Canny vs. ProductPlan Comparison: Which Product Management Tool is Better?

Canny vs product plan hero image
Canny.io and ProductPlan are two popular product roadmapping tools used by SaaS product teams to build and communicate a coherent product strategy. What they have in common is that:

They let you maintain an idea backlog for new features.
They offer frameworks for prioritizing those features.
They let you create visual roadmaps that you can share with customers and internal teams

But for all their similarities, these are very different tools aimed at accomplishing fundamentally different tasks.

ProductPlan is just a roadmapping tool. It excels at building strategy roadmaps, but that’s it. It’s flexible and can be used by marketing teams, IT teams, and more.
Canny is specifically for B2B SaaS Product teams to collect customer product feedback and use it to make product decisions. It’s designed for teams that want to build in public.

That high-level difference between the two tools is reflected in their various feature choices. Read on for a full feature comparison and analysis.

Note: 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. But just because we’re competitors doesn’t mean we’re unfair* 😉. We’ve worked to provide an honest assessment of the merits of both tools.

Feature comparison: ProductPlan vs. Canny

Here’s a high-level comparison of Canny and ProductPlan features. A more in-depth discussion is added below.

(Quick disclaimer: this list was accurate when we wrote it, but features change over time. If you see something that isn’t quite right, send me an email and I’ll fix it.)

	Canny	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	✅ +Added cost	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Help Scout	✅ w/ Chrome extension	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Slack	✅	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Chrome extension	✅	❌	✅
Forward feedback via email	❌	❌	✅
In-app feedback widget	✅	❌	❌
Zapier connection	✅	✅ (It doesn't let you collect feedback)	✅
API	✅	❌	✅
Analyze and prioritize
Link feedback with account data	✅ (Needs dev resources)	❌	✅
Feedback segmentation	✅	❌	✅
Sort by MRR impact	✅	❌	✅
Prioritize features	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Segment	✅	❌	✅
Roadmaps and development
Build visual internal roadmaps	❌	✅	✅
Build visual public roadmap	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Jira	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Shortcut	❌	❌	✅
Integrate with GitHub	✅	✅	❌
Integrate with Azure DevOps	✅	✅	❌
Integrate with ClickUp	✅	❌	❌
Integrate with Linear	✅	❌	❌
Integrate with Microsoft Teams	✅	✅	❌
Integrate with Confluence	❌	✅	❌
Integrate with Pivotal Tracker	❌	✅	❌
Integrate with Trello	❌	✅	❌
Communicate with customers
Changelog tool	✅	❌	❌
Send updates to customers	✅	❌	✅
Personalized close-the-loop message	❌	❌	✅
Pricing
Free trial?	✅	✅	✅
Limited free plan	✅	✅	❌
Paid plans	$400/m (+$40/editor after 5)	$39/m/editor to $69/m/editor	$49/m - $299/m for first editor (+29/m/editor - $59/m/editor)
Annual cost for 5 PMs	$4,800	$2,340	$2,820
Annual cost for 15 PMs	$9,600	$7,020	$7,500

“That was just a big list of features!”

It sure was.

Here’s what it means for you and your team when you’re actually developing your product strategy.

ProductPlan vs. Canny—What are the differences?

Ultimately the big difference is in customer feedback: Canny helps you collect it, and Product Plan doesn’t.

Fundamentally, a great product management tool for deciding what features to build next will have the following characteristics:

Centralization: They’ll be able to collect feedback and new feature ideas from any channel.
Prioritization: They’ll help product leaders analyze features and decide what to build next.
Communication: They’ll empower product teams to communicate your strategy to stakeholders and align your other teams on a single product vision.
Coordination: They’ll coordinate your engineering team's product development process and workflows.
Close the loop: They’ll give you the ability to contact your customers when you build features that they asked for.
Value: They’ll have the smallest dent in your budget for the value they provide.

Here's how ProductPlan and Canny each do when evaluated against those criteria.

1. Centralization

Your customers are your biggest source of new feature ideas. They’re also the key to obtaining—and maintaining—market fit. In other words, your customers will tell you what they want to buy.

