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.
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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 can be 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."
Anurag Goel
Founder and CEO at Render
With Productboard, access to your data is limited
Productboard doesn’t have a public API. This is intentional, as it makes it harder to switch to another tool.
WARNING
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 when it comes to 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.
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.
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.
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."
Sam Hulick
Founder and CEO at ReelCrafter
Your whole team can access Canny—no paying for seats
Need to give multiple team members access?
With Productboard, you’ll have to pay per seat.
So, if you want to give full team access or scale the use of the tool, it’ll cost you. You can’t share your roadmap across your entire team without paying more.
"I want to have my product team own the roadmap, but open it up for other team members to see or provide comments/requests.
They've continued to limit this feature [...] So if you're a team of 30 people, with 5 product folks, and 25 others who you want to share the roadmap with so the team is in the loop, you have no way to do that."
Canny doesn’t charge per seat. Instead, you pay based on customers that actually give you feedback.
So, you’re paying based on the value you get out of the tool from your users—not the number of employees that need to access it.
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
Read their story
Get started with Canny for free, or reach out to us for a demo to see Canny in action.
