10 Best Idea Board Tools and Software to Try in 2024

Developing a new product is a challenging and complex task. It requires creative thinking, strategic planning, and effective communication among team members. To streamline this process, many product development teams use idea boards.

Whether you're working on a new app, website, or physical product, idea boards can help you keep your team focused and aligned. There are many idea board tools available in the market, each with its unique features and pricing. These tools offer a range of features, from simple to complex, to meet the needs of different teams. Most idea board tools offer a free trial period, so you can test them out before committing to a subscription.

What are Idea Boards?

Idea boards are digital or physical boards used by product development teams to visualize and organize their ideas, tasks, and goals. They allow you to capture your team's ideas in real-time, collaborate with even remote team members, and track your progress.

They are a popular tool in the tech niche with use cases for different roles like product managers, designers, developers, and marketers to brainstorm, prioritize, and track their ideas. Idea boards help teams identify the most promising ideas, clarify their goals, and create a roadmap for their product development process.

The Importance of Idea Boards

Idea boards are essential for successful product development. They offer numerous benefits, such as:

• Clearer Communication: Idea boards help teams communicate their ideas more clearly and effectively, reducing misunderstandings and miscommunications.
• Better Collaboration: Idea boards enable teams to collaborate more efficiently, especially when working remotely. They provide a central location for team members to share ideas, feedback, and progress updates.
• Improved Creativity: Idea boards promote creative thinking by allowing teams to brainstorm and visualize their ideas. They help teams generate more ideas and identify the most promising ones.
• Greater Efficiency: Idea boards streamline the product development process by enabling teams to prioritize their tasks, track their progress, and identify potential roadblocks.
• Increased Flexibility: Idea boards can be customized to meet the specific needs of each team. They can be adapted to different product development methodologies, such as Agile or Waterfall.
• Embeddable and Shareable: The idea board can be embedded directly on a website or app, making it easy for customers to submit feedback and ideas without leaving the platform.
• Feature Upvoting: The platform includes an upvoting feature that allows customers to vote on the feedback and ideas that are most important to them. This helps businesses to prioritize development efforts based on customer demand.

Overall, idea boards are a valuable addition to any product development process. They help teams stay organized, focused, and creative, resulting in faster and more efficient product development.

How to Select the Right Idea Board Tool

When choosing an idea board, it's important to consider the following:

• The purpose of the board: Determine if the board is for personal use or team collaboration.
• Features: Look for boards with features that fit your needs, such as the ability to add images and comments.
• Integrations: Check if the board integrates with other tools you use, such as project management software.
• Pricing: Consider the cost of the board and if it fits within your budget.
• User interface: Check if the board has an easy-to-use interface and if it's visually appealing.

By taking these factors into consideration, you can select an idea board that fits your needs and helps you achieve your goals.

List of Top 10 Idea Boards

We have put together a list of the best Idea Boards available in the market today. After conducting extensive research, we have carefully selected these tools to help you organize your thoughts and ideas with ease.

Our list includes tools that are user-friendly, affordable, and packed with features that will enhance your brainstorming sessions.

Check out our top 10 picks and take your creativity to the next level!

FeedBear: A Modern, Minimal, and Capable Idea Board

FeedBear is a modern and affordable idea board tool designed to help teams manage their software development lifecycle efficiently.

Our platform offers a fast and easy-to-use tool to help 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 that's powerful while also being the simplest tool on 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 want to build a tool that reduces the learning curve for users and team members to near zero. We think we've accomplished that: onboarding and setup take a few minutes.

A secondary but important goal with FeedBear is to reduce the work needed by 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 surface 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.

Shareable Roadmap

With FeedBear, you can easily create and manage a visual product roadmap using the Kanban style. You have complete control with customizable columns and statuses to communicate your needs effectively.

FeedBear also tracks planned, in-progress, and completed tasks, ensuring team alignment toward common goals. Also, it provides a simple way to communicate your progress with customers.

Engage Your Customers

Show your customers that you value their feedback by using an idea board.

