Aha! vs Productboard: Which Product Management Tool Should I Choose?

aha vs productboard image

Productboard and Aha! both offer a suite of tools for product managers to build better software. They both let you collect customer product feedback, prioritize feature requests, and communicate your product strategy in a product roadmap.

But despite all the similarities in functioanlity, they are very different tools.

Which one is most appropriate for your needs?

Very briefly:

Aha! is better for feature prioritization because it lets you segment your ideas by some company attributes. It also gives you better team collaboration tools.
Productboard is better if you want to build in public. It has better tools to update your customers about new features and is much better at centralizing feedback from different channels.

But, of course, the devil is in the details. Here’s everything you need to know to compare Productboard and Aha! for building software.

Savio is another product management tool that helps B2B SaaS companies build better software. Our tool is an alternative to both Aha! and Productboard, but we promise not to let that bias our evaluation in this article 😉.

Disclaimer:* We wrote this based on the features page of each tool as well as a free trial of each tool. We were careful to ensure that everything was accurate at the time of writing. But features change over time. Let us know if you notice an error and we’ll happily update the article.*

Feature comparison between Aha! and Productboard

Here’s a high-level comparison of Aha! and Productboard features. A more in-depth discussion is added below. (We’ve thrown Savio in there to help you see how they all stack up).

Aha! sells groups of features separately. Here, we’ve given Aha! a ✅ if any of its modules have the feature.*

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 here.

	Productboard	Aha!	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	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Help Scout	❌	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Slack	✅	❌	✅
Collect feedback from Microsoft Teams	✅	❌	❌
Collect feedback from Gong	✅	❌	❌
Collect feedback from Chrome extension	✅	❌	✅
Forward feedback via email	✅	✅	✅
In-app feedback widget	❌	✅	❌
Feedback polls	❌	✅	❌
Zapier connection	✅	✅	✅
API	✅	✅	✅
Analyze and prioritize
Link feedback with account data	❌	✅ (Only for Salesforce)	✅
Feedback segmentation	✅ (Basic, and not with customer account data)	✅ (Basic, and not with customer account data)	✅
Sort by MRR impact	❌	❌	✅
Prioritize features	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Segment	❌	❌	✅
Roadmaps and development
Build visual public roadmap	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Jira	✅	✅	✅
Integrate with Shortcut	✅	❌	✅
Integrate with GitHub	✅	✅	❌
Communicate with customers
Changelog tool	❌	❌	❌
Send email updates to customers	✅	❌	✅
Personalized close-the-loop message	❌	❌	✅
Schedule “empathy session” meetings with customers	❌	✅	❌
Pricing
Free trial	✅	✅	✅
Price range	$20/m/editor to $80/m/editor	$59/m/user to $149/m/user	$23/m/editor to $79/m/editor
Annual cost for 5 PMs	$4,800	$4,740	$2,820
Annual cost for 15 PMs	$14,400	$14,220	$7,500

Let’s dive into what those differences mean.

Aha! vs Productboard: What are the differences?

Both Aha! and Productboard were built to help PMs decide what to build next, collaborate to build it, and then communicate with stakeholders. They also both recognize that building good software requires a customer feedback system.

Here are the critical factors of a solid customer feedback tool:

Centralization: Collect feedback and new product ideas from any channel
Prioritization: Analyze features to decide what to build next
Communication: Communicate your strategy to stakeholders and customers
Coordination: Coordinate the development process with your dev team members
Close the loop: Tell customers when you build their feature
Value: More bling, less cha-ching

Here’s how Productboard and Aha! stack up for each of those tasks.

1. Centralization

Productboard is significantly better than Aha! when it comes to putting all your feedback in one place.

Voting boards: Both Aha! and Productboard have public voting portals where your customers can submit ideas to a backlog and vote for features. You can make the boards private. Both keep their feedback vaults separate from the voting board, so you don’t have to have the voting board to collect feedback.

We’ve discussed the pitfalls of feature voting elsewhere. Neither Productboard nor Aha! let you configure your voting board to minimize bias; for example, hide vote counts or randomize the order of feature requests. (Savio does.)

Integrations: Productboard really shines here compared to Aha!. Aha! only lets you get feedback in a couple of channels: through the voting board, through a Salesforce integration, or through a Zendesk integration. Customers can also email feedback, but you have to specifically allow them to do it.

Productboard (like Savio) is way more flexible, with integrations that bring feedback in from Intercom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Gong, and a Chrome extension. This makes it much easier for your customer-facing teams—Sales, Customer Success, Customer Support, Marketing, etc—to send feedback to your feedback vault.

