Discover The 10 Best Idea Management Software and Tools in 2024

To thrive in this quickly evolving business scene, generating novel and cutting-edge ideas alone won't cut it. Equally important is effectively managing those ideas and transforming them into something concrete.

This is where idea management software can play a game-changing role. A key benefit of facilitating seamless collaboration on fresh ideas, judging how feasible they are, and converting them into executable strategies helps startups stay ahead of the game.

What is Idea Management Software?

Idea management software and tools are apps that help companies work with new and great ideas. It's like a special online public notebook where employees, customers, and other stakeholders share their ideas and engage with each other.

People can work together to make the ideas even better by discussing and voting on them. Using dedicated tools for idea management makes it easier for businesses to think of new ideas faster and work together easily. It's like having a secret weapon that helps companies be better than their competitors!

Why Using Idea Management Software is Important?

• Increased Innovation: Idea management tools can help businesses generate new and innovative ideas, which can lead to the development of new products, services, and processes. It helps businesses stay competitive and relevant in their respective industries.

• Improved Employee Engagement, Satisfaction, and Retention: These platforms also help improve employee engagement by empowering employees to contribute their ideas and suggestions. Involving employees in the innovation process promotes a sense of ownership and engagement, which can lead to higher levels of job satisfaction and retention.

• Better Collaboration: Promoting a culture by using idea management software facilitates collaboration and communication among team members, which can help businesses work more efficiently and effectively. This helps businesses to improve their decision-making processes and achieve better outcomes.

• Cost Savings: Cost savings is another major benefit of using tools and processes for idea management. Businesses save a lot of money by reducing the costs associated with traditional innovation processes or running independent surveys that don’t run parallel to regular operations. By streamlining idea generation and evaluation, businesses can save time and resources, and focus on developing the most promising ideas.

• Continuous Improvement: Idea management software bring continuous improvement to processes, products, and services. By collecting and implementing feedback from all the stakeholders, startups and companies work continuously on innovation on all levels and keep their value relevant.

How to Select the Right Idea Management Software

Understanding how you want to use these platforms is critical to capitalize on the benefits that come with them. Whether you're a small startup or a large corporation, selecting the right software can make a huge difference in the success of your innovation efforts. Before making any decision, address these points:

• Understanding how to leverage platform benefits is crucial for success.

• Choose software that aligns with your innovation goals.

• Evaluate if your team needs an easy-to-use tool or one with advanced features.

• Consider customization options for meeting unique innovation needs.

• Look for scalable software with flexible pricing and feature expansion.

• Prioritize security features for idea management software.

• Consider these factors to select the right software for your innovation efforts.

Top 10 Idea Management Software and Tools

We've gone through a bunch of different tools and put them to the test. And now, we're excited to share our top ten favorites with you! So whether you're looking for something specific or just browsing, we've got you covered.

We’ve short-listed 11 tools that meet our criteria. So without any wait, let's dive in.

FeedBear: An Intuitive and Affordable Idea Management Tool

FeedBear is a platform we’ve been working on for the last few years and we’re really proud of how it has evolved into one of the best idea management tools you can find in the market. It’s a modern, simple, visually minimal, and affordable idea management tool designed to help teams manage and boost their innovation process. Our platform offers a wide range of benefits that can help your team stay organized, collaborate effectively, and keep your customers engaged.

Idea Board

FeedBear comes with an idea board that helps you collect ideas and feedback from your team and customers. It's like a bulletin board where you or anyone who has access can post ideas for improving your product, and people can comment and vote on them. You can either have an internal board for your team to suggest ideas or a public board where your customers can give their feedback and your team can respond to those ideas.

This way, you can gather ideas on bug fixes, feature requests, and redesign suggestions. The board can help you align your product development with what your customers need, making them happier and preventing churn. With our idea board, you can collaborate with your team and customers to create a better product that meets their needs.

Visual Product Roadmap

With FeedBear, you can create and manage a visually simple and intuitive product roadmap. Our customizable columns or swimlanes make it easy to organize and prioritize your projects. You can keep track of what's planned, in progress, and completed or customize the board based on the statuses that you work with. This ensures that everyone on your team is on the same page and working towards the same goals.

Collaborate with Your Team

Collaboration is essential to success in software development. With FeedBear, you can assign tasks and communicate with your team in real time. It helps everyone work together effectively and efficiently. FeedBear allows you to build a sense of community among your team members keeping them engaged and motivated.

