Developing a new product can be an exciting and challenging process, but it requires careful planning and execution of ideas that can bring the best results. One of the most critical steps in product development is idea evaluation. It also helps businesses focus on the most promising ideas and develop them into successful products.

However, idea evaluation is not just about using tools and methods. It also requires businesses to be creative, innovative, and open-minded. Businesses need to be willing to explore new ideas, take risks, and learn from failures. They also need to be able to adapt to changing market conditions and customer preferences.

What is Idea Evaluation?

Idea evaluation is the process of assessing a product idea to determine if it's worth pursuing. Businesses use this step to save time, money, and resources by identifying and eliminating weak or unprofitable ideas early on.

Idea evaluation improves decision-making in business. It helps businesses reduce risks and costs by assessing untested concepts. It also uncovers opportunities for innovation and creativity. In a broader picture idea evaluation aligns business strategies with market potential, leading to a competitive advantage.

Importance of Idea Evaluation for Innovation Process

Enhancing Decision-Making Processes

Idea evaluation improves decision-making by using objective criteria and eliminating bias. It ensures data-driven and reliable decisions.

Prioritizing Ideas

Evaluating and selecting the best ideas helps businesses focus on promising ones, optimizing resources and avoiding waste.

Reducing Risks and Costs

Effective evaluation reduces risks and costs by assessing the feasibility and practicality of new concepts.

Avoiding Costly Mistakes

The thorough evaluation assesses risks, aiding informed decisions on moving forward or not.

Encouraging Innovation and Creativity

Idea evaluation identifies improvement opportunities, boosting efficiency, cost savings, and growth. Scenario planning fosters creative solutions and prepares for challenges.

How to Select the Right Idea Evaluation Tool

To evaluate ideas effectively, businesses establish criteria. Common evaluation criteria include:

• Feasibility: Can the concept be implemented practically and achieve set goals?

• Market Potential: Is there a demand for the idea within the market?

• Alignment with Goals: Does the concept align with the business's strategy and objectives?

• Competitive Advantage: Does the concept offer uniqueness and a competitive edge?

List of Top 10 Idea Evaluation Tools

We have carefully selected and researched the best idea evaluation tools available to help you make informed decisions. Our top 10 picks are sure to provide you with the necessary features and benefits to evaluate your ideas effectively. Stay tuned for our comprehensive list!

FeedBear: A Modern, Minimal, and Capable Idea Evaluation Tool

FeedBear is an affordable and modern idea evaluation tool that helps teams manage their innovation process easily. Our platform offers a fast and easy-to-use way that helps your team stay organized, collaborate effectively, and keep your customers engaged.

The core idea behind FeedBear is to build a modern idea management and roadmap tool while also being the simplest in the market. So many alternatives are bloated with so many features and settings that they'll take days to learn and get set up.

We wanted to build a platform that reduces the learning curve for users and team members to near zero. We think we've accomplished that as onboarding and setup takes literally a few minutes.

Also, another important goal with FeedBear that we've succeeded in is reducing the amount of work needed from product teams to maintain and use the tool, saving time whenever possible.

Idea Board

FeedBear lets you create unlimited idea boards for feedback, ideas, and feature requests (but also bug reports and virtually anything you want).

• It centralizes feedback from both team and customers.

• It allows comments and voting on ideas and can be kept internal or public.

• Similar ideas are automatically surfaced and suggested to users as they attempt to post a new one, minimizing duplication.

• Aligns product development with customer needs, increasing satisfaction and reducing churn.

• Facilitates collaboration between product, support, and customer success teams to enhance the product and meet customer requirements.

• Ideas can be merged and reorganized, edited, moved, and deleted so your team members are in complete control.

Visual Product Roadmap

FeedBear allows creating and managing a visual product roadmap. It has:

• Customizable columns and statuses help you communicate exactly where each idea is in the pipeline.

• Tracking of planned, in-progress, and completed tasks ensures team alignment toward common goals and a simple way to communicate your progress with customers.

