Productboard is advertised as a powerful tool for product managers to prioritize new features and action user feedback. And while it doesn’t lack power, most people find it overly complex and hard to figure out.
For a more intuitive and easier to use alternative, choose FeedBear.
How Much Functionality is Too Much?
Productboard is feature-rich, and extremely powerful in the right hands. There’s a lot you can do with Productboard, but figuring out how to use the platform becomes a project of its own.
There are four main facets to Productboard’s platform:
- Roadmaps - public or private roadmaps to visualize your development backlog.
- Prioritization - a data-driven way to identify what to build next.
- Insights - a central hub for all your customer feedback.
- Engagement - “closing the loop” by informing customers about upcoming or newly launched features.
This mirrors what you can do with FeedBear - collecting feedback, sharing a public roadmap, and notifying customers about new features and updates with a changelog.
With Productboard, you can get really deep into how you analyze customer feedback and prioritize new features. But honestly, most of this is overkill, and the added complexity compared to FeedBear only makes it harder to use.
Most businesses are better served with a simple tool that’s designed to be smooth, intuitive, and easy to use for your team and customers alike.
The Paradox of Choice
With so much you can do with Productboard, most users find themselves overwhelmed when they get started.
You can set up your roadmap or feature prioritization framework in so many different ways, it adds stress and complexity just figuring out the correct way to use it.
This is the paradox of choice. The more options you have, the harder it is to make a decision, and the less satisfied you are with any decision you make.
"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." (Capterra Reviews)
You’re better off with a tool that’s customizable enough to fit your brand, but doesn’t require hours to figure out how to set up.
Everything in FeedBear is More Intuitive and Easier To Use
✅ It takes minutes to set up FeedBear and get started - there’s no learning curve whatsoever.
❌ With Productboard, you need hours just to figure out how to get started.
FeedBear is built to be straightforward. It works out of the box - just a couple of minutes and you can set up a feedback collection board, embed a feedback widget on your website or publish your board on a custom domain, and create a public-facing roadmap.
It’s no more complex than it needs to be. While you’re getting valuable feedback and insights from your customers, Productboard users are still trying to figure out how to drive it.
FeedBear is easier for your team, and easier for your users. You bring them into your product management workflow, by making it super easy to suggest new ideas, vote on ideas, and engage with your team on new feature suggestions.
Productboard allows feedback collection, but it’s not as straightforward.
For a start, you need to subscribe to one of their higher plans to collect customer feedback. And a quick scan of their user reviews suggests that the feedback collection element of Productboard just creates more work for your product team to maintain and organize.
"Not good when you need feature-centric orientation: ProductBoard is hopeless at managing one feature request from many users. For example, if you have a public feature requests system and many customers have upvoted it, there does not appear to be a graceful way to include it in the system." (Capterra Reviews)
FeedBear Offers Better Value For Money and More Transparent Pricing
✅ Get the full power of FeedBear for $49 per month (no commitments or hidden fees).
❌ The same features and usage limits on Productboard could cost you $210 per month.
Head to head, FeedBear is more effective for most companies, because of its greater simplicity and ease of use.
If you consider pricing as well, it’s a no-brainer. FeedBear’s pricing is simple, and transparent. Get started from as little as $49 per month. You get unlimited boards, a roadmap and changelog, custom domain and branding, and access for 3 of your team members.
There are no hidden costs, or usage limits.
In comparison, the pricing for Productboard is not so simple. You can subscribe for as low as $20 per month. But to capture customer feedback, you’ll need the higher plan, at $60 per month ($70 if you pay monthly).
Tied with a contract or paid upfront for Productboard? You can get FeedBear for free for the remaining duration of your contract. Just reach out to sales@feedbear.com to take advantage of this offer.
What’s more, it’s charged per team member. If you want more than one of your team to use the tool, you need to (at least) double the original cost.
For unlimited feedback collection portals and the full range of integrations, you're going to pay even more.
The pricing model from Productboard is overly complex, and is so for a reason. It stacks up fast. The tool is designed for large product teams, yet a team of 5+ people all using Productboard could rack up a bill of hundreds of dollars per month.
FeedBear vs Productboard: The Final Verdict
✅ FeedBear is a simple and delightful tool for collecting customer feedback and sharing public roadmaps and a changelog.
✅ FeedBear is perfect for teams of all sizes, particularly lean, agile startups.
❌ Productboard is an enterprise tool, built for huge teams with a huge budget.
If you need a powerful product management tool, want to set up complex systems to validate and prioritize new features, and have the time, energy and money to spend on it, use Productboard.
For anyone else, FeedBear is a superior Productboard alternative. It’s much simpler and more intuitive, comes with far less of a learning curve and cheaper and more transparent pricing.
FeedBear is ideal for SaaS companies of any size looking for a clean, intuitive tool for collecting feedback, creating roadmaps, prioritizing features, and creating announcements for existing users. It’s easy enough to use for any non-technical person to handle it quickly and it’s affordable enough that anyone can fit it into their monthly app budget.