Engage Your Customers

Keeping your customers engaged is key to reducing churn and improving retention. With FeedBear, you can share your roadmap publicly with your customers and demonstrate that you're listening to their feedback. This creates a sense of community and loyalty among your customers as well, reducing churn and improving retention.

Announce New Features and Releases with a Changelog

FeedBear includes a built-in changelog feature that allows you to inform your customers about new features and releases. It closes the feedback loop and generates excitement around your product.

By keeping your customers informed of the changes you're making, you can show them that their feedback matters and that you're committed to improving your product around their needs. These actions create a positive customer experience and can help prevent customer churn. Overall, FeedBear's changelog feature is a useful tool for keeping your customers engaged and informed about your product updates.

Integrate with Your Favorite Tools

At FeedBear, we understand that you’re comfortable with your own set of tools and workflows. That's why we integrate seamlessly with popular tools like Trello, Jira, Intercom, Slack, and Zapier. This makes it easy to connect FeedBear to your existing workflow and make sure that everything is working together smoothly.

Simple and Customizable Design

At FeedBear, we take pride in our simple, minimal, and customizable design making it easy to get started with little to no learning curve. You can publish your roadmap from your own domain, on your website, or inside your application. This ensures that it's accessible to your team and customers wherever they are.

Affordable Option

Starting at just $49 per month for the base package that comes with almost every feature you need, FeedBear is an affordable option for startups and small businesses looking to improve their innovation process. You get a wide range of features and benefits at an incredibly low price point.

What Users Love

• Users can add ideas and suggestions, and other users can vote for the ones they like.
• It gives a better understanding of what should be prioritized.
• It keeps customers posted about updates in progress.
• It sends automatic status updates.
• The UI is simple and easy to use.

To sum it up, FeedBear is an easy-to-use idea management software that comes loaded with an idea board, a product roadmap, and a changelog. It helps your team stay organized, collaborate effectively, and keep your customers engaged and informed. With its modern design and powerful features, it's surely a valuable addition to your workflow. Try FeedBear today and see the difference it can make for your team!

Brightidea

Brightidea is an innovation management software for product research teams. It provides the means to generate and evaluate ideas using several channels like web portals, mobile apps, email campaigns, paper forms, or voice skills. It allows you to collaborate on solutions and track outcomes with custom criteria.

Core Features

Idea Management: Brightidea offers a centralized platform for organizations to collect and organize ideas. The software provides tools such as idea boards, filters, and tags to visually display and sort ideas. Organizations can also launch targeted idea campaigns, defining the scope, problem statement, evaluation criteria, and rewards for participants.

Project Management: It enables organizations to create and manage innovation projects with clear goals, timelines, budgets, and deliverables. Team members can be assigned roles and responsibilities, and their progress and performance can be tracked.

Feedback Collection: Brightidea allows organizations to collect feedback from various sources, such as customers, employees, and partners, using multiple tools such as surveys, forums, commenting, and ranking features.

Idea Sources: This tool helps organizations to source ideas internally and externally using various methods such as idea campaigns, suggestion boxes, hackathons, and incubator programs.

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

Analytics: It provides teams with capable analytics tools to measure the impact of their innovation initiatives on various metrics such as ROI, engagement, participation, quality, and diversity. Organizations can generate reports, dashboards, and insights to share their results with stakeholders or improve future strategies.

Pricing

Brightidea.com does not publicly disclose its pricing details. To receive a personalized quote based on your specific requirements, you must contact them directly. However, users have reported a starting price of $59 per month for a flat-rate plan.

Confluence

Confluence is another idea management software that helps teams to collaborate on ideas effectively and according to your specific needs and workflow. It allows for the creation of pages, spaces, and blogs to store and present project information. Confluence also offers templates, macros, and integrations to enhance content. Users can invite feedback, comments, and votes from team members and stakeholders to align goals and share knowledge.

Core Features

Confluence by Atlassian is a team workspace that lets you create, capture, and share dynamic pages on any project or idea with your team. Here are the core features of Confluence from the perspective of an idea management tool:

Spaces: You can create spaces for different teams, projects, or topics to structure, organize, and share work. You can also customize your space with themes, logos, colors, and permissions.