Engage Your Customers

• Share your idea evaluation tool with customers and demonstrate that you value their feedback.

• Cultivate a sense of community and loyalty among your customers to decrease churn and enhance retention.

• Use comments and discussions to identify the real problems and needs of your customers.

Announce New Ideas

• Keep customers updated on new ideas with a built-in changelog.

• Close the feedback loop and generate excitement for new ideas.

• Ensure new ideas are not overlooked and receive genuine usage from customers, thus aiding in customer retention and overall satisfaction with your product.

Integrate with Your Favorite Tools

Effortlessly integrate with popular tools such as Trello, Jira, Intercom, Slack, and Zapier.

Include FeedBear in your existing workflow and guarantee that everything is functioning together seamlessly.

Simple and Customizable Design

The straightforward and customizable design makes it effortless to get started with little to no learning curve.

Publish your idea evaluation tool from your own domain, on your website, or within your application.

Affordable

Straightforward pricing plans that cover your entire team - FeedBear's team pricing is generally the per-user pricing of most alternatives, which means that if you have more than one user on your team, FeedBear will always be more affordable.

The Startup plan begins at just $49 per month for up to 3 team members.

The Business plan starts at $99 per month for larger teams with an unlimited number of team members.

A wide range of features and benefits, all integrations, at an incredibly low price point.

To summarize FeedBear:

• Users can contribute ideas and suggestions, while others can vote for their preferred ones.

• FeedBear improves prioritization, enhancing decision-making.

• It keeps customers informed about ongoing updates.

• FeedBear provides automatic status updates as progress is made or customer requests are addressed.

• FeedBear's user-friendly UI stands out for its simplicity and ease of use.

• Users can provide feedback without an email, streamlining the process.

• FeedBear is intuitive and user-friendly, making feedback collection and management efficient.

• Users can quickly implement new features based on received feedback.

FeedBear simplifies team workflow, offering a user-friendly and efficient tool. Its minimal and innovative design ensures easy setup and usability. Experience the capabilities of FeedBear firsthand by trying it today.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is an idea evaluation tool that connects organizations with individuals who have innovative ideas. With IdeaScale, you can gather, refine, prioritize, and choose ideas that arise organically in your environment, and integrate them into your organizational outcomes, such as projects and data.

Core Features

• Cloud-based platform for idea management and innovation.

• Creation of communities for idea submission, commenting, and voting.

• Responsive design for optimal functionality across devices and browsers.

• Support for custom fields for ideas, profiles, or campaigns to collect relevant data.

• Stage-gate process for development, prioritization, and selection of ideas.

• Seamless integration with various tools and systems, including Slack, Salesforce, and SharePoint.

• Good analytics and reporting features for valuable insights into the performance and impact of ideas.

Pricing

IdeaScale offers 4 pricing plans with prices ranging from $12,999 to $64,999 per year. A free plan is available for up to 25 users, with limited functionality. Custom subscriptions are also available upon request. Contact their sales team for current pricing.

Note: These prices are not listed on IdeaScale's website and may not be current prices so please reach out to their sales team for the most recent pricing.

Viima

Viima is a versatile innovation platform that collects and improves ideas from employees and customers to tackle problems like weak feedback loops, limited transparency, and a lack of innovation culture. It can be customized to fit any process or need, including stage-gate, lean startup, hackathons, and beyond.

Core Features

• Idea contribution and development: Users can submit their ideas through web, mobile, email, or Microsoft Teams. They can also comment, vote and work together on ideas with others.

• Idea ranking: Viima ranks ideas using a unique algorithm based on criteria like popularity, feasibility, and impact. Users can also customize their own ranking criteria and filters.

• Campaign management: Users can create and manage various campaigns for specific goals or challenges. They can set deadlines, rewards, and feedback mechanisms for each campaign.

• Gamification tools: Viima uses gamification elements such as points, badges, and leaderboards to motivate and engage users in the innovation process.

