Brainstorming is an essential element of the creative process, typically involving group discussion and collaboration to generate ideas and solve problems. However, without structured teamwork, valuable and practical ideas often get overlooked in the discussions or disorganized processes.

This is where brainstorming tools play a vital role. These platforms improve the innovation process by allowing people to both cultivate ideas and collaborate on them.

In this article, we will explore the functions and advantages of brainstorming software and provide an overview of the top 10 tools you can utilize to enhance brainstorming within your organization.

What is a Brainstorming Software?

Brainstorming software are tools that help in generating or gathering, managing, prioritizing, tracking, and sometimes collaborating on ideas. These software are utilized across various industries, specifically where innovation plays a key role.

Why Using Brainstorming Software is Important?

• Facilitates collaboration: These tools allow users to collaborate in real-time by allowing teams to work together seamlessly, reducing communication barriers and improving productivity.

• Organizes ideas effectively: Brainstorming platforms helps users organize their ideas into categories, tags, or themes making it easier to prioritize ideas and turn them into actionable plans.

• Increases efficiency: These tools often come with centralized idea portals that you can use to access your ideas, let people discuss them in detail, sharing and assigning them to team members and tracking them across various stages of development.

• Improves decision-making: A brainstorming tool usually helps teams to make data-driven decisions.

How to Select the Right Brainstorming Software

To pick the right tool, you need to know what you want to achieve and what benefits you need. This will help you find software that suits your needs and budget. Here are some things to think about:

• Define your goals: Before selecting any tool, it's important to define your goals. Determine the purpose of the software and what you aim to achieve. This will help you choose software that aligns with your objectives.

• Consider the features: Look for a platform that offers the features you need. Whether it's an idea board, collaboration tools, or project management, make sure the software you choose has features that align with your goals.

• Assess the user interface: The user interface should be easy to navigate and user-friendly. This will help you save time and increase productivity.

• Compare prices: The cost of the tool is an important factor to consider. Look for one that fits within your budget but also offers the features you need.

• Read reviews: Before making a decision, read reviews from other users. This will give you an idea of the software's strengths and weaknesses, and help you make an informed decision.

List of Top 10 Brainstorming Software

We did a lot of research to find the best tools you can select from for brainstorming. Our list has options for different needs and budgets. We looked at things like how well the software works, how easy it is to use, what it can do, and how much it costs. Let's dive in.

FeedBear: A Modern, Capable, and Easy Brainstorming Tool

FeedBear is an affordable and modern brainstorming tool designed to help teams manage their software development lifecycle efficiently. Our platform offers a fast and easy-to-use tool that helps teams stay organized, collaborate effectively, and keep customers engaged.

The core idea behind FeedBear is to build a powerful yet simple idea management and brainstorming tool. Unlike many alternatives that are bloated with features and settings, our tool reduces the learning curve for users and team members to near zero. Onboarding and setup take only a few minutes.

A secondary but important goal of FeedBear is to save time for product teams. FeedBear's AI-powered features allow team members to quickly reply to new ideas and generate changelog announcements for new features. The tool also moderates and rejects offensive and spam submissions, and automatically suggests similar ideas to users and team members to avoid duplication.

Visual Product Roadmapping

FeedBear enables the creation and management of a visual Kanban board-style product roadmap.

• Customizable columns and statuses allow for the precise communication of your desired outcomes, putting you in control.
• Tracking planned, in-progress, and completed tasks ensures team alignment toward common goals and provides a straightforward way to communicate progress with customers.
• Share it with your stakeholders or keep it private, it's your choice!

Idea Board

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

• A feedback platform that centralizes inputs from teams and customers.
• Allows comments and voting on ideas and can be used internally or publicly.
• Reduces duplication by automatically surfacing similar ideas and suggesting them to users.
• Aligns product development with customer needs, increasing satisfaction and reducing churn.
• Facilitates collaboration among product, support, and customer success teams to enhance the product and meet customer requirements.
• Gives team members complete control to merge, reorganize, edit, move, and delete ideas.

Customer Engagement

Use an idea board to work closely with customers and show that you care about their ideas. This can make customers feel like they're part of a group and want to stay with your company. Talk to customers in comments and discussions to find out what they really want and need.

Feature Announcements and Releases

Use a built-in changelog to tell customers about new features and releases. This will help them get excited about what's new. It will also encourage them to use the new features, which can help keep them happy with your product.

Integrate with Your Favorite Tools

Easily connect with popular tools like Trello, Jira, Intercom, Slack, and Zapier. Add the brainstorming tool to your current process to make sure everything works smoothly.

Simple and Customizable Design

FeedBear is very easy to start using. It's simple and can be customized easily. You can put it on your own website or in your app.

