13 Canny Alternatives for Sophisticated Customer Feedback Management

Canny is a popular product roadmap and feature request application. It allows you to collect customer feedback, analyze it, prioritize features, and then publish them into a roadmap. It also includes a changelog.

These features are useful for building great software and keeping customers happy.

But there are many reasons Canny may not be ideal for your company. Here’s why you might want to research some alternatives to Canny.

(Let me skip ahead to the tools!)

Why find a Canny.io alternative?

For one thing, it’s expensive, especially for the features they offer. Canny costs $400 per month, or $4,800 per year. You get a discount if paid annually. There's also a more limited free plan. Many of Canny’s competitors offer similar features for a better price. It makes sense to find a customer feedback management tool that optimizes value.

For another, it doesn’t offer the best solution for the problem.

SaaS companies need to make the best use of product feedback and feature requests so that they build the highest-impact features and delight customers. But there are a number of challenges for using that feedback:

• Product feedback is all over the place. Centralizing it in one place can be highly manual. That work falls on a number of customer-facing teams: Sales, Customer Success, Customer Support, and even Product. And not all of those teams directly benefit. If collecting feedback isn’t extremely easy, some may fall through the cracks.
• The data is incomplete. If feedback does fall through the cracks, the Product team will be missing critical data. That means that they may not have all the information they need to properly prioritize data or make the best product decisions.
• Using the wrong data. Often, companies use the total number of requests for a feature to prioritize features. Total feature votes is a useful metric, but it’s coarse. It doesn’t necessarily point to the highest-impact features.
• Following up with customers. Many companies will post in a blog about new features, send a mass email, or update their changelog. But they often don’t close the customer feedback loop and individually reach out to customers to let them know when the feature they requested is built.

Canny is designed to collect product feedback, prioritize it, and help SaaS teams figure out what to build next. It does that, but not perfectly. Here are some reasons Canny doesn’t fully solve the problems of collecting and using product feedback.

1. Feedback collection in Canny isn’t great. Canny is primarily a feature voting board tool. They have integrations that pull in requests from Intercom and Zendesk, amongst others. But if you use a tool they don't integrate with? Or if you get your feedback in an email, or on a customer call? You're back to cutting and pasting and switching tools to track feedback, or if you're on their paid plan you can use a Chrome Extension.

Worse, your teams might not collect the feedback themselves. Instead, they might just re-route the customer to give the feedback again on the voting board. That’s what ClickUp, who uses Canny, does on Twitter. Needless to say, that’s not ideal—it’s a surefire way to frustrate your customers.

2. Canny’s segmentation feature is powerful but expensive. A critical step in prioritizing feedback is understanding which of your customers are asking for what. That lets you say, “Hmm. We want to reduce churn… What are our churned customers asking for?” Or, “We want to prioritize features requested by our biggest accounts—what do our enterprise customers want?”

Most feature request software tools don’t let you do this kind of segmentation. Canny does—it’s a real strength. It lets you slice and dice data to prioritize features based on customer attributes like monthly spend. This is where Canny beats out many of its competitors that simply offer a voting board.

But to provide that powerful segmentation, Canny is expensive—a team of 5 would cost you $4,320 per year. Tools like Savio give you the same functionality at a much lower cost.

3. Canny doesn’t let you close the loop. Canny has a changelog feature, so you can post updates about new features. And you can send automated notifications that a new feature was built to your customers.

But Canny doesn’t let you easily send personalized notifications to customers that say, “Hey, we listened to you and built what you asked for. Here’s the feature and how to use it.”

To do that, you’ll do a lot of copying and pasting.

4. Canny’s voting board will bias your feedback. Voting boards can be really useful. But if it isn’t configured properly, it can unintentionally bias feedback. (That’s why we built a voting board that minimizes bias.)

People tend to vote for features that are already popular. They also tend to review existing feature requests starting at the top of the list and reading down. So features that have high vote counts or that are at the top of the list will tend to get more votes.

A good voting board will hide upvote counts from voters and randomize the order to reduce bias. Canny’s boards don’t do that, and so they risk introducing bias. The result could distort your prioritization process so you build the wrong thing.

The above weaknesses of Canny mean that it may not be the best product feedback software tool for your team.

Here is our list of the most popular Canny alternatives, along with their features, pros and cons, and who they’re best suited for.

