Canny vs Uservoice - What's the Best User Feedback Tool?

As more companies around the world realize the value of feedback in product management, there are new tools popping up every day. While that is good news, the other side of the story is that choosing the right feedback tool for your own product team is getting more difficult by the day.

Canny and Uservoice are two names that have been in the feedback tool niche for quite a while now and both have their pros and cons. If you’re considering using one of these in your product team, read on as we discuss their pros and cons and help you make an educated decision.

What’s important when choosing the right feedback management app?

There are quite a few considerations to keep in mind. First, take a look at your own needs:

• How many customers you have
• What kind of feedback you want to collect (qualitative and quantitative)
• How many people you have in your product team
• What methods you currently use to collect and manage feedback
• What your budget is
• How much time you have to learn how to use the tool properly
• What other tools you use and whether your feedback management tool integrates with them

Depending on your answers to these questions, you’ll figure out what kind of tool you need and whether Canny or Uservoice meet your requirements. In general, you need something that is easy to use, both for your product team and for the customers.

In the sections below, we’ll discuss these and some other key aspects of Uservoice and Canny to help you decide for your next feedback tool.

Uservoice

Speaking in SaaS terms, Uservoice is definitely long in the tooth. Launched in 2008, Uservoice has gathered a portfolio of over 3,500 customers, including names such as Microsoft. It’s known as a tool for enterprise businesses, both in terms of features and pricing. While it is a pioneer in this niche, many Uservoice alternatives have tried to claim the spot since then.

Canny

This company has the completely opposite philosophy. Launched by two ex-Facebook employees in 2017, it quickly gained popularity with other startups, and it’s now used by companies such as Ahrefs, Bench, and Compass. There are many Canny alternatives to choose from, but it has become a popular choice of many small businesses today.

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Canny vs Uservoice - differences

The two tools are only seemingly similar and as you’ll see in a moment, there are some key differences to keep in mind. If you're wondering how to treat customers professionally, let's dive deep into both and find out which one is better for customer feedback management.

Differences in Cost

The first thing that comes to mind when comparing the price is that it’s not an easy task. This is primarily because Uservoice doesn’t have its pricing publicly available anywhere on its website. To find out the price, you have to sign up for a demo and get to hear the price at the very end.

However, if you do some digging around the web, you’ll find out that the basic plan is $499 per year, which includes one license for one product manager. If it seems steep, it’s because it is. Uservoice caters to large companies and chances are that you need a hefty budget just to be considered as their customer.

Oh and speaking of which, there’s a chance that they may decline to give you a demo if you don’t match their ideal customer profile. A good way of saying “more than you can afford, pal.”

Canny is much more transparent with their pricing, and more affordable too. At $400 per month, you get all the Canny features for 5 product managers. You get unlimited contributors, product roadmaps, and end-users.

Canny isn’t all that flexible since all you can really choose from is their Growth plan ($400) or you can create your own custom package. However, you can still see what you get and how much it costs, compared to Uservoice.

When it comes to pricing, Canny is the clear winner, both in terms of the value and the transparency around the cost.

Differences in Features

If you know about a product feedback feature, there’s a good chance that Uservoice tried it first. Feedback boards, roadmaps and changelogs - they have all the bells and whistles of an advanced product feedback tool.

On top of this, they have quite a few extras. For example, there’s a segment feature that allows you to split up your customer audiences based on the feedback that they give you and the requests they make. You can add even more information here by running NPS surveys through Uservoice.

The Salesforce integration/API can be interesting to some companies, as it allows you to link product gaps with missed opportunities. Besides Salesforce, you can connect Uservoice with Fivetran and Stich to get more BI information for each customer that leaves feedback.

Overall, really useful features for someone with a mature product and an advanced tool stack.

Canny has a feedback portal that you can effortlessly embed and collect all types of feedback in one place. The portal embeds in different platforms: your mobile app, desktop, and mobile versions of your website.

All of the feedback pools into one place - your dashboard, where you have an easy overview of the most requested features, comments and votes. Once you pick your favorites, you can move them to a product roadmap and end the feedback lifecycle with a changelog.

It has some cool features, such as a separate place for integration requests only and the ability to assign tasks from the feedback board and roadmap internally to your team members.