• Reporting and analytics tools: Viima provides various reports and dashboards to help users monitor and measure the performance of their ideas and campaigns. They can also export data to other tools for further analysis.

Pricing

Viima has various pricing plans based on users and features, including a free plan for up to 10 users and 1 board.

The Basic plan, for small teams, offers more control and costs $39/mo for up to 50 users and 3 boards.

The Unlimited plan, for larger organizations, offers all features, unlimited users, and boards, and costs $1799/mo.

Innovation Cloud

Innovation Cloud is software that manages innovation processes, right from idea gathering to product launch, with ease and speed. It allows you to collect ideas from multiple sources, assess them using customizable criteria, execute them using project management tools, and measure their impact.

Core Features

• Includes everyone in the innovation process.

• Efficiently manages idea progress with a streamlined workflow.

• Offers different plans for various company sizes and needs.

• Integrates with Microsoft 365 and a few other tools.

• Manages innovation process from idea to final product based on specific needs.

• Democratizes data and uses cloud-native application platforms for engaging experiences.

• Unlocks new technical skills and expanded business capabilities by understanding customer needs and building innovations rapidly.

• Provides insightful reports for better decision-making.

• Customizes workflows, forms, fields, and categories to suit specific innovation processes.

• Offers collaboration and communication tools such as comments, ratings, notifications, and feedback.

Pricing

Innovation Cloud offers free online idea management software for collecting, developing, and executing team ideas. It allows 15 users, 100 ideas, and 1GB of storage.

The PRO 20 plan costs 25€/$30 per month and includes 20 users, unlimited ideas and folders, and 2GB of storage.

The PRO 50 plan costs 60€/$70 per month and includes 50 users, unlimited ideas and folders, and 5GB of storage.

Idea Note

Idea Note is a web-based tool designed to assist organizations in collecting, prioritizing, developing, and executing ideas. Its main purpose is to provide users with a platform where they can launch idea campaigns, invite participants, evaluate and rank ideas, and monitor their progress.

Core Features

• Collaboration: Work together with your team members and stakeholders in real-time.

• Discussion Threads: Discuss ideas with your team members and stakeholders and add comments, feedback, and suggestions to the discussion thread.

• Engagement Monitoring: Track the engagement of your team members and stakeholders and see who is engaging with your ideas and how they are engaging.

• Evaluation Workflow: Evaluate ideas based on your criteria and score ideas based on those criteria.

• Feedback Management: Manage feedback from your team members and stakeholders in one place and respond to it.

• Gamification: Gamify the ideation process by setting up challenges, rewards, and badges to motivate your team members and stakeholders.

• Idea Ranking: Rank ideas based on their potential impact and prioritize ideas to focus on the most impactful ones.

• Ideation/Crowdsourcing: Crowdsource ideas from your team members and stakeholders by setting up challenges and inviting people to submit their ideas.

• Idea Campaigns: Create and launch different types of idea campaigns for specific challenges or opportunities with customizable settings.

• Idea Boards: Organize and visualize your ideas on interactive boards with filtering, sorting, and grouping options.

• Idea Evaluation: Evaluate ideas using various methods, such as voting, rating, or commenting, and assign reviewers or experts to provide feedback.

• Idea Execution: Turn ideas into actionable projects with clear goals and milestones and track progress and impact using metrics and reports.

• Idea Templates: Use ready-made templates for different types of ideas or create your own templates to suit your needs.

• Idea Collaboration: Invite and engage your team members or stakeholders to join your idea campaigns, share ideas, comment, and collaborate on projects.

• Idea Analytics: Measure and analyze the performance and impact of your ideas and projects, and see how they align with your goals.

Pricing

Free plan: Perfect for small teams with up to 10 members. Unlimited guests and access to all features for collecting, engaging, managing, and automating ideas.

Business plan: Starts at $49/mo for 15 members, can scale up to 2,500 members. Advanced features like custom branding, integrations, analytics, and support.