Note:* Our feature request tracking app is Savio. We built it based on what we would have liked to have as product managers and leaders. It’s helped hundreds of customers become more customer-centric and identify the best features to build next. Learn more here and try it for free.*

Top Canny.io Alternatives for Feature Request Tracking

Here they are:

• 1. Savio
• 2. UserVoice
• 3. Productboard
• 4. Aha!
• 5. Pendo
• 6. Feedbear
• 7. Upvoty
• 8. Nolt
• 9. Frill
• 10. UserReport
• 11. Hellonext
• 12. Astuto
• 13. Trello

1. Savio

Savio was built to solve four problems:

• Feedback is everywhere—you need to collect and centralize it
• Feedback is disorganized—you need to organize and segment it
• Teams don’t see feedback—you need to share it so it can inform your product roadmap
• Telling customers—you need to close the loop when you build a feature your customers asked for.

Feedback everywhere—Savio centralizes feedback in a single place

Savio really shines in its ability to flexibly bring in feedback scattered across different platforms. You can pull feedback into your Savio using a variety of methods:

• Native integrations make it easy to pull feedback from the tools you already use, including Intercom, Help Scout, Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Slack
• You can connect Savio to thousands of other apps using Zapier
• The Chrome extension can be used to bring in feedback from any web app
• You can email feedback to Savio
• Customers can submit and vote for feature requests on a public voting board
• Customers can submit feedback through a feedback form
• You can also add feedback programmatically using the Savio API

Bring in feedback from Intercom by simply applying a tag to the message.

These integrations and tools make it easy for your teams to add feedback without switching tools. That increases the chances that they’ll track all relevant feedback and that nothing will fall through the cracks.

Disorganized feedback—Savio helps you organize your feedback and feature requests

The trick to using your customer feedback is to organize it.

When Savio brings in feedback, it adds customer and company attributes like names, email addresses, MRR, plan type, and more. These attributes are attached to the feedback so that you can filter and sort your feature requests by attributes that are meaningful to you.

For example, you can easily find:

• Feedback from customers who have a monthly spend of more than $500
• Feature requests from customers on your “Pro” plan
• Feedback from churned customers
• Feature requests made from customers in the past 30 days

And many more.

By slicing and dicing your data, you get a more nuanced view of what features are needed by which customers. That allows you to find and prioritize the highest-impact features and make better product decisions.

Teams don’t see feedback—Savio unites your team around your customers

It takes a village to make a product. Each of your teams needs to coordinate to build the best product for your customer.

Savio makes it easy to get feature requests from all your customer-facing teams, like Sales and Customer Success, and Support. It also provides hard data so that your CS team can clearly articulate what they’re hearing from customers in a way that the Product team understands. And it provides Product with a way to rationalize their product decisions to Dev teams, executives, and other stakeholders.

Savio also connects with development tools like Jira and Shortcut so that when you build a new feature, its status gets automatically updated in Savio.

Letting customers know—Savio helps you close the loop

Closing the loop means telling your customers when you built a feature they asked for. It’s not a blog post or a changelog update, it’s a direct, personalized message.

Closing the loop is simple and powerful. It boosts loyalty and helps reduce churn.

Savio makes it easy to quickly send personalized emails to each of the people that asked for a feature.

Better voting boards—Savio makes sure your voting boards aren’t biased

Many customer feedback tools, including Canny, are really just voting board tools. Sure, voting boards can be useful, but not everyone wants to use a voting board to collect feedback. That’s why you can use a voting board to collect feedback with Savio, but you don’t have to.

When you do use Savio’s voting board, you can configure it to reduce bias. For example, you can hide upvote counts so people don’t become drawn to the features that are already popular. You can also randomize the feature list to eliminate order bias.

In these ways, Savio’s provides the flexibility to use voting boards most effectively for your particular needs.

Notice that vote counts are hidden on this voting board and that the features are randomized.

Main features:

• Bring in feedback from anywhere with integrations, email feedback, voting board, feedback forms, and more
• Powerful segmentation to know which customers want what
• Voting board settings that minimize feedback bias
• Flexible roadmapping tool that displays number of requests and MRR for each feature, helping justify roadmap decisions
• Easily close the loop

Advantages:

• Flexible ways for your teams to add feedback
• Segmenting allows you to identify and prioritize high-impact features
• Voting boards are optional and don’t bias your feedback
• Effectively build relationships with your customers
• High-value

Disadvantages:

• No changelog tool
• No support (yet!) for multiple languages

Pricing:

Plans start at $39/month. For 5 Admins on the Professional plan, it would be $2,820 per year. Savio is $1,500 less expensive than Canny.