Affordable

Our pricing plans are simple and include your whole team. Our brainstorming tool is usually priced per user, but with us, you'll save money if you have more than one user.

Our Startup plan costs $49 per month for up to 3 team members, and our Business plan costs $99 per month for larger teams with unlimited members.

With FeedBear, you'll get lots of features and benefits, plus all integrations, at a great price.

In summary, with FeedBear you can

• Create transparency in prioritization by allowing users to contribute ideas and vote for preferred suggestions.

• Build loyalty and a sense of community among customers through regular updates on ongoing developments.

• Stay informed with automated status updates as progress is made on product advancements or customer requests.

• Provide accessibility for all team members with a user-friendly user interface (UI) design.

• Remove friction by giving the option for feedback submission without requiring an email address.

• Streamline feature development and effectively manage feedback with FeedBear's intuitive design.

Try FeedBear today and experience its powerful capabilities firsthand. It has the potential to greatly enhance your team's productivity and customer satisfaction.

Brightidea

Brightidea is software for innovation teams to manage their ideas and projects easily. It allows you to collect ideas from various sources, such as mobile apps, web portals, and email campaigns. You can evaluate ideas according to custom criteria, collaborate with team members, and track outcomes efficiently. This software helps you make data-driven decisions and execute innovation projects effectively.

Core Features

Idea Management

Brightidea centralizes idea gathering and organization with tools like idea boards, filters, and tags. Targeted idea campaigns can be created with defined scope, problem statements, evaluation criteria, and rewards.

Project Management

Brightidea manages innovation projects with goals, timelines, budgets, and roles. It tracks progress and performance.

Feedback Collection

It helps you gather feedback from various sources, including customers, employees, and partners, using surveys, forums, comments, and rankings.

Idea Sources

Brightidea collects ideas from diverse groups through campaigns, boxes, hackathons, and programs.

Integration

It integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Jira, and Zapier to streamline innovation workflow and data.

Pricing

Brightidea.com doesn't have a public price list. You need to contact them to get a quote based on your needs. People say the flat rate plan starts at $59/month.

Confluence

Confluence is a helpful tool for brainstorming with your team. It helps you organize and communicate about your work. You can create pages, spaces, and blogs to store and share information. There are also templates, macros, and integrations to make your content better. You can ask for input, feedback, and voting from your team or stakeholders.

Core Features

Spaces

Confluence helps you organize and share work by creating spaces for different teams, projects, or topics. This makes it easier for everyone on the team to access the information they need to do their work. You can also customize your space with themes, logos, colors, and permissions.

Templates

Confluence has templates for different purposes like product requirements, marketing plans, or employee development. These templates help you save time and keep your pages consistent. You can also make your own templates or change existing ones to fit your needs.

Feedback

With Confluence, you can leave comments, mention team members, and use emojis to give feedback. This helps you work better with your team and improve your ideas. You can also keep track of changes and revisions using page history and version control.

Integrations

Confluence offers integrations with other Atlassian products like Jira, Trello, and Bitbucket, as well as third-party apps like Google Drive and Slack.

Pricing

It comes with two pricing plans for its cloud option.

The Standard plan costs $5.75 per user per month and is for up to 10 users.

The Premium plan also allows up to 10 users and costs $11 per user per month.

The Premium plan has more features like unlimited storage, 99.9% uptime SLA, 24/7 Premium Support, advanced permissions, admin insights, anonymous access, audit logs, page archiving, a sandbox testing environment, and more.

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!

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Aha! Ideas

Aha! Ideas is a cloud-based brainstorming software that helps with strategy, feedback, prioritizing features, and creating roadmaps. It uses visuals to help you set goals and initiatives based on customer needs and market data. You can collect feedback from different sources and turn it into plans. The tool lets you prioritize features based on value and effort, create roadmaps for different audiences, and track progress across teams.

Core Features

Ideas Portals: Platforms where you can accumulate ideas from different sources and allow users to submit, vote, and comment on them.

In-App Feedback Widget: A tool to get ideas from customers while they use your product.

Custom Scorecards: A way to rate ideas based on your own criteria like value, effort, or risk.

Custom Fields: Add more info to ideas like tags, categories, or statuses.

Custom Workflows: A way to define the steps ideas go through from submission to implementation.

Empathy Sessions: Invite users to share feedback live via video or audio calls.

Reports and Charts: A way to see and analyze data from ideas like votes, comments, scores, or statuses.

Product Roadmaps: Connect ideas to your product strategy and show how they fit with your goals and plans.

Integrations: Connect ideas with other tools like Jira, Trello, GitHub, or Slack.

Aha! helps you capture, prioritize, and analyze ideas for your product. Some of its pivotal features for idea management include:

Pricing

The cheapest plan is $39 per user per month and needs at least 3 paid users. You can have as many feedback portals as you want. The more expensive plan is $59 per user per month and has extra features like custom fields and analytics.

