysis of feedback from various sources to inform product decisions.
• Product Roadmap Planning: Offers tools for prioritizing feature requests and planning product roadmaps.
• Update Sharing: Enables businesses to announce product updates, boosting customer engagement and retention.
• Integrations: Supports seamless integration with popular project management, customer service, and development tools​​.

Advantages of Canny:

• SOC2 compliance for enterprises
• Modern & intuitive design

Drawbacks of Canny:

• Very expensive pricing 
• No changelog popups
• No bulk editing
• No prioritization matrices
• No follow-up questions like "How important is this for you?" for extra insights
• Customers complain about not being listened to
• Supports only English

Pricing

Canny offers a range of pricing plans to cater to different business needs. 

• Free plan - limits active posts to only 100 a month. For very small companies only
• $99/month (Starter Plan) - custom domain, roadmap, 2 integrations. Very limited in features, equal to competitors' free plans
• $399/month (Growth) - for 5 admins, user segmentation, private boards, and more
• Business (talk to sales) - unlimited boards, pay by invoice, SOC2, etc.

Canny Pricing 2024: Is It Worth It →

Canny reviews:

• G2 - 4.5/5 (complaints)
• Capterra - 4.8/5
• GetApp - 4.7/5

Conclusion

Canny is a reasonable product management tool for medium to large companies. They are SOC2 certified, support paying by invoice & have advanced moderation features. 

They offer a free plan that limits you to 100 posts. But the most useful features are on the $399/mo plan, so it can get even quite expensive.

Check out these affordable Canny alternatives →

5. Linear

Linear is a project management and issue-tracking tool for modern product teams. It offers a clean UI, powerful project management features, and a ton of tools designed to streamline product management. Plus, it’s lightning-fast (unlike many project management tools) and supports customizable workflows and hotkeys.

Key Features

• Centralized Project Data: Collects and organizes issues, tasks, performance metrics, and more in one place.
• Project Management: Set milestones, assign tasks, track progress, and visualize project timelines.
• API and Integration Capabilities: Offers excellent integration with tools like Slack and Featurebase and provides an API that is well-regarded for ease of use​​.
• Planning Tools: Estimate team and cycle capacity to better understand how many issues can be tackled in a given time frame.

Advantages of Linear:

• Modern, user-friendly interface
• The API and integration capabilities are beneficial for modern teams
• Offers a comprehensive suite of features for product and engineering teams

Drawbacks of Linear:

• Since it’s entirely focused on engineering teams, you might need a separate tool for product and support teams

Pricing

Linear offers three pricing plans—Free, Standard, and Plus. 

The Free plan provides basic features for an unlimited number of users. Standard ($8/user/month) is suitable for teams of 1-50 users and includes additional features like unlimited file uploads and guest accounts. 

Plus ($14/user/month) is designed for larger teams (50+ users) and offers advanced features such as SAML/Single Sign-On, priority support, and Linear Insights.

Linear reviews:

• G2 - 4.6/5
• Capterra - 5/5

Conclusion

Linear is a modern project management and issue-tracking tool for developer teams. It’s lightning-fast (unlike many project management tools) and supports customizable workflows and hotkeys.

It offers a clean UI, powerful project management features, and a ton of tools designed to streamline product development (and a little bit of pmanagement).

While it's more meant for devs, you can use their Featurebase integration to automatically sync the workflow between product and developer teams.

6. Trello

Trello is one of the most popular task-management tools, with simple Kanban boards at its core. Users love it for its highly visual approach to task and project management. It is designed to be highly customizable, allowing users to organize workspaces and boards according to priorities, projects, and tasks.

This is a tool that can be useful for (almost) any product management task, whether you’re organizing feature requests or planning out your roadmap.

Key Features

• Visual Dashboards: Allows for insights into team workloads and project statuses with customizable boards.
• Team Collaboration: Enables multiple users to collaborate on the same board, assign tasks, and track progress together.
• Integrations: Trello integrates with a variety of other tools like Google Drive, Slack, and Salesforce to streamline workflow and increase productivity.

Advantages of Trello:

• Offers a visually oriented project management tool 
• Highly customizable workflows.
• Wide range of third-party integrations
• User-friendly

Drawbacks of Trello:

• Some built-in features, such as time tracking and detailed reporting, are missing.
• Lacks some advanced features 
• Customer service is somewhat limited

Pricing

Trello has 4 plans to pick between:

• Free - unlimited cards, 10 boards, 10MB files with unlimited storage
• Standard ($6/user/mo) - unlimited boards, custom fields, advanced checklists, and up to 250MB files with unlimited storage
• Premium ($12.5/user/mo) - unlocks all the views, calendar, timeline, table, etc.
• Enterprise ($17.5/user/mo) - unlimited workspaces,

Note: The total cost of Trello depends on how many users you have in your team. For example, five users on their Premium plan will cost $62.5 a month.