Enterprise plan: Customized solution for enterprises. Includes everything in the Business plan, as well as dedicated account management, custom development, security, and compliance.

Brightidea

Brightidea is a software designed for innovation teams to manage their ideas. It facilitates the sourcing of better concepts, data-driven decision-making, and execution of innovation projects. It allows users to create portals, mobile apps, email campaigns, paper forms, or voice skills to collect ideas from anyone, anywhere.

Core Features

• Brightidea allows organizations to collect and organize ideas in a centralized platform.

• The software provides various tools, such as idea boards, filters, and tags, to display ideas in a visual way and sort them by various criteria.

• Organizations can launch targeted idea campaigns for specific challenges or opportunities that they want to address with innovation.

• Brightidea enables organizations to create and manage innovation projects with clear goals, timelines, budgets, and deliverables.

• The software provides tools, such as surveys, forums, commenting, and ranking features, to engage the audience and gather insights.

• It helps organizations source ideas from both internal and external sources.

• Brightidea can integrate with various tools and platforms, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Jira, Zapier, etc., to streamline the innovation workflow and data.

• It provides organizations with capable analytics tools to measure the impact of their innovation initiatives on various metrics, such as ROI, engagement, participation, quality, diversity, etc.

Pricing

Brightidea.com does not publicly reveal its pricing information. To receive a personalized quote that caters to your specific needs, you must contact them directly. Nevertheless, according to user feedback, the cost of a flat-rate plan starts at $59 per month.

Aha! Ideas

Aha! Ideas is a cloud-based tool for evaluating ideas. It gathers feedback from multiple sources and turns them into feasible plans. You can prioritize features, create roadmaps, and establish vision and goals based on customer needs and market insights. Aha! Ideas also enable tracking progress across teams and making informed decisions.

Core Features

• Ideas portals: online spaces for collecting ideas from various sources and enabling users to submit, vote, and comment on them.

• In-app feedback widget: for capturing ideas while customers use your product.

• Custom scorecards: assigning scores to ideas based on your criteria like value, effort, or risk.

• Custom fields: adding additional information to ideas such as tags, categories, or statuses.

• Custom workflows: defining stages that ideas go through from submission to implementation.

• Empathy sessions: inviting users to share their feedback live via video or audio calls.

• Reports and charts: visualizing and analyzing data from ideas such as votes, comments, scores, or statuses.

• Product roadmaps: linking ideas to your product strategy and showing how they align with goals and initiatives.

• Integrations: connecting ideas with other tools like Jira, Trello, GitHub, or Slack

Pricing

Aha! Ideas provide idea management software with feedback, engagement, and analysis features. The Essentials plan is $39 per user per month with unlimited portals. The Advanced plan is $59 per user per month with advanced analytics, fields, and integrations.

Aha! Roadmaps is a product management suite with Ideas Essentials included. The Starter plan is $59 per user per month, while the Premium plan is $99 per user per month. The Enterprise plan is $124 per user per month, and the Enterprise+ plan is $149 per user per month. You can add Ideas Advanced for an additional fee.

MindMeister

MindMeister is an online tool that allows users to create and share mind maps for idea evaluation. With its user-friendly interface and visual approach, it enables individuals and teams to capture and organize their thoughts efficiently. MindMeister offers multiple layout options, themes, and icons to customize your maps according to your preferences.

Core Features

• Mindmap templates for brainstorming ideas.

• Mindmap editor for creating and editing mind maps.

• Attachments for adding notes, links, images, or videos to ideas.

• Project management with MeisterTask integration for turning mind maps into project plans and assigning tasks and deadlines to team members.

• Publishing and embedding mind maps online or on websites or blogs for feedback or showcasing work.

• Images, videos, emojis, and stickers for making mind maps engaging and memorable.

• Import and export from other formats such as MindManager, Freemind, or XMind for using or editing existing files in MindMeister.

• History mode for tracking changes made to mind maps over time and restoring previous versions.

Pricing

Basic plan: Free - 3 mind maps, real-time collaboration, import, and email support.