MindMeister

MindMeister is a tool for brainstorming and sharing ideas online. It helps you organize your thoughts and create professional-looking mind maps. You can choose from different layouts, themes, and icons to make unlimited mind maps. You can also collaborate with others in real-time using chat and comments.

Core Features

MindMeister is a tool that helps you organize your thoughts and ideas. Here are some of its features.

Mindmap Templates: Use pre-designed templates to generate new ideas for different topics or situations.

Mindmap Editor: Create and modify mind maps to structure your thoughts.

Attachments: Add notes, links, images, or videos to supplement your ideas.

Project Management: Transform your mind maps into project plans, assign tasks, and set deadlines for team members using MeisterTask Integration.

Publishing and Embedding: Share your mind maps online or embed them on your website or blog to receive feedback or showcase your work.

Images, Video, and More: Enhance your mind maps by adding images from Google Images or Flickr, embedding YouTube videos or audio files, or including emojis and stickers.

Import and Export: Import mind maps from other formats, such as MindManager, Freemind, or XMind, or export your mind maps as PDFs.

Pricing

The free Basic plan lets you make up to three mind maps with real-time collaboration, import, and email support. The Personal plan costs €4.99/month (or $2.49/month for a lifetime deal) and gives you unlimited mind maps, advanced export options, file attachments, custom themes, statistics, and reports. The Pro plan costs €8.25/month and adds team management, branded presentations, custom styles, group sharing links, and priority support. The Business plan costs €12.49/month and includes everything in the Pro plan plus admin control, user groups, and custom domain mapping.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is software that helps organizations gather and prioritize ideas from people. It's used by businesses, governments, non-profits, and schools to involve their communities and create solutions. IdeaScale can help with issues like low employee involvement, slow innovation, and bad decision-making.

Core Features

IdeaScale is a cloud-based platform that enables users to manage and innovate ideas.

It offers the ability to create communities where members can submit, comment, and vote on ideas. The platform is optimized for all devices and browsers.

IdeaScale supports customizable fields for collecting relevant data for ideas, profiles, or campaigns.

The platform uses a stage-gate process to prioritize and select good ideas for development.

It integrates smoothly with various tools, including Salesforce, Slack, and SharePoint.

One of IdeaScale's essential features is its analytics and reporting, which provides valuable insights into idea performance. This feature allows users to determine the impact of concepts on their business.

Pricing

IdeaScale has four pricing plans: Engage, Evolve, Advance, and Transform. Each plan has different features and costs between $12,999 and $64,999 per year. There is also a free plan for up to 25 users and 5 campaigns, but it has limited features. Users can upgrade to a paid plan if they need more users or features. IdeaScale also offers custom subscriptions for users with specific needs. To get a personalized quote, users can contact IdeaScale's advisors. Note: These prices are not on IdeaScale's website, so users should check with IdeaScale before buying.

Build products and features your customers want using FeedBear. Give it a try for 14 days, free of charge, and see the impact of customer-driven development!

Get customer and team feedback easily with FeedBear! Centralize and prioritize feedback, ideas and feature requests. Try it for free and see how it improves your product development. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial!

Viima

Viima is a tool that helps you get ideas from your employees or customers. It can work with different processes like stage-gate, lean startup, and hackathons. Lots of different organizations like using Viima because it helps people work together, pick the best ideas, and keep track of how things are going. Viima can help solve problems like not having enough new ideas, not talking to each other enough, not getting good feedback, and not being clear about what's happening with ideas.

Core Features

Idea contribution and development: Viima lets you share your ideas easily through web, mobile, email, and Microsoft Teams. You can work with others by commenting, voting, and discussing ideas.

Idea ranking: The algorithm ranks ideas based on popularity, feasibility, and impact. Users can customize the criteria and filters to prioritize specific ideas.

Campaign management: Users can create and manage campaigns with goals and deadlines. They can also set rewards and feedback for each campaign.

Gamification tools: Viima uses gamification elements like points, badges, and leaderboards to motivate and engage users during the innovation process.

Reporting and analytics tools: You can use reports and dashboards to track idea and campaign performance. You can also export data to other tools for more analysis.

Pricing

Viima offers three pricing plans for teams: Free (up to 10 users and 1 board), Basic ($39/month for up to 50 users and 3 boards), and Unlimited ($1799/month for unlimited access to all features and users). All plans have a 7-day free trial of the Unlimited plan, and custom quotes are available for enterprise-level needs.