Other than that, just keep in mind that most of their key features are on the Premium plan.

Trello reviews:

• G2 - 4.4/5 (see complaints)
• Capterra - 4.5/5
• GetApp - 4.5/5

Conclusion

Trello is a nice product management tool for more basic functions. You can collect feedback with it, but it's very basic and not enough for many.

You should also consider that most of their key features are on the Premium plan. Also, the PER USER pricing can get expensive for larger teams.

Check out the best Trello alternatives →

7. Roadmunk

Roadmunk is a visualization tool specifically designed to help PMs and product teams build strategic roadmaps.

It’s a great way to align your product vision with your team's goals, showcase your progress and plans, and collaborate more effectively.

Key Features

• Roadmap Creation and Customization: Allows for the creation of detailed visual roadmaps with various styles like timeline, table, and swimlane.
• Feedback Integration and Collaboration: Supports direct incorporation of team input and stakeholder feedback into roadmaps.
• Flexible Prioritization and Reporting: Users can prioritize tasks within roadmaps and utilize reporting tools for insightful analytics on project progress.
• Workflow and Product Lifecycle Management: Enables efficient workflow configuration and manages the entire product lifecycle within the platform.

Advantages of Roadmunk:

• Customizable design and filter options
• Controlled Access for each member of the team
• Swimlane and Timeline are great features for internal presentations

Drawbacks of Roadmunk:

• Selecting dates from the calendar takes a lot of time. Users want a quicker way, like typing the date directly or copying and pasting
• There are reports of occasional lagging or slow performance
• It's not easy to customize some of the features

Pricing

The pricing plans for Roadmunk range from $19 per month for the Starter plan to custom pricing for the Enterprise plan. 

There are three main tiers—Starter ($19/month), Business ($49/month), and Professional ($99/month). Each plan offers increasing features and capabilities, catering to individual road mappers, small teams, and scaling teams with advanced security and support needs.

Roadmunk reviews:

• G2 - 4.0/5
• Gartner - 4.6/5
• TrustRadius - 8.9/10

Conclusion

Roadmunk is a good choice if creating customizable roadmaps is important to you. This, along with their prioritization frameworks makes it a good choice for managing feedback internally.

Feedback collection with Roadmunk is very primitive and they lack a public feedback board. It's not possible for users to upvote, chat with each other or view changelogs.

Check out the best Roadmunk alternatives →

8. Pendo

Pendo is a product experience platform that helps PMs understand user behavior and make data-driven decisions. With Pendo, PMs can track feature usage, gather user feedback, and create in-app messaging to guide users through the product experience.

It’s designed to be a one-stop shop for product teams, offering solutions for roadmapping, analytics, feedback, and more.

Key Features

• Product Analytics: Offers insights into user behavior, feature use, and engagement through views, clicks, and interactions.
• User Onboarding: Provides layout templates for creating engaging onboarding flows with triggers based on URL landing, device type, or user actions.
• Feedback Collection: It enables user feedback collection through polls, NPS surveys, and a feedback module.
• Event Tracking: Offers no-code options for tracking core events crucial for product adoption and has a dashboard for monitoring various event metrics​​​​.

Advantages of Pendo:

• Users can prioritize what posts are more important for them than others
• Great for onboarding new users and understanding the customer journey
• Has lots of translations

Drawbacks of Pendo:

• Very expensive, even more enterprise-focused
• Steep learning curve and confusing to use
• Limited customizations (No dark mode, custom CSS, etc.)
• Aged UI/UX
• Limited user segmentations

Pricing

Pendo offers user-based pricing plans tailored to different organizational needs.

The pricing is based on monthly active users (MAU) and is designed to scale with the size of the customer base, ranging from a free plan for up to 500 MAU to custom plans for organizations with single or multiple products. 

Customers can choose between the Free plan, Growth plan for single web or mobile apps, and Portfolio plan for unlimited web and mobile apps, with custom pricing available for each.

Pendo reviews:

• G2 - 4.4/5 (see complaints)
• Capterra - 4.5/5
• GetApp - 4.5/5

Conclusion

Pendo is an all-inclusive tool designed to help large organizations create the best software experience. It's a great choice if you're looking for everything you need for customer retention in one place and have lots of money to spare.‌‌‌‌

Otherwise, their prices are unjustifiably high, and we'd recommend these, more affordable alternatives to Pendo →

9. Jira

Atlassian's Jira is a powerful tool for project management, issue tracking, and Agile development. It's widely recognized for its robust features, which help teams manage complex projects, streamline workflows, and enhance productivity.

Initially conceived as an issue-tracking tool, Jira has evolved into a multi-purpose project management solution used by various industries, including software development, marketing, and IT services.

