Modern SaaS companies are turning to Prodroll as an alternative for canny.io.
Prodroll is designed to make product management a more collaborative process with the customer at the center of it.
Prodroll helps product teams to get feedback from customers at each step of product development. This helps product managers build more meaningful features with the limited engineering effort.
Prodroll vs Canny Philosophy
Prodroll is designed to do one thing very well: Help B2B SaaS companies get different types of feedback to help them improve their product.
Canny on the other hand supports multiple features like feature collection, prioritization with formulas, roadmaps, and change logs.
How does prodroll work?
Prodroll follows the what, how, when, and how well framework. At each step, Prodroll enables collaboration with your customers to help your both win.
"I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice -- constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself." Elon Musk
Get new feature Ideas or report issues (What)
Your customers and admins can add new ideas, search for existing ideas, and vote and comment on ideas. Most voted ideas can be picked up and refined further before they go to the engineering team for implementation.
Run poll on options (How)
Another problem PMs and designers face is selecting an option from multiple options. Eg: What should be the next language the app must support? Which integration do people value most?
Of course, feature upvoting can be hacked into achieving the same thing.
But, it is still a hack.
Roadmap (When)
Communicate to customers when their favorite feature will get launched.
Get feedback on how well a feature was implemented (How well)
After an idea has been implemented, get feedback from customers on how well the feature was implemented and has the feature solved their problem.
So, Prodroll supports the product team by helping them get feedback on what to build to how well was something built all centered around the customer.
Prodroll truly makes your customers co-creators of the product.
Prodroll vs Canny Features
Canny's philosophy is different from Prodroll's philosophy. While Prodroll is built ground up to collect all types of feedback from customers canny is partly into feedback collection and partly into communication.
Feature | Prodroll | Canny |
Polls | Supports polls to capture user preferences when there are a limited set of options available. | Does not support polls at all. If the design team is not sure about the right design, the product team will have to leave the tool and do it outside the canny system. This is not a great experience for product managers. |
Feedback on the completed feature | Prodroll was built ground up to collect various types of qualitative feedback on the product. | The design to collect feedback on a completed feature is not backed in. Canny allows you to use comments, but then the product management team would have moved on to other features. Completing a feature represents the logical end of an idea suggested by a customer. |
Design | Prodroll has managed to keep the design simple as well as functional at the same time. You can delete multiple ideas in one go, search for an idea across boards, etc. | Though canny has a clean UI, its rigid structure does not allow you to do certain things. Eg: Each board is an island. You can't search for a feature across boards to vote on a feature. |
Prioritization | Prodroll does not support prioritization with formulas | Supports prioritization |
Changelog | Prodroll does not support product change announcements by design as of now | Supports changelog |
Pricing | Prodroll starts at $29 with generous limits. | Canny starts at $50 and the price increases with the number of users. |
While the table shows the differences, both prodroll and canny can be used to collect feedback, vote on ideas and support roadmaps.
Why you should really pick ProdRoll?
If you have tried out some of the feedback collection tools, you will notice that they may not be very productive to use on a daily basis.
ProdRoll focuses not just on the simplicity of the end-user UX, but also on the productivity of the internal users UX.
Here are some major benefits of ProdRoll.
Remove "Powered By": Only the lowest pricing tier will have "Powered By ProdRoll". If you upgrade to any of the higher tiers, you will have an option to remove "Powered By". Most of the competition does not even allow you remove this even if you were to upgrade to a higher tier.
Universal Search: ProdRoll supports universal search. You do not have to worry about selecting a board first before you start to search. This eliminates confusion to users and reduces duplicate submissions.
Search in Roadmap: ProdRoll has re-imagined the roadmap screen and focuses more on usability. Your customers can search, filter based on boards and status in the roadmap screen. Your customers need not spend time looking for a needle in haystack in Kanban views.
Clear Separation between Public and Admin Views: Both public and private views are clearly separated out so that you will always know what your customers will see.
10 more canny alternatives
There are several other alternatives to canny each with its subtle take on feedback collection and analysis. Check out their demos on their website/youtube and see if the features make sense for your product development process.
Here is a summary of the competitors.
Uservoice: Suitable for enterprise customers with support for customer segments, prioritization, and customer data enrichment from CRM systems. Starts at $500 per month.
Aha Ideas: Suitable for enterprise customers with complex requirements like note-taking sessions with customers, automation flows, custom views generation, etc.
Product Board: This is a very powerful tool for enterprise users. Supports roadmaps, prioritization, several integrations, top-down-approach to feature building, product analytics, and other integrations. Starts at $25 per month.
ProdPad: Enterprise product built to manage the entire product management process starting from objective-and-key-results, ideas collection, user story development to integration with development tools. Starts at $25 per month per editor.
Upvotey: Supports idea-collection, voting, roadmap, and changelog. Starts at $15 for 3 users.
Nolt: Supports idea-collection, voting, roadmap, and changelog. Price: $25 per board.
Feedback Fish: Simple feedback collection widget. Users can request a feature and admins can respond to a feature request. $19.00 per month.
Trello: Trello is a general project management software. Has a free plan with limitations.
Hellonext: Supports idea-collection, voting, roadmap, and changelog. Price: Starts at $19 for 1 administrator.
Announcefly: Supports feedback collection but focuses on communicating changelog and user engagement. Built for non-product-related announcements like webinars etc.
Reach out to us
If you have any questions on prodroll send a note to contact@prodroll.com
Here is a full list of Prodroll features