Innovation Cloud

Innovation Cloud is a helpful tool for managing the innovation process. It makes it easy to collect ideas from different sources, evaluate them, and use project management tools to put them into action. Innovation Cloud is useful for businesses of all sizes and types. It can help them improve their operations, encourage innovation, and bring ideas to market faster. Innovation Cloud can also solve problems like slow innovation, bad ideas, lack of teamwork, and wasting resources.

Core Features

• Inclusion of everybody in the front end of the innovation process
• Efficient management of the progress of ideas with streamlined ideation workflow
• Different plans for different company sizes and needs: Startup, Pro, and Enterprise
• Integration with Microsoft365 and other tools
• Management of your complete innovation process from the idea to the final product easier, faster, and based on your exact needs
• Democratization of data and use of cloud-native application platforms to create engaging experiences
• Unlocking new technical skills and expanded business capabilities by understanding customer needs and rapidly building innovations
• Insightful reports for better decision making
• Customizable workflows, forms, fields, and categories to suit your specific innovation process
• Collaboration and communication tools such as comments, ratings, notifications, and feedback

Pricing

Innovation Cloud has a free package that lets you work on ideas with your team. You can have up to 15 users, 100 ideas, and 1GB of storage. You can collaborate on ideas, vote on them, and see an activity dashboard.

For the PRO 20 plan, which costs 25€ or 30$ per month, you get more features like unlimited ideas, unlimited idea folders, and 2GB of storage. You can also share files, have discussion groups, and see analytics.

If you need more users, the PRO 50 plan is available for 60€ or 70$ per month. You can have up to 50 users, unlimited ideas, unlimited idea folders, and 5GB of storage.

Sideways 6

Sideways 6 helps employees share ideas for improving their workplace. It works with tools like Microsoft Teams or Yammer. Managers can use Sideways 6 to collect, analyze, and act on these ideas. This creates a culture of feedback and empowerment. Any organization can use Sideways 6 to tap into the wisdom of its workforce and make positive changes.

Core Features

Idea challenges for launching campaigns for specific business issues or opportunities.

Gamification to encourage employee participation and reward their contributions.

Sentiment analysis for measuring employee mood and satisfaction based on their feedback.

Chatbot for guiding employees through idea submissions and providing instant feedback.

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

Centralized dashboard for tracking, evaluating, and prioritizing ideas across different campaigns.

Automated workflows for streamlining idea management processes and providing feedback to employees.

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

Pricing

Sideways 6 costs money, with the cheapest option starting at $2,000 per month. They can also make a special plan just for you if you need it. To find out how much it would cost for you, fill out a form on their website.

Collect feedback the easy way. Centralize and prioritize feedback, ideas and feature requests with FeedBear. Start your 14-day free trial and see it for yourself!

Get customer and team feedback easily with FeedBear! Try it for free and see how it improves your product development. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial!

Idea Note

Idea Note is a web-based brainstorming software that assists businesses in collecting, developing, prioritizing, and acting on the most appropriate ideas. Users can create and launch idea campaigns, invite participants, evaluate and rank ideas, and track their progress. It is a useful tool for any organization seeking to enhance its innovation capacity, engage its employees or customers, and solve business challenges with creative solutions.

Core Features

With this tool, you can create idea campaigns tailored to specific challenges or opportunities. Customize campaign settings, including duration, audience, rewards, and feedback options, to suit your needs.

Visualize and organize your ideas on interactive boards that can be filtered, sorted, and grouped by attributes such as status, category, or rating.

Evaluate your ideas using methods like voting, rating, or commenting. Assign reviewers or experts to provide feedback on your ideas.

Transform your ideas into actionable projects with specific goals and milestones. Monitor progress and impact using metrics and reports.

It offers templates for different types of ideas, such as product improvement, customer feedback, or new business models. You can also create your own templates.

Invite and engage team members or stakeholders to join your idea campaigns. Collaborate on projects, share ideas, and provide feedback.

Measure and analyze the performance and impact of your ideas and projects, including the number of submitted ideas.

Pricing

The Free plan is good for small teams with up to 10 members. It has unlimited guests and all the tools to manage and improve ideas.

The Business plan starts at $49 per month for 15 members and can go up to 2,500 members. It's for bigger teams and has more features like custom branding, integrations, analytics, and support.

The Enterprise plan is for big companies that need a special solution. It has everything in the Business plan plus personalized account management, custom development, security, and compliance.

Conclusion

After exploring various brainstorming tools, it is clear that FeedBear is one of the best options available due to its affordability, user-friendliness, and features.

FeedBear provides a centralized platform to collect and organize ideas, a customizable public roadmap to keep customers informed, and a changelog to track progress. Its modern design and customer engagement capabilities make it a valuable addition to any team.

While other options exist, FeedBear's affordability and ease of use make it an excellent starting point for teams seeking to improve their brainstorming process. Give it a try and discover how it can assist you in developing the right features for your customers.