Key Features

• Scrum and Kanban Boards: Facilitates Agile methodologies, enabling teams to visualize work in progress and manage tasks efficiently​​​​.
• Issue Tracking: Centralize issues, bugs, and tasks in one place and track their progress through customizable workflows.
• Customizable Dashboards: Keep track of team performance, project status, and progress with user-friendly dashboards that can be customized to show relevant data.
• Advanced Reporting: Generate reports on various aspects of a project, such as burndown charts, velocity charts, and more.
• Roadmaps: Plan, track, and report work across teams with customizable Gantt chart views​​​​.
• Integrations: Integrates with more than 3,000 tools including Featurebase, GitHub, and Slack to streamline workflows and increase productivity​​​​.

Advantages of Jira:

• Deep integration with the other Jira tools
• Highly customizable
• Comprehensive reporting capabilities and analytics 
• Good collaboration features
• Cross-team collaboration

Drawbacks of Jira:

• The UX can be hard to navigate and complex
• Hard to share with your customers - they need to create an account with Atlassian.
• Not ideal for large volumes of feedback
• Customization and setup can be time-consuming 
• May require technical expertise​​

Pricing

Jira offers a range of pricing options.

For starters, there’s a free plan for up to 10 users. Moving on, there’s Standard ($8.15/user/month),  Premium  ($16/user/month), and Enterprise (custom). Higher-tier plans unlock more monthly automation, advanced planning, dependencies, and more.

Jira reviews:

• G2 - 4.3/5
• GetApp - 4.4/5
• Capterra - 4.5/5

Conclusion

Jira is a good choice for teams looking to have their entire workflow inside the Atlassian ecosystem. It works well for gathering feedback across different teams in the company.

Gathering feedback from customers using Jira can get quite difficult, because customers will have to create an Atlassian account in order to leave feedback. Furthermore, they do not have any in-app widgets for optimal feedback gathering.

Check out the best Jira alternatives →

10. Aha!

Aha! is a cloud-based product development platform that offers a ton of useful tools for product management.

Aha! is best known as a road mapping tool that helps teams prioritize and plan their product roadmap. But it also offers ideas management, project management, collaboration, and more features.

Key Features

• Comprehensive Product Roadmaps: Visualize the direction of product development with a strategy-first approach.
• Idea Management: Seamlessly connects customer insights with product strategy, prioritizing what to build next.
• Features Prioritization: Use a scoring system to determine which features should be prioritized in development.
• Release Planning and Task Management: Offers detailed timelines and links tasks to larger initiatives for alignment with broader goals​​.

Advantages of Aha!:

• Lots of prioritization & management features
• Very good for large enterprises
• Many enterprise integrations like Salesforce & Hubspot
• Modular design lets companies pick and pay for the exact functions they need from Aha!

Drawbacks of Aha!:

• Very expensive
• No changelog for closing the feedback loop
• Can't segment and prioritize your feedback data by customer attributes
• Not intuitive, especially for beginners
• Steep learning curve & confusing
• Aged UI/UX

Pricing

Aha! Has different prices for each of its products—here’s a summary:

• Aha! Roadmaps (starts at $59/user/month)
• Aha! Ideas (starts at $39/user/month)
• Aha! Whiteboards (starts at $9/user/month)
• Aha! Knowledge (starts at $39/user/month)
• Aha! Develop (starts at $99/user/month)

To gather customer ideas, prioritize them, and make roadmaps, you'll need two modules. These are "Roadmaps" and "Ideas", costing $59 and $39 per user each month. So, all together, it's $98 per user each month.

So, let's say you have a team of 5 people. The cost of using Aha! for a year would be $5,880.

Read more in detail about Aha!'s pricing here →

Aha! reviews:

• G2 - 4.3/5 (see complaints)
• GetApp - 4.7/5

Conclusion

Aha is an all-in-one product management suite, that's perfect for large companies that want to handpick what they get. It's a big tool with a complex UI, making it complicated to operate.

They have a crispy seat-based pricing that starts at $98/month per user to collect feedback and create roadmaps.

Check out the top affordable Aha! alternatives →

Conclusion

Product management is evolving fast. Teams need better processes and teamwork. Our review of the top ten product management tools shows us a wide range of features, use cases, and prices. So, which product management tool is right for you?

Ultimately, the decision on which product management tool to use will depend on your specific needs. But if you’re looking for the best deal for your money, you can't go wrong with Featurebase.

In addition to a generous free plan, it offers a beautiful and intuitive design. Besides prioritization features and roadmaps, it offers feedback boards, widgets, surveys, changelogs, and automated emails.

You can automatically migrate your product backlog over from any existing tool in seconds, so there's no downside to trying it. 👇

Start managing product ideas with Featurebase for free today →