Canny is a powerful, focused alternative to Productboard
Productboard is an overly complex tool with more customization options than you really need. Plus, their product is half-baked.
Canny is a flexible tool that’s both lightweight and powerful. It’s cost‑effective, quick to set up, and prioritizes features you’ll actually use.
Table of contents
01
Quick look: Why people prefer Canny over Productboard
02
Canny offers a better design and user experience than Productboard
03
With Productboard, access to your data is limited
04
Canny was built specifically for user feedback
05
Canny has more robust integrations than Productboard
06
Your whole team can affordably use Canny
Quick look: Why people prefer Canny over Productboard
Only the features you need
We’ll integrate with your existing workflow and allow other tools to do their jobs
Feature bloated
Half the battle is figuring out which features you want to turn on
Public API
Your data belongs to you. We won’t penalize you if you decide to switch.
Limited access to data
Much harder to switch, export your data, and increased risk of losing it all
Feedback focused
Built from the ground up around feedback management.
Feedback's an afterthought
Managing user feedback is manual. It's not built with feedback in mind.
Flexible pricing
We have plans that work for early startups through enterprise
Pricing Issues
Pay hefty prices per user just to access basic features.
Canny offers a better design and user experience than Productboard
Productboard is a complicated tool that does too much.
They support just about every use-case you can imagine. It’s challenging to customize Productboard so that it actually works for you and makes your life easier.
It’s hard to find what you’re looking for. And, the customization options are more granular than most people really need.
"There are SO MANY features and the ability to basically customize any of them, it can be a bit overwhelming to get started.
The onboarding tutorial was pretty long in order to cover all the features, and at the end I wasn't quite sure how I needed to configure things to best suit my needs."
We built Canny so that it’s straightforward and intuitive.
It’s a robust tool with everything you need. But, it’s not so overbuilt that you get lost in it.
"[Productboard] perhaps has too many features and options! The responsibility is on the user to not over-complicate the implementation."
In short, Canny allows for customization, without being too much. It guides you toward success, rather than complicating the process unnecessarily.
"Liking Canny so far! [...] So much more dev-friendly than Productboard which is a bit over-engineered in terms of UX."
With Productboard, access to your data is limited
Productboard only offers a public API on their most expensive plans. This is intentional, as it makes it harder to switch to another tool.
Lack of a public API is one of the biggest risks of going with Productboard.
Without it, you can’t use your data elsewhere. This means, it's much harder to:
- Switch to another tool
- Pull data into another tool (eg. for analytics)
- Build something custom into your UI
Choosing a tool that “locks in” your data is inherently risky. You won’t be able to use the data you gather and input anywhere else. You can only access it within Productboard.
And, if you choose to try a new tool, it means a more difficult process with migrating your data (or losing access to everything).
It’s not user-friendly, and leaves you with limited options.
At Canny, we believe that you should have access to your data. We hope you’ll try Canny and stick around forever, but we won’t penalize you if you decide it’s not the right fit for your team.
Canny was built specifically for user feedback
Productboard is a product management tool first and foremost. They added on a user feedback feature after the fact, and it shows.
"Productboard's UI and organizational structure makes it a bit difficult to understand who specifically gave you the feedback.
It's a manual process to export users' insights so that our support team can follow through on customer feedback once we've delivered on their asks."
Overall, their feedback functionality isn’t very robust, and their users say it has “a lot of space for improvement.”
Productboard’s user feedback tool is essentially another inbox you’ll have to go through. Managing user feedback in Productboard means more manual effort, not less.
Productboard doesn’t place feedback and community at the center of product management. Canny does.
“Before Canny, we were using Productboard. We didn't like it because it was lacking interaction with the community. So we started looking for a tool with a public roadmap where the community could interact with us and also between each other. It was really important for us – to give them a place where they can chat about feature requests and what's missing in the product.”
Aurélien Georget
CPO at Strapi
Canny’s user feedback tool is straightforward to use, plays well with your existing tool set, and streamlines processes.
We’ve simplified feedback management with features like user voting, similar post suggester, and the ability to merge posts.
Having an easy way to capture and manage user feedback is vital. You’ll be able to make informed product decisions—without a complicated manual process.
Productboard's best feedback management features are pricey
Productboard's product management software covers a lot of functions. But, many of them are undeveloped. Some are even gated behind expensive subscriptions. That includes many of their feedback management tools.
Want to manage a feedback board? Use a Chrome extension to collect feedback and ideas as you browse the web? Use integrations to streamline feedback collection?
Those are all gated behind their pro plan.
With Canny, those features are available on all our plans – even our Free plan.
Canny has more robust integrations than Productboard
Productboard has plenty of integrations. But, they’re not powerful enough to easily capture user feedback or work with your existing tools.
For example, Productboard boasts a Slack integration—but it doesn’t work as well with their feedback feature as it should:
"It's quite complex to implement and you have [to] log into it daily to view feedback from users as there is no Slack integration to surface these insights outside of Productboard.
They advertise a Slack integration but this just shares updates from internal users and is useless in all honesty."
Users have also noted that Productboard’s Zendesk integration isn’t very powerful, and that “integration with Jira isn't as robust (2-way) or easy to use as I'd like.”
We want using Canny to make things easier for you, not add unnecessary steps and complications. That's why we integrate with most major customer support, team collaboration, and project management tools.
Canny integrates with Slack, Zendesk, Jira, Salesforce, and more.
And, our integrations are robust and well-executed. It isn’t a manual process to log feedback you receive in Zendesk, for example—you won’t have to leave the tool.
"I really like [Canny]! I like how easily it integrates into Intercom too. It makes it very easy for customers to provide feedback, unlike other solutions like Productboard where you have to modify your web app's code to embed the feature request portal."
Your whole team can affordably access Canny
Need to give multiple team members access to manage your board?
With Productboard, you’ll have to pay a hefty price per seat.
They charge for each manager seat and offer no discounts as you grow.
Canny's plans include 5 manager seats. Extra managers can be added at an affordable price. You also get unlimited contributor seats for free. So, your whole team can easily and affordably collaborate.
Learn more about Canny’s pricing here.
Try Canny today
Here at Canny, we have customers all the way from 2-person startups to billion dollar companies like CircleCI and Mercury.
How Mercury found a drastic improvement in efficiency and productivity
Get started with Canny for free, or reach out to us for a demo to see Canny in action.