Other channels: Aha! has a feature to set polls, which is kind of cool. It also has a feedback widget (Productboard has neither). Both have APIs.

Overall: I think Productboard is better here. Aha! is much more rigid about collecting feedback, and the polls don’t sufficiently make up for it. Productboard (and Savio) are designed to make it easy to pull in feedback from the many various channels you actually receive it.

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.

2. Prioritization

Once you have your customer feedback, how can you use it to inform your product roadmap?

Aha! uses a “product value score” that takes into account impact and effort. You score each idea with respect to impact and effort. Then, you can sort your list of ideas by that value score to see the highest value ideas. That list becomes how you track priority. You can also drag and drop features up and down the list to tweak the priority.

Aha! uses a value scorecard that’s based on Impact and Effort.

You can also see all the ideas on a chart to help you visualize the priority.

Aha!’s priority chart lets you visualize your ideas in terms of effort and impact.

Aha! also lets you segment your ideas based on the industry of your customers, company size, geographic location, etc. But it doesn’t let you segment by customer attribute data like MRR, plan, stage in the customer journey, and so on. (Savio does.)

Productboard uses a “user impact score” to evaluate priority. You, the user, assign a score from 0 to +3 based on how important it is to customers. That lets you compare features directly. You can also drag and drop features up and down your list based on their priority.

Productboard’s user impact score.

Productboard also lets you segment your customer data, but, like Aha!, it’s limited to very basic information like geography, market size, and industry.

Overall: Aha! and Productboard are quite similar when it comes to prioritization. They both use scores that you assign yourself, rather than using customer attributes. Both have basic segmentation. (Savio’s is more powerful because it lets you segment based on customer data—MRR, plan, etc—rather than things like industry.)

Guide: Explaining 8 Prioritization Frameworks for PMs

3. Communication and team alignment

Once you know your priorities, you can build your product roadmap and share it with stakeholders. Both Aha! and Productbaord do that primarily with visual roadmaps software tools.

Roadmaps: Aha!’s roadmapping tool is quite complex. They let you specify tasks within features within releases. They also let you build swimlanes and set up your roadmaps like a Gantt chart with initiatives, milestones, and life cycles. They also have templates for several different use cases like marketing and project management.

Screenshot of an Aha! Roadmap.

While it’s detailed and probably powerful, we don’t love the look and feel.

Productboard’s public roadmap looks more like a blog. There are tabs for the features that are planned, those under consideration, those in Beta, and those that have been launched. Each feature is like a post, with a title, an image, and the number of people that voted for it.

Screenshot of Productboard’s public roadmap.

Their roadmapping tool also produces visual roadmaps aimed at your internal teams that are elegant and well-designed.

Neither is necessarily better than the other. Productboard’s roadmaps are designed for people who want to build in public and want to show customers what’s coming next. We like the design better. Aha!’s roadmaps are more for internal teams to organize their work and strategy. They’re more powerful but we don’t like the design as much.

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.

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

Other communication tools: Productboard, Aha!, (and Savio) let you post updates through Slack.

Productboard and Aha! also let you post updates to Microsoft Teams.

Aha! Goes even further by posting updates to to Flowdock and Google Chat, so it’s a bit better integrated. In addition, Aha! lets you organize live “empathy sessions” where you can pick your customers’ brains, live, about what they need for features and the roadmap.

Overall: Neither tool is clearly better than the other. If you’re building in private and want to organize your strategy among your teams, Aha!’s (or Savio’s) roadmaps may make more sense. If you’re building in public, Productboard’s (or Savio’s) may be more appropriate.

4. Coordination with development

Now you want to connect your product team’s tool with your engineering team’s workflow. That means integrating with the tools they use and keeping everyone on the same page.

Aha! integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal, Rally, GitLab, Redmine, FogBugz, and Bugzilla. It also has its own product development tool, which might be convenient for you.

Productboard integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Pivotal, Trello, and Shortcut.

Savio integrates with Jira and Shortcut.

Overall: Neither tool is better than the other—it depends on the tools you use in your development stack.

5. Close the loop

Your development team built the feature. Now you need to let your customers know. Here’s how the tools stack up with customer follow-up and closing the loop.

Aha!: Aha doesn’t have great tools for telling customers when you build new features. They don’t have automated updates, you can’t easily send notifications, and you can’t send personalized close-the-loop emails when you build features your customers ask for.