Overall, it’s clear that Canny’s feature set is intended for smaller teams and startups but can easily manage a robust upmarket product too.

Differences in Ease of Use

When you do some research about Uservoice, you’ll find that one of the most common complaints is that it’s difficult to use and that the onboarding takes quite a bit of time. Just to grasp the basics, you’ll need to spend a few weeks getting to know Uservoice better.

This is our experience too, as we found that Uservoice suffers from feature bloat - the basic (and only) plan comes packed with enterprise-level features such as a deep Salesforce integration for enriched business intelligence.

The Uservoice onboarding is clunky and slow because it’s built for big products and enterprise companies. If your SaaS just needs some roadmaps and a feedback board, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

On the flip side, Canny is pretty intuitive and easy to use, both for your product team and your customers. While it does have enterprise pricing, Canny was built for small to mid-sized teams.

That means easy and streamlined onboarding the ability to figure out which feature does what. Adding feedback widgets to your app or website is pretty effortless. You can track all your feedback in a single dashboard for a birds’ eye view of your customers’ thoughts.

All in all, just getting started with Canny is a lot easier compared to Uservoice, and things only get better in favor of Canny from that point on. In this category, Canny takes the win by a landslide.

Differences in Customer Service

There’s one important thing to note here first. At the moment of writing, Uservoice claims to have more than 3,500 customers globally. On the flip side, Canny has just 1,000, according to the company co-founder, Andrew Rasmussen.

When you have that in mind, it makes perfect sense that Uservoice’s customer support team can sometimes be slow and take quite a bit of time to get back to you. Bigger accounts have more priority, so if you’re an enterprise business spending big bucks every year, you’ll get help more quickly.

On the other hand, Canny has a smaller user base and will reach out quite quickly once you submit a ticket or send out an email.

Canny wins this round, but we have yet to see their customer support once they reach the number of Uservoice’s customers.

Differences in Integrations

Let’s keep this section short and sweet: Canny wins, hands down.

There are the integrations you can find in Uservoice: Slack, Jira, Zendesk, AzureDevops and Gainsight.

On the other hand, Canny integrates with Slack, Jira, Zendesk, Intercom, Zapier, Salesforce, Github, Segment, Okta and Microsoft Teams.

In other words, Uservoice has 5 integrations, while Canny has 10. And just any 10 - the addition of Zapier makes a massive difference as you can integrate Canny with any tool on the Zapier marketplace - your options are endless.

So, which tool is better?

Canny is overall a better choice of a feedback tool, when it comes to overall features, ease of use, integrations and the entire package. This is not to say Uservoice is a bad tool - it's just more complex and built for a more enterprise audience.

But what if you could get a tool that's easy to use, has the same features as Canny and has a much lower price point? You can - you just need to give FeedBear a try!

FeedBear: a powerful and affordable alternative to collect customer feedback

Are you looking for something that has all the best aspects of Canny and Uservoice but without the hefty price tag? You’ve come to the right place - give FeedBear a try!

Whether you’re running an enterprise business or a two-person startup, FeedBear has everything you need to collect feedback from your customers, analyze it and make smarter decisions related to your product.

Here's an example of how FeedBear customers use their feedback boards to discuss a feature request. For more examples of how you can use FeedBear, you can find inspiriation here.

Here's another example of a roadmap created by our customers, Brainboard

Use feedback boards to get all of your feedback in one place. Once a card is created, customers can vote on it, leave comments in threads and engage with your team. Based on votes and other forms of prioritization, move your best feature requests to a product roadmap.

A roadmap by our customer Squirrly

Creating one in FeedBear is a few minutes of work, thanks to our easy setup. Add your feature requests, customize your board and you’re good to go. Once customers add their feedback to the idea board, these items will also show up on the roadmap. This makes for a neat, live overview of your work in progress.

As features go live, customers get notified through emails. If you're looking for a superb way to close the feedback loop and leave no question unanswered, this is a great way to handle that problem.

Once a feature goes live, it also gets added to your changelog.

Sounds like something you need? Sign up for a free trial of FeedBear today and you’ll see why we’re a better choice than Canny or Uservoice!

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