Build a strong sense of community and loyalty among your customers to reduce churn and improve retention

Use comments and discussions on the idea board to identify the real problems and needs of your customers

Announce New Features and Releases

Keep your customers up-to-date with new features and releases by using a built-in changelog.

Engage with your customers and generate excitement for new features. Ensure that new features are not overlooked and receive real usage from customers. This will help you retain customers and increase their overall satisfaction with your product.

Integrate with Your Favorite Tools

Seamlessly integrate FeedBear with popular tools like Trello, Jira, Intercom, Slack, and Zapier.

Incorporate FeedBear into your existing workflow and ensure everything is working together smoothly.

Simple and Customizable Design

The simple and customizable design of FeedBear makes it easy to get started with little to no learning curve.

Publish your idea board from your domain, on your website, or inside your application

Affordable

FeedBear offers simple pricing plans that include your whole team, making it more affordable than most alternatives.

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

• The Business plan starts at $99 monthly for bigger teams, with unlimited team members.

Despite the incredibly low price point, FeedBear offers a wide range of features and benefits, including all integrations.

Overall, FeedBear is an affordable, practical, and effective solution for businesses looking to collaborate with customers and organize feedback and ideas. Its user-friendly design, centralized idea board, customizable roadmap, and changelog feature are a must-have for any innovation team.

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 FeedBear for free and see how it improves your product development. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial!

Brightidea

Brightidea is an idea management and innovation management software designed for innovation teams. It allows users to source better ideas, makes data-driven decisions, and execute innovation projects.

With Brightidea, users can create branded web portals, mobile apps, email campaigns, paper forms, or voice skills to collect ideas from anyone, anywhere. It also lets users evaluate and prioritize ideas using custom criteria, collaborate on solutions, and track outcomes.

Core Features:

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

• The platform provides various tools, such as idea boards, filters, and tags, to display ideas visually and sort them by various criteria.

• You can launch targeted idea campaigns for specific challenges or opportunities and invite participants to submit their ideas.

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

• You can assign roles and responsibilities to their team members and track their progress and performance.

• Brightidea enables organizations to collect feedback from various sources, such as customers, employees, partners, etc., on their ideas and innovations.

• 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.

• The software can integrate with various tools and platforms, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Jira, Zapier, etc.

• Brightidea provides capable analytics tools to measure the impact of innovation initiatives on various metrics.

• Organizations can generate reports, dashboards, insights, etc., to share their results with stakeholders or improve their future strategies.

Pricing

Brightidea.com does not publicly display pricing information. To receive a quote tailored to your specific requirements, you must contact them directly. User feedback suggests that the starting price for a flat-rate plan is approximately $59 per month.

Confluence

Confluence is a collaboration tool that allows you to work with your team to create, organize, and discuss ideas. It assists in documenting and sharing information by enabling you to create pages, spaces, and blogs. Templates, macros, and integrations can be used to enhance content. Also, you can invite feedback, comments, and votes from your team members and stakeholders.

Core Features

• Spaces: Create spaces to organize and share work for different teams, projects, or topics. Customize your space with themes, logos, colors, and permissions.
• Templates: Use templates to quickly create pages for common purposes. Save time and ensure consistency across your pages. Create your templates or modify existing ones to suit your needs.
• Feedback: Comment on pages, mention teammates, and use emojis to give feedback and suggestions. Collaborate with your team and improve your ideas. Track changes and revisions on your pages with page history and version control.
• Integrations: Connect Confluence with other Atlassian products and third-party apps to streamline your workflow and access relevant information. Link your pages with other tools and data sources. Embed files, videos, images, macros, charts, and more on your pages to enrich your content.

Pricing

Confluence provides two plans for its cloud option:

Standard and Premium.

• The Standard plan is designed for up to 10 users and priced at $5.75 per user per month.
• The Premium plan, also for up to 10 users, costs $11 per user per month.
• The main difference between the two plans is that the Premium plan offers unlimited storage, a financially backed 99.9% uptime SLA, and 24/7 Premium Support. It also provides additional features such as advanced permissions, admin insights, anonymous access, audit logs, page archiving, and a sandbox testing environment.

