Choosing the right tool for  product management can be quite a task. You are going to invest in a tool that will determine your entire team’s efficiency and productivity. That is why it is important that you carefully scrutinize and consider factors like features, pros and cons, and compare competitive tools to come to a decision.

In this article, we are going to do a detailed comparison between two popular product management tools- Productboard Vs. ProdcutPlan. Since you are reading this, we believe you are already looking for a comparison guide of these two tools.

Let’s directly get to the point.

What is Productboard?

Productboard is a product management tool designed to empower teams to create and get the right products to market faster. It enables product teams to understand user needs, align teams on the roadmap,  prioritize features. and engage effectively with their customers. Over 6000 organizations worldwide used Productboard to innovate and build products. Productboard is easy to use, collaborative and integrates seamlessly with existing workflows.

Productboard’s key features include road mapping, idea collaboration, resource management, prioritization, feedback collection, milestone tracking, and monitoring of requirements and workflows. It is a complete solution for product teams to create, share, collaborate and integrate.

What is ProductPlan?

ProductPlan is an easy-to-use roadmap software offering a drag-and-drop interface for users to visualize, plan better and share product strategy across teams. It allows users to create beautiful, collaborative and flexible roadmaps in minutes while keeping teams aligned. To enhance user productivity,  it allows users to use custom legends, tags and containers.

ProducPlan’s custom legends allow users to colour-code their roadmap strategies easily, and its containers allow users to group bars together by theme. Additionally, users can highlight dates and set colourful milestones to make the roadmap visually appealing.

Productboard vs ProductPlan - Integrations

Productboard

Productboard offers integrations to your favourite productivity tools to keep the workflows going smoothly. These include-

Customer insights and collaboration integrations- Slack, Microsoft teams, Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom, Zapier, 

Delivery integrations- Jira, AzureDevops, Github, Trello, Shortcut, Pivotal Tracker

APIs- Productboard offers 3 types of APIs- Notes API, Features API and GDPR API. The Notes APIS helps users to capture product ideas, requests and feedback from any source and consolidate them on Productboard’s Insights board. Features API allows users to push prioritized features from Productboard into their preferred planning tool.

ProductPlan

ProductPlan offers integration to your favourite tools in one platform to keep your data and teams in sync. Integrations include Vimeo, confluence, Jira, Pivotal tracker, Slack, Trello, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, Github, and Azure DevOps.APIs. They also offer APIs making it easy to integrate ProductPlan with your existing systems.

Productboard vs ProductPlan - Features

Productboard

Here are the top features of Productboard-

Roadmaps

• Productboard allows users to add features and filters directly to the roadmap.
• Make high-level roadmaps and detailed release plans aligned with a single source of truth.
• HIgh-level customization to tailor your roadmap for every audience
• Define custom swimlanes, track milestones and collaborate across teams.

Feature Prioritization

• Identify the top requested feature.
• Evaluate features according to business criteria.
• Rank features according to priority.
• Distinguish the must-haves from the should-haves and nice-to-haves.
• Implement a data-driven product management process. 

Feedback Centralization

• Capture product ideas, requests, and pieces of feedback from colleagues and customers in one place.
• Consolidate all your feedback, sales conversation and messages from Zendesk, Gong, Microsoft Teams, and Slack in one place with integrations and APIs
• Automatically send relevant customer feedback to the right teams through insights automation.
• Link important insights from customer feedback to existing or new features.

Idea Validation

• Collect feedback on your ideas from customers, source new ideas and validate feature ideas. 
• Identify the top requested feature and understand why users need them.
• Update your customers about the requested features and close the feedback loop.
• Share your portal via a private link, public link, at a custom URL, or embedded in your site. 

ProductPlan

Here are the top features of Productplan-

Roadmaps

• Collaborate, share, and transfer an unlimited number of roadmaps between users.
• Share and collaborate across teams, push updates to Slack or export to a PDF, image or spreadsheet.
• Unlimited free viewer accounts.
• Share your live roadmaps via a private URL or embed that roadmap in Confluence or Wiki page.
• Filter custom views of your roadmap and share them separately to different audiences such as marketing, sales, and engineering.

Prioritization

• Learn which features are the most demanded and prioritise initiatives accordingly.

Table Layout

• Choose between timeline, list and table layouts with just a click.

Collaboration

• Collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders. Use @mentions while commenting to ensure engagement.

Templates

• Make use of templates to target specific audiences. Some of the ready-made templates are the IT service management roadmap template, customer-facing roadmap template, multiple product roadmap templates, software roadmap template etc.

Productboard vs Productplan - Pricing

Productboard

• 15-day free trial, no credit card required. 
• Essentials plan: $20 per maker/month (billed yearly) or $25 per maker/ month (billed monthly)
• Pro plan: $60 per maker/month (billed yearly) or $70 per maker/month (billed monthly)
• Scale plan: Custom pricing
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing. 