Ideal use case: You are serious about collecting product feedback and tracking feature requests and want powerful ways to understand and prioritize your feedback.

Savio helps you centralize, organize, and prioritize product feedback from your GTM team, by integrating with Slack, HubSpot, Intercom, Zendesk, SFDC, Help Scout, and more. Learn more about Savio here.

Read more: Compare savio vs. Canny

2. UserVoice

UserVoice is a feedback management system focused on Enterprise SaaS companies. It allows you to collect feedback from several sources into a voting board-like forum. You can collect feedback both from customers and also from your internal teams.

Main features:

• Ability to collect feedback from Slack, feedback app widget, and API
• Feedback analysis and segmentation
• Roadmapping tool
• Internal status updates

Advantages:

• It’s easy to share feedback with your internal teams
• Segmentation allows you to identify high-impact features
• Communicate your product roadmap publicly

Disadvantages:

• The knowledge base is not multilingual
• Loading time and slow when clicking on links within the dashboard
• They don't send any warnings or mass messages to all users
• Very expensive plans aimed at large Enterprise SaaS customers only

Read more: The Best UserVoice Alternative

UserVoice Pricing:

Prices start at an "Essentials" package for $699/month on a quarterly billing cycle. For the powerful segmentation features, you need the “Premium” plan at $1,349/month. For the year, it would cost $16,188.

UserVoice is $11,800 more expensive than Canny.

***Read more: ***

• Compare Canny vs. UserVoice
• UserVoice competitors that will save your SaaS Startup $11,000 a year

Ideal use case: Enterprise companies that need the same features as Canny and don’t mind paying much more for them.

3. Productboard

Productboard helps product teams understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and align everyone around the roadmap.

Main features:

• Collect feedback in different feedback portals for multiple audiences
• Validate ideas using a public voting board
• Tools to analyze and prioritize features
• Public roadmapping

Advantages:

• Several integrations allow you to collect feedback from other software tools
• Can prioritize based on impact and effort
• Can align team and customers around features on a public roadmap

Disadvantages:

• You can’t pull in customer attributes or segment customer feedback by them
• You can’t easily close the loop
• Voting boards can’t be configured to reduce bias

Compare*: *Savio vs. Productboard

Product Pricing:

Productboard's Essentials plan is $20 per maker per month. But to get unlimited feedback captured in one place, you need to pay $80 per maker per month. For a team of 5 makers, that would be $4,800 per year.

Canny's cheapest paid annual plan is $4320 (and includes 5 users). Productboard is $480 more expensive than Canny if paid annually. Canny also offers a more limited free plan.

Read more:

• Compare Canny vs. Productboard
• Save $6,000 Every Year with These 14 Productboard Alternatives

Ideal use case: Companies that don’t need the powerful segmentation that Canny offers, who don’t mind that voting boards may be biased, and who want a cheaper Canny.io alternative.

4. Aha!

Aha! is a suite of product development software that includes a roadmapping module and a public idea portal that functions as a standard feedback voting board. Your customers can post suggestions and vote on others' suggestions. It also has several other modules that you can add on (for an additional cost) including collaboration tools, a development tool, and certification training.

Main features:

• Crowdsource ideas
• Prioritize features
• Visualize plans
• Track progress

Advantages:

• You can filter by most popular features and by assigned tags
• You can score ideas to help you prioritize them
• You can showcase your roadmap publicly

Disadvantages:

• You can’t segment by customer attributes that matter like MRR and Plan
• Voting boards can’t be configured to minimize bias
• You can’t bring feedback in from everywhere you get it

Read more: Aha! vs. Savio

Pricing:

The Ideas module starts at $59 per user per mong to get similar features to Canny. You’d also have to pay an additional $59 per user per month for the roadmapping tool. For a team of three, it would cost $4,248 per year.

For that team size, Aha! costs about the same as Canny (it’s $72 more, actually).

Ideal use case: Aha! Is ideal for companies that need a full product development suite. Its ideas portal isn’t as good as Canny’s, but if you need a development tool and collaboration tools, it might be worth the switch.