Templates: You can use templates to quickly create pages for common purposes like product requirements, marketing plans, or employee development. You can also modify or create your own templates to suit your needs.

Feedback: Confluence lets people comment on pages, mention teammates, and use emojis to give feedback and suggestions. It lets you track changes and revisions on your pages with page history and version control.

Integrations: You can connect Confluence with other Atlassian products and third-party apps to streamline your workflow and access relevant information. Embed files, videos, images, macros, charts, and more on your pages to enrich your content.

Confluence is a capable tool for idea management because it helps you:

Pricing

Confluence offers two pricing plans for their cloud option.

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

The Premium plan, also designed for up to 10 users, costs $11 per user per month.

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

Aha! Ideas

Aha! Ideas is a cloud-based feedback software that helps you capture feedback, prioritize ideas, and create visual roadmaps. With Aha! Ideas, you can define your vision and goals based on customer needs and market insights. The app lets you collect feedback from different sources and turn them into actionable plans.

Aha! Ideas also allows you to prioritize ideas based on value and effort, create roadmaps for different audiences, and track progress across teams.

Core Features

Let’s quickly go through its core features

Ideas portals: You can collect ideas from different sources and allow users to submit, vote, and comment on them.

In-app feedback widget: It lets you capture ideas while customers are using your product.

Custom scorecards: You can assign scores to ideas based on your own criteria such as value, effort, or risk.

Custom fields: You can also add additional information to ideas such as tags, categories, or statuses.

Custom workflows: Aha! Ideas lets you define the stages that ideas go through from submission to implementation.

Reports and charts: You can visualize and analyze the data from your ideas such as votes, comments, scores, or statuses.

Product roadmaps: Using a product roadmap, you can also link your ideas to your product strategy and show how they align with your goals and initiatives.

Integrations: Aha! Ideas comes with a lot of integration options. You can connect it with other tools in your stack such as Jira, Trello, GitHub, or Slack.

Pricing

Aha! Ideas offers two pricing plans for idea management software.

1. The Essentials plan costs $39 per user per month (with a minimum of 3 paid users), which includes unlimited portals for crowdsourcing feedback.
2. The Advanced plan costs $59 per user per month (with a minimum of 3 paid users) and includes everything in Essentials, as well as advanced analytics, custom fields, integrations, and more.

Aha! Roadmaps is a complete product management suite that includes Ideas Essentials for crowdsourcing feedback. It offers four pricing plans:

1. Starter plan at $59 per user per month.
2. Premium plan at $99 per user per month.
3. Enterprise plan at $124 per user per month, and Enterprise+ plan at $149 per user per month.

If you want to include Ideas Advanced in your Roadmaps account, you can upgrade for an additional cost.

MindMeister

MindMeister is an online tool for creating mind maps allowing users to visualize, develop, and share their ideas. It offers various layouts, themes, and icons to help craft unlimited maps. Collaboration is possible in real-time with chat and comments, making it a good tool for brainstorming with team members.

Core Features

Some of the core features of MindMeister are

Mindmap templates: You can use templates to brainstorm ideas for different topics.

Mindmap editor: It lets you create and structure your ideas with a mindmap editor.

Attachments: You can add notes, links, images, or videos to your ideas.

Project management: MindMeister allows you to turn your mind maps into project plans and assign tasks and deadlines with its MeisterTask integration.

Publishing and embedding: Share your mind maps with others online or embed them on your website or blog.

Images, video, and other media: You can insert images, YouTube videos or audio files, emojis, and stickers to make mind maps, especially your ideas more engaging.

Import and export: The tool lets you import mind maps from other formats and export them as PDFs, images, or text outlines.

History mode: MindMeister allows you to track changes made to your mind maps over time, see who contributed what, and restore previous versions.

Pricing Information

The Basic plan comes for free and offers up to 3 mind maps, real-time collaboration, import functionality, and email support.

For those who want a bit more functionality and features, the Personal plan costs €4.99 per month (or $2.49 per month if you buy a lifetime deal) and offers unlimited mind maps, advanced export options, file attachments, custom themes, statistics, and reports.

The Pro plan, at €8.25 per month, provides team management, branded presentations, custom styles, group sharing links, and priority support.