Aha! Ideas

Aha! Idea is a cloud-based tool that enables you to generate and organize your creative ideas. Its Idea Boards feature lets you capture your ideas and group them into categories for easy reference.

The tool allows you to set goals and initiatives based on market insights and customer needs, making it easier to prioritize your ideas.

Core Features:

• Ideas portals: Online spaces to collect ideas from various sources and enable users to submit, vote, and comment on them.
• In-app feedback widget: A tool to capture ideas while customers use your product.
• Custom scorecards: Assign scores to ideas based on criteria like value, effort, or risk.
• Custom fields: Add extra information to ideas like tags, categories, or statuses.
• Custom workflows: Define stages that ideas go through from submission to implementation.
• Empathy sessions: Invite users to share feedback live via video or audio calls.
• Reports and charts: Visualize and analyze data from ideas such as votes, comments, scores, or statuses.
• Product roadmaps: Link ideas to product strategy and show how they align with goals and initiatives.
• Integrations: Connect ideas with other tools like Jira, Trello, GitHub, or Slack.

Pricing

Aha! Ideas offers two pricing plans.

Essentials and Advanced.

The Essentials plan costs $39 per user per month and requires at least three paid users. It lets you create unlimited portals for getting feedback.

The Advanced plan costs $59 per user per month and also requires at least three paid users. It includes everything in the Essentials plan, plus advanced analytics, custom fields, integrations, and more.

Aha! Roadmaps is a product management suite that includes Ideas Essentials for feedback.

It has four pricing plans:

• Starter ($59/user/month).

• Premium ($99/user/month).

• Enterprise ($124/user/month).

• Enterprise+ ($149/user/month).

You can also add Ideas Advanced to your Roadmaps account for an extra cost.

MindMeister

MindMeister is an online tool for creating Idea Boards that allows you to visually capture, develop, and share ideas.

With MindMeister, you can brainstorm with your team, organize your thoughts, and present your ideas professionally. The tool offers various layouts, themes, and icons to create unlimited mind maps.

Core Features:

• Mindmap templates for brainstorming ideas on different topics or scenarios.
• Mindmap editor to create and edit mind maps for organizing and structuring ideas.
• Attachments to add notes, links, images, or videos to ideas.
• Project management for turning mind maps into project plans, assigning tasks and deadlines to team members using MeisterTask integration.
• Publishing and embedding to share mind maps online or embed them on websites or blogs to get feedback or showcase work.
• Images, videos, and more to make mind maps engaging and memorable by inserting images from Google Images or Flickr, embedding YouTube videos or audio files, or adding emojis and stickers to ideas.
• Import and export to import mind maps from other formats such as MindManager, Freemind, or XMind and export mind maps as PDFs, images, or text outlines.
• History mode to track changes made to mind maps over time, see who contributed what, and restore previous versions of mind maps.

Pricing

There are four different plans for using this mind-mapping tool.

• The Basic plan is free and lets you make up to 3 mind maps, work with others in real-time, import files, and get help through email.

• The Personal plan costs €4.99 per month (or $2.49 per month with a lifetime deal) and gives you unlimited mind maps, more ways to export your work, attach files, choose your own themes, see stats, and make reports.

• The Pro plan costs €8.25 per month and gives you more control over teams, lets you add your own branding to presentations, choose custom styles, share links with groups, and get priority support.

• The Business plan costs €12.49 per month and includes everything in Pro plus an admin control panel, user groups, and custom domain mapping.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is a tool that connects organizations to individuals with innovative ideas. With IdeaScale, you can capture, develop, prioritize, and select ideas that arise within your ecosystem and integrate them into your organizational outcomes.

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 decent ideas.
• Seamless integration with various tools and systems, including Slack, Salesforce, and SharePoint.
• Analytics and reporting feature for valuable insights into idea performance and impact.

Pricing

IdeaScale offers four pricing plans named Engage, Evolve, Advance, and Transform.

The pricing plans vary based on the number of users and features they provide. The pricing plans range from $12,999 to $64,999 per year.