Productboard: Productboard is a bit better because you can send automated updates when a new feature is launched. But you can’t send personalized close-the-loop emails without a lot of manual work.

Savio: Savio lets you quickly send personalized emails letting customers know when a feature they asked for was launched.

Overall: Productboard is better than Aha! for letting customers know when there’s a new feature launched. (Savio is even better).

6. Value

Which tool is easier on the budget?

Productboard pricing is simpler to understand because it’s only one product. There are four plans. The Essentials plan is super basic and would be inappropriate for the vast majority of companies (it’s missing capturing feedback, a feedback portal, lots of key integrations, the Chrome extension, and other essential features).

So the Pro plan is the least expensive real option. For the Pro plan,

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $4,800
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $14,400

Note: Even the Pro plan may be too limited. For example, if you want the Salesforce integration, the ability to prioritize features, multiple products, or customer segmentation (which is key) you have to get the “Scale” plan. Obviously, that would be more expensive (although the price isn’t publicly available).

Screenshot of Productboard pricing.

Aha! pricing is more complicated because all the features you need are split into different products. So the overall price would depend on how many of the modules you need. Here, we’ll assume you’re interested in the two modules that give you the same features as Productboard—Ideas and Roadmaps.

For those same features as Productboard, you would need at least the Premium Roadmaps plan ($59/user/month). That includes the Ideas Essentials plan, but you would need the Ideas Advanced plan for segmentation, feedback widgets, feedback forms, and integrations with Salesforce and Zendesk. So together, that would be $79/user/month.

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $4,740
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $14,220

Aha! pricing for roadmaps. These plans include Aha! Ideas essentials, but for Ideas Advanced, there’s an additional cost.

Savio is the best value. You can get all of the same features, and plans are much less expensive.

A team of 5 PMs would cost you $2,820
A team of 15 PMs would cost you $7,500

Screenshot of Savio pricing.

Overall: Aha! is virtually the same price as Productboard for the same features. Savio has the best value of the three.

The takeaway: Productboard is better for centralizing feedback and updating customers

Both Aha! and Productboard could be valuable additions to a SaaS tool stack. Here’s our summary:

Centralization: Producboard wins. It’s much better at bringing in feedback from all your channels. (Savio is the best at this.)
Prioritization: It’s a tie. (Savio is better than both because you can segment based on customer attributes like MRR).
Communication: It’s a tie. Look to see which style roadmap you like better.
Coordination: It’s a tie. One may be better for you depending on the dev tools you use.
Close the loop: Productboard wins because you can update your customers when you launch a feature. Aha can’t do this. (Savio is even better because you can send personalized close-the-loop emails.)
Value: They’re virtually identical in terms of price. (Savio is the best value).

Overall, we think most teams would prefer Productboard, but it depends on your particular needs.

	Productboard	Aha!	Savio
Centralization	🥈	🥉	🥇
Prioritization	🥈	🥈	🥇
Communication	🥇	🥇	🥈
Coordination	🥇	🥇	🥇
Close the loop	🥈	🥉	🥇
Value	🥈	🥈	🥇

FAQs

What are the main differences between Aha! and Productboard?
Aha! excels in feature prioritization and team collaboration tools, while Productboard offers superior feedback centralization and customer update capabilities.

Which tool is better for a large team?
Both tools cater to large teams, but Aha! offers more advanced team collaboration features, whereas Productboard's extensive integrations may better suit large, feedback-heavy teams.

Can Aha! and Productboard integrate with Jira?
Yes, both Aha! and Productboard integrate with Jira to streamline development workflows.

Is there a free trial available for Aha! and Productboard?
Yes, both Aha! and Productboard offer free trials to test their features.

Which tool is more cost-effective?
Productboard tends to be slightly more cost-effective, but Aha!'s pricing can be competitive depending on the features required.

How do these tools handle customer feedback? Aha! uses feedback boards and polls, while Productboard integrates feedback from multiple channels, making it more versatile in collecting customer input. Overall, all three tools do similar things, but one of them may make more sense for you depending on your needs and workflow.

More resources and tool comparisons

Still not sure what tool to go with? Here are some more resources for comparing product management tools:

Product management software tools

Learn more about Productboard

Learn more about Aha!

Savio has most of the same features as the other tools while being much better value. It also has better centralization and a powerful prioritization engine. Plus, our support is killer (if I do say so myself).

Take Savio for a spin to see if it’s the right fit.

Not ready? Learn more here.

Last Updated: 27-01-2023

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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