Personal plan: €4.99/month (or $2.49/lifetime) - unlimited mind maps, advanced export, file attachments, custom themes, stats, and reports.

Pro plan: €8.25/month - team management, branded presentations, custom styles, group sharing links, priority support.

Business plan: €12.49/month - everything in Pro plan + admin control panel, user groups, custom domain mapping.

Sideways 6

Sideways 6 is a software platform that enables companies to foster innovation and change among their employees. It provides a platform for employees to share their ideas to improve the business through existing collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or Yammer. The tool helps managers to collect, analyze and act on those ideas to create a feedback culture.

Core Features

• Idea challenges to launch targeted campaigns for specific business problems or opportunities.

• Gamification to motivate employees to participate and reward them for their contributions.

• Sentiment analysis to measure employee mood and satisfaction based on their comments.

• Chatbot to guide employees through idea submission and provide instant feedback.

• Native integration with popular communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Workplace from Facebook, and Slack.

• Centralized dashboard to track, evaluate and prioritize ideas across different campaigns.

• Automated workflows to streamline idea management processes and provide feedback to employees.

• Analytics and reporting to measure the impact of ideas on business outcomes and employee engagement.

Pricing

Sideways 6 does not offer a free version of its product. The paid version starts at US$2,000.00 per month, though this information is not publicly available on their website and was sourced from a third-party review site. In addition to their standard pricing, Sideways 6 offers customized pricing plans tailored to meet the specific idea management requirements of their clients. To receive a personalized quote, interested parties can submit a form directly through the Sideways 6 website.

Crowdicity

Crowdicity is a cloud-hosted application designed to help companies collect, organize, and respond to feedback and proposals from their personnel, clients, and other stakeholders. The system employs social tools like voting, commenting, and gamification to promote teamwork, regardless of location or time zone.

Core Features

• Challenge management: Easily create and launch challenges, target user participation, refine ideas, and automate progression.

• Idea management: Capture, categorize, and prioritize ideas using various criteria and collaborate with others using social tools.

• Analytics tools: Measure and monitor challenge and idea performance using various metrics, and generate reports and insights.

• Mobile engagement: Access Crowdicity from any device, and receive notifications and updates via email or push messages.

• Access control: Control who can access your platform, invite users individually or use SSO/LDAP integration, and assign different roles and permissions.

• Email integration: Integrate Crowdicity with your email provider, and customize email templates and branding.

• Custom landing pages and user interface: Create custom landing pages for challenges and ideas, and customize the look and feel of the platform using themes, colors, logos, and images.

Pricing

Crowdicity has three pricing plans. Starter costs $99/month or $999/year for small teams or projects with up to 100 users, 1 challenge, basic analytics, and support.

Professional costs $499/month or $4999/year for medium-sized companies with up to 1000 users, 5 challenges, advanced analytics, and support.

Enterprise is for large organizations or networks with custom features, integrations, analytics, and support, price available on request.

Conclusion

After reviewing several idea evaluation tools, FeedBear definitely turns out to be one of the best options out there. With its affordable price, user-friendly interface, and impressive features, it's a great choice for businesses of all sizes.

One of the standout features of FeedBear is its centralized idea board, which allows you to easily keep track of all your ideas in one place. Additionally, the customizable public roadmap and changelog make it easy to communicate updates to your customers and keep them in the loop.

Another great thing about FeedBear is its modern design, which makes it easy on the eyes and enjoyable to use. Plus, the ability to close the loop with your customers is a game-changer, as it allows you to get feedback and make improvements based on their suggestions.

While there may be other tools out there with more advanced features, FeedBear is a solid choice for those looking for a simple, affordable, and effective idea evaluation tool. Give it a try and see how it can help you collaborate with your customers and build the right features for your business.

Improve how you handle feedback from customers and your team. Picture an easier way to gather, measure, and rank their feedback, ideas and feature requests. Try FeedBear for yourself to see the difference. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial and see how feedback helps you build better products!