The company also provides a free plan that supports up to 25 users and 5 campaigns. However, this plan has limited features compared to the paid plans. Users can upgrade to a paid plan anytime they need more users or features.

IdeaScale offers custom subscriptions to users who require specific features that are not covered by the standard pricing plans. Users can contact IdeaScale's team of advisors to get more information and receive a personalized quote for their custom subscription.

Note: These prices are not mentioned on IdeaScale's website and are taken from third-party sources. Therefore, they may not reflect the current or actual prices.

Viima

Viima is an innovation platform that assists organizations in collecting and developing ideas from their employees or customers. It is a simple yet decent tool that can be customized as per the process or need of the organization.

Core Features:

• Idea contribution and development: Users can submit their ideas through web, mobile, email, or Microsoft Teams. They can also comment, vote and collaborate with others.
• Idea ranking: Viima ranks ideas using a unique algorithm based on popularity, feasibility, and impact. Users can also customize their ranking criteria and filters.
• Campaign management: Users can create and manage different types of campaigns with 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: It provides various reports and dashboards to help users monitor and measure their ideas and campaigns' performance. They can also export data to other tools for further analysis.

Pricing

Viima has different pricing plans based on the number of users and features you need. Here are the plans:

• Free plan: For new innovation teams. Includes up to 10 users and 1 board. You get basic features like idea submission, voting, commenting, and ranking. You also get self-service support.
• Basic plan: For small teams that want more control. Includes up to 50 users and 3 boards. You get additional features like custom fields, filters, categories, and integrations. You also get email support. This plan costs $39 per month.
• Unlimited plan: For larger organizations that need all features and unlimited users. You get priority support and advanced features like campaigns, analytics, gamification, SSO, and API. This plan costs $1799 per month and allows unlimited users and boards.

All plans come with a 7-day free trial of the Unlimited plan. You can also request a custom quote for enterprise-level needs.

Innovation Cloud

Innovation Cloud is a software tool that helps manage the entire innovation process starting from an idea to the final product. It enables you to collect ideas from various sources, assess them based on custom criteria, and execute them using project management tools.

Core Features:

• Front-end inclusion of everyone in the innovation process.
• Efficient management of idea progress with streamlined ideation workflow.
• Different plans for different company sizes and needs.
• Integration with Microsoft 365 and other tools.
• Management of the complete innovation process from idea to the final product, based on your exact needs.
• Democratization of data and cloud-native application platforms for engaging experiences.
• Unlocking new technical skills and expanding business capabilities by understanding customer needs and building innovations rapidly.
• Reports and insights for 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

Innovationcloud.com offers the following pricing packages

• Free plan: 15 users, 100 ideas, 1GB storage. Collaborate, vote, approve, share, and control access.
• PRO 20 plan: 20 users, unlimited ideas/folders, 2GB storage for 25€/30$.
• PRO 50 plan: 50 users, unlimited ideas/folders, 5GB storage for 60€/70$ monthly.
• PRO 100 plan: 100€/115$ monthly, 100 users, unlimited ideas/folders, 10GB storage.

The Enterprise plan can be customized and needs a demo request. It has unlimited users, ideas, and storage, and features of the PRO 100 plan.

It also has innovation strategy planning, analytics and reporting, customization, and integration.

Sideways 6

Sideways 6 is a software tool that allows you to involve your employees to share their ideas for business improvement. It works with Microsoft Teams or Yammer to help managers collect, analyze and act on those ideas for a culture of feedback and empowerment.

Core Features:

• Idea challenges for targeted campaigns.
• Gamification to motivate and reward employee contributions.
• Sentiment analysis to measure employee mood and satisfaction.
• Chatbot for idea submission and instant feedback.
• Native integration with popular communication platforms.
• Centralized dashboard to track, evaluate, and prioritize ideas.
• Automated workflows to streamline idea management processes.
• Analytics and reporting to measure impact on business outcomes and employee engagement.

Pricing Information

Sideways 6 doesn't have a free version.

