Roadmunk vs. Productplan: Know the Difference

While Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations work well in conveying information, it lacks visual depiction and real-time collaboration for effective communication. 

Product Managers started switching to Roadmapping platforms to build visual roadmaps, collaborate with stakeholders, and devise strategies accordingly. 

The product roadmaps must be easy to build, customize, share, and integrate with other third-party apps. You will find many platforms catering to the different needs of product managers. But in this article, Roadmunk Vs. Productplan, we will review two of the best software aimed at building compelling roadmaps only. 

What is Roadmunk?

Roadmunk is a customer-driven roadmapping tool suitable for product management and marketing teams for managing campaigns and effective communication. Scalability remains one of the persistent features helping brands of different sizes accommodate their specific use. 

What is Productplan?

ProductPlan is a custom roadmap platform to align teams for building and collaborating on product strategies targeting the company’s major objectives. Drag-and-drop building features, customizable layouts, unlimited roadmaps, and many integrations help brands create effective roadmaps. 

Roadmunk vs. Productplan - Integrations

Roadmapping platforms are focused on conveying compelling visual product-building strategies to teams and stakeholders. But the creation of a roadmap requires planning, collecting customer feedback from varied platforms, market study, and communication with respective team members. Tackling these tasks requires integration with top platforms smoothening the overall process. 

Product Managers often use platforms like Slack, Jira, etc., to effectively perform these activities. But smooth functioning requires a roadmap platform that integrates with all necessary tools. Let’s move forward and understand the various integrations the concerned tools provide. 

ProductPlan: 

ProductPlan integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, Github, Trello, Slack, Confluence, Microsoft teams, and Pivotal tracker. Along with these, the platform provides an integration API to create custom APIs per requirements. 

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Roadmunk

Roadmunk only integrates with Jira and Azure DevOps helping teams connect their strategy with business objectives. You need to develop and sync custom integrations after installing their API. 

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Roadmunk vs. Productplan - Features

Let’s now have a look at the features that stand out in the given platforms. 

Roadmunk: 

• Pre-built templates 

Roadmunk provides many pre-built templates categorized into product, technology, project, product development, business roadmap, and many more. It saves the time required in creating roadmaps from scratch using excel or PowerPoint. You can pick any template of your choice, edit it, and customize it based on your requirements. 

• Roadmap building options 

Roadmunk caters to varied audiences by providing strict timeline-oriented and swimlane roadmaps. It's suitable for teams with strict deadlines and prioritizing efficient work completion through flexibility. Furthermore, it also allows tailoring the roadmaps based on specific viewers 

• Data organization 

Both Roadmunk and the p ProductP plan provides many features required for organizing data. You can organize your items by the project owner, status, objectives, etc. The platform also allows easy viewing of different sets of information and cross-referencing. 

However, Roadmunk provides a crucial feature called data pivoting which ProductPlan does not. Data pivoting allows shifting row data into columns, providing product managers with an improved degree of flexibility. 

• Favouriting roadmaps 

Roadmunk also provides a feature of favouriting roadmaps to save the time required in searching separately. You can easily search, review, and modify your most-used roadmaps appearing in a separate list on your homepage.

• Safety and Security 

Many businesses convert roadmaps into URLs to share with external stakeholders. But the URL contains sensitive information people can easily misuse. Roadmunk provides you with the option of deleting published URLs to ensure security. 

• Feedback mechanism 

Roadmunk helps businesses make customer-driven product decisions by capturing feedback in one place. It has a feedback inbox allowing the sales and customer support team to submit feedback for review. The chrome extension also allows extraction of feedback from platforms like Salesforce. Furthermore, anyone can submit feedback without any restrictions. 

ProductPlan: 

• Vast variety of customizable templates

ProductPlan also provides fully customizable templates broken down into four categories- Product, IT, Engineering, and Marketing. You can easily browse through the available templates. Furthermore, the Product Launch Plan template remains the most convenient template for businesses. 

• Plethora of tools for building compelling roadmaps

ProductPlan helps teams build unlimited compelling roadmaps and collaborate or share them with the audience. The availability of different layouts (timeline, list, and table) in a single click and custom views makes it preferable among other options. 

• Prioritization 

Both platforms have boards with pre-built frameworks and scoring systems assisting in effective prioritization. The boards help product managers identify backlog items and categorize them based on revenue and costs. This feature remains crucial to help teams prioritize items after evaluating core variables. 

However, ProductPlan stands out here by providing the option to set custom weights based on benefit or cost. The considered variable are rated considering the overall importance in decision making. 

• Safety and security 

ProductPlan on the other hand, allows you to share live roadmaps through a private link. You can also embed the roadmap through Confluence or a Wikipedia page. 