The Business plan, at €12.49 per month, offers everything in Pro and additionally provides an admin control panel, user groups, and custom domain mapping.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is a type of idea management software that connects organizations with individuals who have innovative ideas. It assists in capturing, developing, prioritizing, and selecting ideas within an ecosystem and transforming them into organizational outputs.

IdeaScale is used by various organizations including government institutions, businesses, educational, and non-profit organizations, to encourage collaboration and co-create solutions, addressing challenges such as low employee engagement, slow innovation cycles, and poor decision-making.

Core Features

IdeaScale is a cloud-based platform that enables idea management and innovation. It’s an enterprise-level tool that users can use to create communities to submit, comment, and vote on ideas.

The tool is designed to work well on any device or browser. IdeaScale supports custom fields for ideas, profiles, or campaigns, allowing for the collection of relevant data. It uses a stage-gate process for the development, prioritization, and selection of ideas.

Integration with various tools and systems, including Slack, Salesforce, and SharePoint, is seamless. Finally, IdeaScale's analytics and reporting feature provides valuable insights into the performance and impact of ideas.

Pricing

IdeaScale offers four different pricing plans: Engage, Evolve, Advance, and Transform. The pricing plans are based on the number of users and features that users can access. The pricing plans range from $12,999 to $64,999 per year.

For users who do not require all the features of the paid plans, IdeaScale offers a free plan for up to 25 users and 5 campaigns. However, it has limited features and functionality. Users can upgrade to a paid plan at any time if they need more users or features.

For those who require custom subscriptions, IdeaScale provides personalized quotes based on specific needs or requirements that are not covered by the standard pricing plans. Users can contact IdeaScale’s team of advisors to request more information.

Note: These prices are not mentioned on IdeaScale’s website and are taken from third-party sources. They may not reflect the current or accurate prices of IdeaScale’s services. Readers should verify the prices with IdeaScale before making any purchase decisions.

Viima

Viima is an idea management software that allows organizations to collect and develop ideas from their employees or customers. It is adaptable to any process or needs, from stage-gate to lean startup, hackathons, and more. Viima is used by organizations of all sizes and industries to prioritize ideas based on various criteria and track their progress.

Core Features

Idea Contribution and Development: Users can submit their ideas using web, mobile, email, or Microsoft Teams. They can also collaborate with others by commenting and voting on ideas.

Idea Ranking: Viima uses a unique algorithm to rank ideas based on popularity, feasibility, and impact. Users can also set their own ranking criteria and filters.

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

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

Reporting and Analytics Tools: Viima provides reports and dashboards to help users monitor and measure their idea and campaign performance. They can also export data to other tools for further analysis.

Pricing

Viima offers various pricing plans based on the number of users and features required.

Free: This plan is ideal for teams who are new to innovation. It provides self-service support and basic features such as idea submission, voting, commenting, and ranking. The plan allows up to 10 users and 1 board.

Basic: For small teams looking for more flexibility and control, this plan allows up to 50 users and 3 boards. In addition to the basic features, it provides email support, custom fields, filters, categories, and integrations. The plan costs $39 per month.

Unlimited: This plan is best suited for larger organizations seeking unlimited access to all features and users. The plan provides priority support and advanced features such as campaigns, analytics, gamification, SSO, and API. It allows unlimited users and boards and costs $1799 per month.

All plans come with a 7-day free trial of the Unlimited plan. For enterprise-level needs, you can request a custom quote.

Innovation Cloud

Innovation Cloud is an effective idea management software that streamlines the innovation process from ideation to final product. It offers custom criteria to evaluate ideas and project management tools to execute them. Innovation Cloud aims to address common problems like slow innovation cycles, poor idea quality, lack of collaboration, and inefficient resource allocation.

Core Features

Everyone can participate in the innovation process. The workflow for idea generation is streamlined, and ideas can be tracked easily. The platform manages the entire innovation process from start to finish in a way that’s customized to your needs.

Data is democratized, and cloud-native applications create engaging experiences.

Technical skills and business capabilities are expanded. Insightful reports help with decision-making.

Workflows, forms, fields, and categories are customizable for your specific innovation process.

Collaboration and communication tools like comments, ratings, notifications, and feedback are included.

Pricing

Innovationcloud offers several pricing plans for its online idea management software. Innovationcloud pricing plans:

• Forever Free: 15 users, 100 ideas, 1GB storage. Features include collaboration, voting, idea board, sharing, access control, activity dashboard, scoring.