The paid version starts at $2,000/month, but you can't find the price on their website. You can get a customized price by filling out a form on their website.

On top of their standard pricing plans, Sideways 6 also provides customized pricing options based on your requirements. To receive a personalized quote, you can fill out a form on their website.

Crowdicity

Crowdicity is a cloud-based solution that organizations can use to collect, organize, and act on ideas and feedback from employees, customers, or other stakeholders. It offers a range of social features like voting, commenting, and gamification to facilitate collaboration across teams, locations, and time zones.

Crowdicity is suitable for any organization looking to promote innovation and engagement while addressing business challenges with community input.

Core Features

• Challenge management: Easily set and launch challenges, target user participation, refine ideas through systematic stage gates, and automate idea progression.
• Idea management: Capture, categorize, and prioritize ideas using various criteria such as votes, comments, ratings, or tags. Collaborate on ideas with others using familiar social tools.
• Analytics tools: Measure and monitor challenge and idea performance using various metrics such as engagement, diversity, impact, or innovation. Generate reports and insights to inform decision-making.
• Mobile engagement: Access Crowdicity from any device using a web browser or a native app. Receive notifications and updates on challenges and ideas via email or push messages.
• Access control: Control who can access your Crowdicity platform, invite users individually, or use single sign-on (SSO) or LDAP integration. Assign different roles and permissions to users based on their level of involvement.
• Email integration: Integrate Crowdicity with your email provider such as Gmail or Outlook to send and receive emails from your Crowdicity platform. Customize email templates and branding to match your organization’s identity.
• Custom landing pages and user interface: Create custom landing pages for challenges and ideas to attract and engage users. Customize the look and feel of your Crowdicity platform using themes, colors, logos, and images.

Pricing

Crowdicity has three pricing plans.

• The Starter plan costs $99 per month or $999 per year and is good for small teams or projects.

• The Professional plan costs $499 per month or $4999 per year and is for medium-sized organizations or departments.

• The Enterprise plan is for large organizations and the price is available upon request.

Idea Note

Idea Note is a website that helps groups gather and grow new ideas. It lets you create and start idea campaigns, ask people to join, rate and rank ideas, and keep track of progress.

Core Features

• Create and launch idea campaigns for specific challenges or opportunities.
• Customize campaign settings, such as duration, audience, rewards, and feedback options.
• Organize and visualize ideas on interactive boards.
• Filter, sort, and group ideas by different attributes, such as status, category, or rating.
• Evaluate ideas using various methods, such as voting, rating, or commenting.
• Assign reviewers or experts to provide feedback on ideas.
• Turn ideas into actionable projects with clear goals and milestones.
• Track the progress and impact of projects using metrics and reports.
• Use ready-made templates for different types of ideas or create custom templates.
• Invite and engage team members or stakeholders to join idea campaigns.
• Share ideas, comment on others' ideas, and collaborate on projects.
• Measure and analyze the performance and impact of ideas and projects

Pricing

Free plan: Small teams (up to 10 people) can improve the innovation process with unlimited guests and all necessary features.

Business plan: Costs $49/month, handles up to 2,500 members, and is for multiple campaigns/projects. Includes Free plan features and extras like branding, integrations, analytics, and support.

Enterprise plan: Customized solution for big companies with dedicated account management, custom development, security, and compliance. Includes Business plan features and is ideal for maximum customization.

Conclusion

After going through a lot of tools and platforms, we’re proud to claim and consider FeedBear as one of the best options the market has to offer. It has a combination of affordability, user-friendliness, and functionality that is hard to match.

One of the standout features of FeedBear is its centralized idea board, which allows you to organize and prioritize customer feedback efficiently. The public roadmap is also customizable and easy to use, making it very easy to communicate your product plans with stakeholders.

Also, FeedBear's changelog feature keeps your customers in the loop about the latest updates, ensuring transparency and building trust. The tool also boasts a sleek and modern design, which enhances the user experience.

Overall, if you're looking for an affordable and effective way to collaborate with your customers and build the right features, FeedBear is definitely an excellent choice for you to try.