• Automated workflows 

ProductPlan provide integration with Azure DevOps. This integration saves businesses from manually updating information on multiple platforms. You can automate your workflows while keeping your objectives aligned with the curated strategy. 

• No restrictions on collecting feedback 

ProductPlan provides unlimited free viewer accounts, thereby allowing you to collect feedback without restrictions. It allows the secure sharing of private URLs to individuals, teams, or the entire organization in a single click. Yet, the feedback mechanism doesn’t stand up to the mark as it only focuses on a table view. The feedback capturing doesn’t focus on collecting reviews from individual customers. 

Roadmunk vs Productplan - Pricing

Roadmunk has four pricing plans catering to the needs of various users ranging from single road mappers to big enterprises. The business plan ($49) remains the most popular choice amongst users. Here is the basic breakdown of the four plans: 

ProductPlan offers three plans, namely Basic, Professional, and enterprise. There is no starter plan accommodating the need of road mappers requiring the basic visual representation of their strategies. Furthermore, the professional plan remains the preferred choice amongst users.

Let’s now compare the plans based on two of the most important criteria: 

• Affordability 

ProductPlan remains an affordable option providing a wide range of features. All the Roadmunk plans are expensive when compared to ProductPlan. However, both platforms provide enhanced features with higher plans. 

• Restrictions 

Roadmunk provides three reviewers in the starter plan, five in business, and ten in professional. Many other restrictive features follow the plans. On the flip side, ProductPlan has no restrictions associated with reviewers, API access tokens, custom weight factors, etc. (except the MS teams integrations). 

Final call: ProductPlan provides a plethora of features at an affordable rate when it comes to pricing. Limited restrictions make it a preferred choice amongst users. 

Roadmunk vs Productplan - Pros and Cons

Let’s individually go through the pros and cons to understand the platforms better. 

ProductPlan

Pros: 

• ProductPlan provides enhanced visibility to existing roadmaps for current and future actions. Integrating initiatives with Jira helps brands in setting priorities without struggling with details. 
• Customization of views as per audience allows easy access to information. You can control how much access you provide to a person, saving sensitive information from being misused. 
• A very intuitive and affordable platform when compared with other alternatives. 
• Improves team communication by keeping everyone updated. 
• Shares dynamic views with a simplistic approach suitable for new users to understand. 
• Creating roadmaps in minutes becomes feasible with highly professional templates. 
• No training is required for building custom roadmaps. 
• Pre-built templates organised in different categories save the time required in building everything from scratch. 

Cons: 

• The drag and drop feature provides easy movement, but some users are dissatisfied with its use in all sections. For instance, moving bars between projects cannot occur with simple clicks. 
• No option of uploading and editing a previous spreadsheet consisting of roadmaps. 
• No option of inculcating custom fields. 
• Comes with plenty of restrictions for non-roadmap owners. 
• Teams often complain about limited output in presentations instead of options like MS Project.

Roadmunk

Pros: 

• Provides easy visualisation of complex timelines with multiple swimlanes. 
• Presentation of key information and editing in real-time makes it suitable. 
• The import and export functionality assists in easy updates. 
• Highly suitable for businesses handling multiple user accounts and requiring a detailed graphical interpretation. 
• The functional aspect caters to the needs of every business (big and small). 
• Ease of use in creating multiple views using the same data set. 
• The drag-and-drop feature helps easily adjust timelines and other roadmap items. 
• A professional presentation and easy sharing options are appealing to clients and other stakeholders. 
• The customer support executives are incredibly helpful. 
• The intuitive interfaces remove the burden of manually adding or duplicating views. Users can invest time in performing tasks instead of time-consuming edits. 

Cons: 

• Complex for people with limited technical skills and require training. 
• Users often complain about the challenges with formatting and operating filters. 
• The platform takes time to process changes and functions slower than usual during editing. 
• Difficult in customizing the look of each view and column. Some edits are immediately filtered out, and users are stuck finding the items to cater to the specific filter. 
• Editing becomes difficult when you share screens with other members. 

Final call: Bboth ProductPlan and Roadmunk build professional roadmaps with captivating visuals. But we observed more users complaining about the loading speed of Roadmunk. 

A summarised comparison of Roadmunk and ProductPlan  

Conclusion: which is the best pick? 

While Roadmunk remains on the costlier side followed by the complexity, ProductPlan lacks core features like a feedback inbox. Zeda remains a top choice amongst Product Managers as they can collect feedback, analyze priorities, plan efficiently, and turn collected insights into relevant features. 

Collecting feedback from multiple sources becomes easier with the embedded feedback widget and a plethora of integrations.

With more than 50+ integrations, it helps you make the most of all your platforms. Furthermore, the creation and sharing of live roadmaps while keeping all stakeholders in the loop becomes easier.