That’s why it’s critical to listen to what they tell you. Ideally, you’ll build a full feedback tracking system and your product management tool will help you manage the massive database of feedback you receive.

Voting boards: Most PM tools have a public voting board where users can leave feedback or vote on ideas from other users. That’s exactly what Canny does: it has a public voting board where anyone can leave feedback or vote on feedback.

Canny’s voting board is quite basic and may bias feedback.

Unfortunately, it falls victim to the pitfalls of voting boards: the vote counts can bias customer feedback because people tend to vote for what’s already popular. Also, there could be order effects—people tend to start at the top and scroll down, biasing votes towards features higher on the list.

Still, Canny is better than ProductPlan here. ProductPlan doesn’t have a voting board.

(Savio has a voting board, and you can configure it to minimize bias: hide vote counts and randomize the order.)

Integrations: Canny has 4 different types of integrations to bring feedback, ProductPlan doesn't do product feedback, so it doesn't have any. Savio has 6 integrations, so it’s the most flexible of the three for collecting feedback.

Other channels: Canny and Savio both have Zapier integration and an API so you can build your own connections between apps to bring in feedback. Both also have a Chrome extension to gather customer feedback from any web-based app.

In addition, Canny has a feedback widget. Savio lets you email feedback into your vault.

Overall:* Canny is much better at centralization than Productboard. Savio is even better because it has two more integrations than Canny.*

2. Prioritization

After collecting feedback into your backlog, you have to decide what features to build first. Both Canny and Productboard aim to help you do that prioritization.

Canny: Canny has a more complete prioritization framework, as it allows you to score features for impact and effort, and even segment your feedback by useful customer attributes such as monthly spend. That way, you know which customers are requesting which features so you can tailor your product strategy to better target your audience.

ProductPlan: ProductPlan uses a formula to calculate a total priority score based on priority and effort. By ranking this score you will have your priority list.

Savio: Like Canny, Savio has a powerful segmentation engine. It lets you pull in customer data from your single source of customer truth—Salesforce, Zendesk, Help Scout, Intercom, HubSpot CRM, and so on.

Unlike Canny, you bring in your customer data using integrations we’ve already built—no devs required.

Overall: Canny is better than ProductPlan because it has a complete segmentation engine, so it gives you more powerful tools for prioritizing. (Savio is even better than Canny because it gives you the same segmentation without needing your development team to set it up.)

3. Communication and team alignment

When you’ve finished your product strategy, you’ll want to share it with stakeholders. Both Canny and Productboard let you do that with roadmaps.

Roadmap software: Canny is designed to help you build in public, so its roadmaps are designed for your customers (although they’ll be useful to your internal team members and stakeholders, too). They’re basic: they’re simply a list of features categorized by their status.

A Canny roadmap is quite basic, with lists of features separated into categories along with some filtering options

ProductPlan’s whole focus is roadmaps—they really excel here. They have a ton of templates for different project management use cases, including user interface roadmaps, HR roadmaps, and digital marketing roadmaps. They also let you set up your roadmaps in a number of different layouts from Gantt charts to Kanban boards. You can also add swimlanes, milestones or goals, and even filter and share your roadmap with different audiences.

ProductPlan roadmaps are much more complex and flexible than Canny’s.

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.

roadmap

*Savio roadmaps display feedback data so you can help others understand why you made your product decisions (and minimize roadmap disagreements).

Other communication tools: Canny, ProductPlan and Savio allow you to post updates about feedback and features via automatic updates to Slack. Both ProductPlan and Canny, let you also post updates to Microsoft Teams.

Overall: ProductPlan delivers the best solutions for roadmaps, although Canny can be good if your focus is building in public. Savio and Canny are pretty much the same in terms of roadmap functionality.

4. Coordination with development

Now, someone has to build the features. Your PM tool should sync with your dev project management tools so you know the status of each feature as it moves through the development workflow. Ideally, those updates are automated.

Canny connects to 5: Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, ClickUp and Linear.

ProductPlan integrates with 6: Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal tracker, Trello, and Confluence.

Savio integrates with just 2: Jira and Shortcut.