ProductPlan

ProductPlan offers three simple pricing plans with unlimited roadmaps and free viewer licenses. 

14-day free trial

Business plan: $39/month per editor

Professional plan: $69/month per editor (most popular)

Enterprise Plus plan: Custom. Request consultation.

Productboard vs ProductPlan - Support and Documentation

Productboard

Productboard offers support in the form of  Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, knowledge base, 24/7 (Live Rep) and chat. Training is available in person, live online, webinars, documentation and videos.

ProductPlan

ProductPlan offers support in the form of  Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, knowledge base, phone support and chat. Training is available in person, live online, webinars, documentation and videos.

Productboard vs ProductPlan - Security

Productboard

Productboard is ISO 27001:2013 and SOC2 compliant. They frequently conduct comprehensive audits of  applications, systems, and networks to ensure that customers’ data is always protected.

Additional security features of Productboard include-

• Single Sign-on (SSO)- Which allows only admins to determine who has access to sensitive business information. Productboard also supports Google SSO based on OAuth2.0
• Role Based Acces Control (RBAC) - It allows only specific users access to specific business information based on their role or designation.
• Password and Credential Storage- Productboard stores credentials using PBKDF function, and enforces a password complexity standard.
• Cloud Security- Productboard’s security architecture is built on top of ISO 27002:2013 controls and SOC 2 focus points.
• Application Security- Productboard utilises common best practices defined by standards like OWASP, NIST AND CIS benchmark.
• HR Security- Productboard ensures that employees adhere to the highest security standards by running extensive employee background checks and multiple administrative control.

ProductPlan

ProductPlan is SOC 2 Type II compliant. They continuously invest in security best practices for customer data security and privacy. 

Additional security practices include-

• ProductPlan’s physical infrastructure is hosted and managed within the Heroku cloud platform which manages its infrastructure within Amazon’s secure data centres. It utilises Amazon Web Service (AWS) technology to continuously manage risk and undergoes recurring assessments to ensure compliance with industry standards.
• The application runs within an isolated environment in Heroku, a cloud application platform that manages scaling, security and infrastructure configuration. Heroku’s infrastructure is managed in an AWS environment (us-east-1 region, N. Virginia)
• All customer data is stored in an access-controlled Heroku Postgres database unique to ProductPlan. The data is encrypted at rest using AES-256 block-level storage.
• All data in transit is encrypted using TLS 1.2/AES-128. Data-at-rest is encrypted using AES-256, block-level storage encryption to give heightened security.

Productboard vs ProductPlan - Pros and Cons

Productboard

Pros

• Productboard is considered one of the best tools for prioritization. It combines product feedback voting board and inbox with prioritization methods and roadmaps.
• Different views are available for different stakeholders like the sales, marketing and engineering teams.
• Task ranking, progress monitoring and customer ideation are the highest rated features on G2. 
• Flexible, easy to build and understand roadmap views. Integration of customer insights into features.

Cons

• Steep learning curve and complicated user experience.
• Can be on the expensive side for some users.
• Limited integrations available.

ProductPlan

Pros

• Easy to use and understand with intuitive UI.
• One of its greatest pros lies in several impressive templates that they have to offer. Their templates are designed for specific teams and uses which are both visually appealing and customizable.
• Offers unlimited viewers (cannot edit but view) for free.
• Great visualization for every team member and customization options.

Cons

• Limited integrations available.
• Can lag and be slow at times.
• Not suitable for feedback management, lacks product feedback boards, changelogs, and custom status.
• Moving bars between lanes is only possible with drag and drop. Some users find it annoying.

Here is a summarised comparison board of everything we discussed, to make it easier for you to compare.

Conclusion

Both Productboard and ProductPlan are high-value product roadmap tools. But when it comes to providing a complete product management experience, both of them fall shorts in vital areas. While Productboard is a great tool for prioritization and sorting views according to audiences, it has a steep learning curve which can be complicated for some users to use. ProductPlan is a great visual tool but lacks in some areas including feedback management, which is a crucial aspect of product development. Moreover, both of these tools have limited  direct integration capabilities.

That is why we have Zeda.io for you. It is a complete product management suite created in the best interest of Product Managers, carefully considering all their pain points and requirements. Zeda.io offers a complete product management experience allowing users to build the right features usingwith customer feedback. where-

• Product Mmanagers can sort and prioritise feedback requests, 
• Analyse and prioritize features with the help of built-in prioritization frameworks like RICE or even create custom ones,
•  Plan and co-ordinate efficiently with live roadmaps, 
• Execute efficiently and integrate with your favourite tools.

Additionally,

• Zeda.io can integrate seamlessly with more than 50 tools including Jira, Slack, Zapier, Zendesk, Trello and most other productivity tools. 
• Zeda.io’s support section contains detailed documentation and guides to help you proceed with onboarding as well as all other crucial activities of product management   

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