• PRO 20: 20 users, unlimited ideas, unlimited idea folders, 2GB storage. Includes all Forever Free features plus folders, documents, discussion groups, analytics.

• PRO 50: 50 users, unlimited ideas, unlimited idea folders, 5GB storage. Offers PRO 20 features plus custom fields, categories.

• PRO 100: 100 users, unlimited ideas, unlimited idea folders, 10GB storage. Includes PRO 50 features plus custom workflows.

• Enterprise: Customizable, demo request needed. Unlimited users, ideas, storage.

• Offers PRO 100 features plus innovation strategy planning, extensive analytics, reporting, customization, integration.

Sideways 6

Sideways 6 is an idea management software that facilitates employee engagement in change and innovation for businesses. Its existing collaboration with tools like Microsoft Teams or Yammer enable employees to share their ideas for improving the business. Managers can collect, analyze and act on those ideas, building a feedback culture. Sideways 6 benefits organizations wanting to tap into their workforce's collective wisdom and potential for change.

Core Features

Key takeaways from the text:

• Sideway 6 offers features for crowdsourcing, managing, and prioritizing ideas.

• Idea challenges can be launched to address problems or opportunities and encourage employee participation through gamification.

• The platform includes sentiment analysis, a chatbot for idea submission guidance, and integration with communication platforms.

• The centralized dashboard facilitates idea tracking and prioritization, while automated workflows streamline idea management.

• Analytics provide insights into idea impact, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Pricing

Sideways 6 does not offer a free version, and its paid version starts at US$2,000.00/month. However, this pricing information is not available on their website and was taken from a third-party review site. You can reach out to them via a form on their website to receive a personalized quote.

Idea Note

Idea Note is a web-based tool that assists organizations in collecting, developing, prioritizing, and implementing innovative ideas. It allows users to create and launch campaigns, invite participants, evaluate and rank ideas, and track their progress. This software is suitable for any organization looking to enhance its innovation capacity and engage employees or customers to solve business challenges with creative solutions.

Core Features

Idea Note offers several key features that enable organizations to crowdsource, manage, and prioritize ideas effectively.

Idea Campaigns: Create customized idea campaigns with various settings, including duration, audience, rewards, and feedback options.

Organizing Ideas: Organize ideas on interactive boards by filtering, sorting, and grouping them based on status, category, or rating.

Idea evaluation: Evaluate ideas using various methods and assign reviewers or experts to provide feedback.

Idea Progress Tracking: Turn ideas into actionable projects with clear goals and milestones, and track their progress using metrics and reports.

Custom Templates: Use ready-made or custom templates for different types of ideas.

Team: Invite team members or stakeholders to collaborate on projects.

Performance Management: Analyze project performance and impact using metrics.

Overall, these features provide businesses with a comprehensive solution for managing ideas, from ideation to implementation, while ensuring collaboration, transparency, and accountability throughout the process.

Pricing

The Free plan is ideal for small teams of up to 10 members who want to manage their ideas and enhance innovation. It comes with all the necessary features to collect, engage, manage, and automate ideas, and allows unlimited guest access.

The Business plan starts at $49 per month and can accommodate up to 2,500 members. It is best suited for larger teams or organizations that want to run multiple idea campaigns and projects. In addition to everything offered in the Free plan, it includes advanced features such as custom branding, integrations, analytics, and support.

Their Enterprise plan is designed for corporate customers that require a tailored solution to meet their innovation needs. It includes all features from the Business plan, along with dedicated account management, custom development, security, and compliance.

Conclusion

When it comes to choosing the best idea management tool for your business, FeedBear is definitely a top contender in the Idea Management Software niche. Its combination of affordability, ease of use, and functionality makes it a tough tool to beat.

FeedBear provides a centralized idea board, customizable public roadmap, and changelog all in one place. It comes with features like idea filtering, voting, chat-like threads for a detailed discussion of ideas, and seamless integrations with tools like Slack, Intercom, JIRA, Trello, etc.

Its modern design and ability to close the loop with customers make it a great choice for businesses looking to collaborate with their customers and build the right features.

If you're looking for a powerful yet simple and affordable solution, FeedBear is definitely worth trying out. It's a great way to start collaborating with your customers and putting your resources toward building the best product possible.