Aha! vs Productboard - What's the Best Feedback Tool in 2024?

The market for customer feedback tools has been growing in the past few years and for a good reason. Building a SaaS company has become easier than ever before and many people go into building a product hoping for the promises of a passive income. Then they have to collect customer feedback and actually build a product that customers want to use.

Feedback tools are a massive help here and Aha! and Productboard are one of the most popular in the market right now. You’re probably looking at both and trying to make up your mind - or you’re looking for a third option that’s even better.

Whichever the case, let’s get on with the comparison.

The features

In Aha!, you’ll find the product split up into three sections - Ideas, Roadmaps and Develop. The first two are necessary to collect and manage feedback and create roadmaps, so we’ll primarily cover those two.

Your Ideas portal is the number one place where your customers come together to give feedback about your product. They can do this through a variety of channels and integrations so everything comes in one place.

From there, you can create a roadmap, but only if you purchase Roadmaps as a separate add-on to the product. The roadmaps look great and building them isn’t difficult if you already have your feedback in one place. You can choose different layouts and customize them to show only the information you need for a specific target audience. Sharing the roadmaps is effortless too, with several different formats available.

If you don’t know what you want to do and how to do it, you’ll be overwhelmed because Aha! has a lot in one package. It’s a complex tool that does a great job, but the issue is in the first part - it may be too much for someone who wants basic feedback and roadmapping features.

Productboard has everything you need to collect and manage feedback as well as act upon it. You can use the app as a centralized feedback hub and have new customer comments come in from a variety of sources, including Zendesk, Microsoft Teams, Slack and more. Have it all come to the central feedback repository and move it along according to priority.

Each piece of feedback can be linked to an existing or new feature in the form of cards. Within each of them, you’ll be able to see real-time customer comments which will help you prioritize and create user stories, among other things.

With feedback in one place, creating a product roadmap is a breeze in Productboard. You can start with a template or create a custom one from scratch, organizing it by milestones, swimlanes, objectives, releases, and more. You can validate your ideas by creating a product portal, which is essentially an enhanced version of a product roadmap.

In essence. Productboard has it all, from soup to nuts. If you’re a seasoned product manager, you’ll have no problem setting everything up. If you’re just a startup founder looking for an easy way to collect feedback and create a roadmap, it will take quite a while to learn how to use Productboard fully.

The integrations

Compared to a typical SaaS product, Aha! isn’t exactly rich in integrations, but the ones it has are more than enough for typical use cases. At the moment of writing, there are 30 available integrations in Aha!, for apps such as:

• Jira
• Salesforce
• Slack
• Github
• Asana and others.

If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the available list, you can create your own integration using Zapier or the available API. In this regard, Aha! fares pretty well.

Productboard is not far behind though, with its 26 integrations. Slack, Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Mixpanel - there’s lots to love about this list. Developers will appreciate the integrations with Azure, Jira, Github and others.

If your favorite integration isn’t there, you can use the Productboard API to build something to your liking. Or you can use their own feedback portal (built in Productboard, of course) to request a new integration.

The pricing

When it comes to pricing of both Aha! and Productboard, things are nowhere near as transparent as you would expect from a typical SaaS product. The basic price that you see when signing up is not the price that you’re going to end up paying in most cases.

For Aha!, you’ll have to pay $39 per month to get started and use the Ideas portion of the application to gather feedback from your customers. You’ll have to pay an additional $59 to use the Roadmaps portion of the app, to build roadmaps, of course. And then, another $9 per month to use the Develop part in your engineering team. Total cost: $107 per month to use all the features in Aha!

On the other hand, Productboard has two plans with publicly available pricing. Essentials (at $20 per maker per month) and Pro (at $60 per maker per month). The Essentials plan gives you the basic features and the ability to create roadmaps. The odd thing is, you’ll have to get the Pro plan to get access to the customer feedback portal, which is a necessity to manage roadmaps.

In essence, you’ll have to read the fine script before getting any of the plans in either Aha! or Productboard. The good news is that there are more affordable options out there, like Feedbear - which offers all the features mentioned above and more for $49 per month.

Why FeedBear is a better alternative

Sure, Aha! and Productboard are great tools. But for what kind of customers?

Both of them cater to a specific audience - big companies with established product teams, processes and customer feedback methods. But what if you don’t fit into that category?

FeedBear is built for people who want a feedback tool that is:

• Easy to use and intuitive
• Customers can use just as easily as the product team
• Built for the entire feedback loop (from collecting feedback to building a roadmap, all the way to a changelog with the finished work)
• Made to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback
• Easy to integrate into any website
• Affordable enough for any startup

In short, FeedBear fits the bill for a large variety of companies, including yours too! Sign up for a free trial today!

Wrapping up

If you’re looking for an advanced feedback tool with a wealth of options for your product managers and developers, both Aha! and Productboard will be a good choice. The problem is, both come with a rather steep learning curve and there might be too many features for someone who’s just starting their product journey.

If you want something that has all the features of Productboard and Aha!, at a lower price point and is easier to use - give Feedbear a try! Sign up today for your free trial to get started!

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