Overall: ProductPlan wins because it has the most integrations, but it really depends on your tools. If you use ClickUp or Linear, Canny is probably better. If you use Shortcut, Savio is best.

5. Close the loop

Closing the feedback loop means letting customers know when you build a feature they ask for. It’s a simple but extremely powerful way of boosting customer loyalty.

Canny: Canny's solution for closing the loop is a changelog. You can also use it to set up automatic email notifications, but there is no way to send personalized messages to customers who have requested a feature.

ProductPlan: ProductPlan cannot update its customers and does not send personalized emails.

Savio: Savio lets you quickly send personalized emails to customers when you create a feature they have requested).

Overall: Canny beats ProductPlan here. But Savio is better because you can send personalized close-the-loop emails.

6. Value

Choosing the right PM tool is often as much about budget as features. You want to make sure you’re getting good value.

Canny pricing: Canny costs $400/month for 5 editors and $40/month for every additional editor. This provides most of the features needed for a robust feedback management system. There is also a more limited free plan.

Scenario 1: if your team has 5 PMs, you’d pay $4800 per year
Scenario 2: if your team has 15 PMs, you’d pay $9,600 per year

Screenshot of Canny’s pricing.

ProductPlan pricing: ProductPlan’s pricing model is $39/month/editor for the Basic plan and $69/month/editor for the Professional plan. For most companies, the Basic plan is probably sufficient. On that plan,

Scenario 1: if your team has 5 PMs, you’d pay $2,340 per year
Scenario 2: if your team has 15 PMs, you’d pay $7,020 per year

Screenshot of ProductPlan’s pricing.

Savio’s pricing model: Savio is the best value of the three.

Scenario 1: if your team has 5 PMs, you’d pay $1,980 per year
Scenario 2: if your team has 15 PMs, you’d pay $5,460 per year

Savio Pricing

**Screenshot of Savio’s pricing plans.

Overall:* ProductPlan is less expensive than Canny, but you also get fewer features. Savio is about the same price as ProductPlan but gives you many more features.*

The takeaway: Canny is better for centralizing feedback and prioritizing features; ProductPlan is better for roadmaps.

ProductPlan is a product roadmap tool, and it’s great at that. But it doesn’t do user feedback. Canny does, so it’s more flexible. Here is a summary of our analysis:

Centralization: Canny is better than ProductPlan. It's much more flexible to bring in feedback from all your channels. Savio is even better because it has more integrations and is more flexible.
Prioritization: Canny is better than ProductPlan. Canny lets you prioritize based on customer segments, ProductPlan doesn’t. Savio is as good as Canny (perhaps even better because you can set up segmentation without dev resources).
Communicating: ProductPlan wins. Its roadmaps are more flexible and have way more features. Savio and Canny are tied for second here.
Coordination: ProductPlan wins because it has one more integration. But really, it depends on the tools you use.
Closing the loop: Canny is better than ProductPlan because it can send automatic emails to customers. It also has a changelog. (Savio is even better than Canny because you can send personalized emails in close-the-loop.)
Value: ProductPlan is cheaper, but it also has far fewer features. Canny is more expensive but offers better features. (Savio is the best value because it has comparable features to Canny for less. It’s similar in price to ProductPlan but gives you many more features.)

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

Either Canny or ProductPlan could work for you.

Canny’s better for B2B SaaS teams that care about their customers and want to build in public.

ProductPlan is purely a product roadmap software tool. It’s better for large enterprise companies in any industry that just need visual roadmaps to share with their stakeholders.

Savio, like Canny, is for B2B SaaS teams that care about their customers. It’s great for anyone from startups and small teams to enterprises. It’s also better than Canny on several dimensions and is much better value.

If you’re looking for the best tool for tracking feature requests so you can build better software products, give Savio a whirl.

Do a free trial (no credit card required)

Or, if you want to learn more about its features, check those out here.

More resources and customer feedback tool comparisons

Still not sure what tool will be the right fit? Here are a bunch of resources to get to know the major players and see which one might work best for you.

Product management software tools

Learn more about Canny

Learn more about ProductPlan

Last Updated: 28-04-2023

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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