Read more: Compare Aha.io vs. Canny

5. Pendo

Pendo is not only designed to collect and manage feedback but also to manage user onboarding. It includes product analysis tools and built-in customer sentiment surveys.

Main features:

• Track in-app customer usage
• Sentiment analysis collection
• In-app usage guides
• Feedback voting boards
• Roadmaps

Advantages:

• Intuitive and easy-to-use design
• You can collect sentiment data to understand customer satisfaction
• Can connect feedback with sentiment analysis and usage data

Disadvantages:

• You can only collect feedback from a voting board—inflexible gathering feedback from other tools
• You can’t segment feedback by things like MRR, plan type, or customer journey stage
• Voting boards can’t be configured to minimize bias

Pricing:

Pendo pricing information isn’t available. You have to talk to sales.

Ideal use case: Pendo is ideal for companies that need to see usage statistics and customer satisfaction scores, and who are willing to give up better feedback collection and segmentation.

6. Feedbear

Feedback is a quick and dirty way to collect feedback on a voting board. It has few features, but it’s inexpensive and easy to set up and use.

Main features:

• Idea voting boards
• Roadmaps
• Changelogs
• Integration with Intercom

Advantages:

• It’s very easy to set up and use
• Supports multiple languages
• Modular workspaces

Disadvantages:

• Few integrations make it difficult to centralize feedback
• You can’t segment feedback based on customer attributes
• Voting boards can’t be configured to minimize bias
• You can’t easily close the loop

Pricing:

Starts at $29 per project board per month for up to three team members. If you want to make your project private, you need the business plan at $99 per project per month. For a year, you would pay $1,188.

Feedbear is $3,100 less expensive than Canny.

Ideal use case: Companies that don’t need the powerful segmentation that Canny offers, and who want a less expensive alternative.

7. Upvoty

Upvoty is a feedback management tool that helps you get feedback from a board with a custom domain, as well as a widget embedded in your product.

Main features:

• Feedback boards
• Website widgets
• Roadmap
• Changelog

Advantages:

• Centralized, easy to use voting board
• Roadmaps and changelogs help keep customers up-to-date on what you are building

Disadvantages:

• Upvoty does not allow you to easily segment your feedback
• It's not easy to get feedback from web applications that don't have integrations
• Voting boards can’t be configured to reduce bias

Read more: Top Upvoty Alternatives

Pricing:

For the same roadmapping and feedback features and integration with Intercom, you would need the “Unlimited Power” plan at $75 per month. It would cost you $900 per year—$3,400 less expensive than Canny.

Ideal use case: Upvoty has much more basic features than Canny, but it’s also less expensive. Its ideal use case is for companies that are just starting to build a feedback collection system and just need superficial features.

8. Nolt

Nolt offers feedback voting boards. Users can provide ideas and vote on new features. Nolt doesn’t have changelog features, but it could be used in place of Canny’s feedback collection and roadmaps module.

Main features:

• Feedback idea boards
• Roadmaps
• Anonymous voting
• Voting on behalf of others

Advantages:

• Users don’t need to register to participate
• Supports multiple languages
• Communicate with your customers about what you’re building

Disadvantages:

• Can’t bring in feedback from other sources, like Intercom
• Can’t segment feedback by customer attributes
• Can’t configure voting boards to minimize bias

Pricing:

Nolt costs $25 per month per board. If you only have one product, it would cost you $300 per year. That’s $4,000 less than Canny each year.

Ideal use case: Nolt is super basic and has very few features. It’s ideal for small startups that need a very simple tool to begin collecting customer feedback. Companies would probably need another tool to scale up to a feature request collection system that really works.

9. Frill

Frill is an easy-to-use feedback collection board and widget. It allows your customers to add ideas and vote on them so they know what to prioritize.

Main features:

• Feedback voting board and widget
• Ideas and comments
• Roadmap for customer views and comments
• Changelog
• Supports multiple languages

Advantages:

• Can bring in feedback from some other platforms like Zendesk and Intercom
• Can capture feedback in a widget on your website
• Canny importer to import your feedback from Cannu in one click

Disadvantages:

• There are some integrations, but still not very flexible for bringing in feedback from other apps
• There is little segmentation possible
• You can’t configure voting boards to minimize bias

Pricing:

For unlimited ideas on the voting board, you would spend $50 per month. That would be $600 per year—$3,700 less expensive than Canny.

Ideal use case: Frill is better than Canny if you need a feature request voting board that’s less powerful and convenient, but also less expensive.

10. UserReport

The UserReport is a suite of user feedback tools that tells you what your users want from your product. It has two main features: a survey widget and a feedback widget that runs inside of your app or website. It’s designed less for SaaS companies and more for large news platforms, car companies, communications companies, and travel platforms.

Main features:

• Obtains survey results as well as feedback
• Complaint monitoring
• Feedback management

Advantages:

• Easy integration with websites to collect customer feedback
• You can ask about demographics and customer satisfaction
• Allows you to build custom audience segments

Disadvantages:

• No integrations with customer support or communication tools, so you can’t centralize feedback
• You can’t configure the feedback board to minimize bias
• Audience segmentation is designed to sell advertisements, not to understand what features your customers want

Pricing:

UserReport is free to use to get feedback and surveys. You need the Premium version to segment your audiences, but they don’t publish their pricing publicly.

Ideal use case: UserReport is ideal for large media companies looking to get feedback on their content and understand the socio-demographic characteristics of their audiences.

11. Hellonext

Hellonext is a feedback management tool designed for SaaS companies. It features three main modules: a feature voting board tool, a public roadmapping tool, and a changelog tool.

Main features:

• Allow customers to submit feature requests and vote
• Close the feedback look
• Publish creatures to public roadmap
• Announce new features in a changelog

Advantages:

• Customers can evoke ideas by showing you which requests are most popular
• Feedback forms are customizable
• Can centralize feedback from Intercom and Zendesk
• Can easily close the feedback loop with customers

Disadvantages:

• There are some integrations, but still not very flexible for bringing in feedback from other apps
• It's not easy to segment feature request data to find out what your most valuable customers need
• Can’t configure voting board to minimize bias

Pricing:

Canny has more integrations than Hellonext. But to submit feedback by email, you’d need the “Fly High” plan at $99 per month. That’s $1,188 per year, or about $3,100 less than Canny.

Ideal use case: Hellonext is better for companies that aren’t yet looking to deeply understand their customers’ needs and who just need a simple alternative to Canny.

12. Astuto

Astute is an open-source feedback management tool that was heavily inspired by Canny. It’s basic, but it’s free and it works well for what it does: collecting, managing, and prioritizing feedback.

Key features:

• Feature request management
• Bug report management
• Roadmap tool

Advantages:

• Completely customizable
• Completely free
• You can add as many boards as you want

Disadvantages:

• Astute can’t segment your feedback data
• Not built for Windows PC
• Can’t configure voting boards to minimize bias
• Doesn’t easily let you centralize feedback from all the places you get it.

Pricing:

Astuto is free. Switching from Canny to Astuto would save you about $4,300 per year.

Ideal use case: Early startups that are looking for a basic, and free feedback management tool.

13. Trello

Trello is a versatile project management and collaboration tool, commonly used for helping teams manage tasks. It is famous for its Kanban-style boards, with simple design and powerful automations. Trello isn’t ideal for gathering product feedback, although you can set it up to do that.

Main features:

• Kanban boards with lists and cards
• Cards can be customized to include comments and voting
• Power Ups can make it possible to include polls
• Can make boards public or private, and enable observers

Advantages:

• Powerful card-based automations
• Clean and user-friendly interface

Disadvantages:

• You can't easily segment your feedback data
• It's not easy to use feedback to prioritize your features
• You can't easily close the customer feedback loop

Pricing:

Trello is free to start, but you would need to pay $10 per month per user for enabling board observers and voting. If you have a team of three, you’d pay $360, $3,960 less than for Canny.

Ideal use case: Early startups that are already using Trello within their team and who don’t yet receive enough feedback to require a well-functioning feedback collection system.

Savio is the best Canny competitor.

Canny is a powerful tool, but it has lots of drawbacks. The above tools are all potential alternatives to Canny and can replace some or all of its features.

Of course, in our opinion, Savio is the best alternative to Canny.io. Savio not only has all of the same feedback collection functions that Savio has, it actually is more powerful because it can bring feedback in from more sources and can segment your feedback so you understand your customers’ needs more deeply.

Savio is also much better value. For a team of three, switching from Canny to Savio could save you big bucks each year (plus giving you better functionality).

Want to see it in action? Try Savio for free.

Last Updated: 2023-04-27

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