Canny Ideas Explained: Do You Actually Need This Complexity?
Shayan, FounderUpdated 14 min read
Canny Ideas is Canny's overhaul of its product feedback system, replacing a flat feedback board with a five-level hierarchy of Groups > Subgroups > Ideas > Sub-ideas > Insights, split across separate internal and external views. Instead of a customer request living as a single post on a board, every piece of feedback now sits inside an internal planning tree that your team manages behind the scenes before deciding what customers see on your public portal.
When Canny rolled this out, they started hosting 30-minute training webinars, recurring "Office Hours" Q&A sessions, and multi-part video tutorials just to teach teams how to set up the hierarchy. That alone tells you almost everything you need to know about where the product is going.
A customer feedback tool has a simple job: customers tell you what hurts, other customers vote on it, and you let them know when you ship a fix. When your feedback board requires half-hour webinars and live office hours so your team can figure out whether a customer request is an Idea, a Sub-idea, or an Insight, the tool didn't just add features. It drifted into enterprise scope creep.
Below, we break down how Canny Ideas actually works, why the dual-view model creates hidden work for small teams, what it costs under Canny's tracked-user pricing, and how to decide whether your team needs five layers of taxonomy at all.
What is Canny Ideas?
Before Ideas, Canny worked the way most people expect a feedback board to work: you created a few boards, users submitted posts, and your team updated statuses as features moved toward launch. Canny Ideas replaces that flat model with a five-tier tree designed for internal product operations:
Groups > Subgroups > Ideas > Sub-ideas > Insights
At the top of the tree sit Groups and Subgroups, which act like folders and subfolders for your product areas or strategic initiatives. You might create a Group for your mobile app, and then nest Subgroups underneath it for authentication, offline mode, and push notifications. Both groups and ideas support up to three levels of nesting.
Inside those folders live Ideas and Sub-ideas, which represent the actual features or work items your team is considering and the smaller tasks that support them. At the very bottom sit Insights, which are the individual pieces of customer evidence attached to an idea: quotes pulled from Intercom or Zendesk tickets, snippets from recorded sales calls, internal notes from your team, or posts from your public board.
Alongside the hierarchy, Canny splits every item into two separate views. The internal view is an admin-only workspace where your team sees the sub-ideas, customer insights, private comments, and custom scoring formulas. The external view is the public post on your portal where customers vote, comment, and check the status. Canny's Autopilot AI ties into this layer by scanning connected support inboxes and call recordings to extract Insights and route Ideas into Groups automatically once you have at least three groups set up.
The training problem
Software products don't end up running weekly "Office Hours" by accident. They run them when users log in, stare at the screen, and can't agree on where a piece of work belongs.
Every layer of hierarchy you add to a tool forces a classification decision before anyone can do real work. When a customer writes into support asking for a way to filter invoices by date, your team now has to pause and play librarian. Is that an Insight that should be linked to an existing billing Idea? Should it be a Sub-idea nested under a broader reporting overhaul? Or does it deserve its own Idea inside an invoicing Subgroup?
Canny's training sessions and tutorials spend their time teaching teams rules for these exact edge cases: when to use Groups versus Subgroups, when an item crosses the line from an Insight into a Sub-idea, how auto-sorting assigns feedback, and how to build filtered table views for different departments.
On a small or mid-sized software team, that friction kills adoption. Engineers and support reps don't want to pause for a taxonomy debate every time a user reports a pain point. And most software teams already run their engineering sprints in Linear, Jira, or GitHub Issues, where features get broken down into sub-tasks anyway. Maintaining a second five-level work breakdown structure inside your feedback tool means grooming two backlogs instead of one.
How the dual-view system quietly breaks public boards
On paper, separating your messy internal planning view from a clean public portal sounds appealing. Product managers get a private space to weigh impact against engineering effort, attach CRM revenue figures, and group rough notes without customers watching every status tweak in real time.
In practice, splitting every feature request into an internal Idea and an external portal post introduces constant mental overhead. Your team has to remember which view they are looking at and which fields are visible to whom. Even Canny's own documentation has to remind admins that approving an internally captured Idea does not publish it to the public portal or notify customers unless you take a separate action to expose it.
The bigger risk isn't the extra clicks for your team, though. It's what happens to your customers.
Once a product team starts doing all of its triage, grouping, and roadmap planning inside an admin-only internal view, the public feedback board slowly turns into an afterthought. Customers still visit the portal and add their votes, but because the real conversation has moved behind the curtain into private Ideas and Insights, the public board stops moving. A tool you bought to build in public and close the loop with users turns into a one-way dropbox where requests sit in "Under Review" for a year.
What Canny Ideas actually costs
When Canny first introduced Ideas, it launched as a beta gated behind the Pro and Business plans. Since then, Canny has made Ideas the default workspace structure for new accounts and retired its lower paid tiers altogether. Both the old Growth plan and the entry-level Core plan that started at $19 a month billed yearly disappeared from Canny's pricing page by mid-2026.
Today, Canny sells three plans, and your bill scales with the number of "tracked users" who ever interact with your feedback:
| Plan | Tracked users | Monthly billing | Annual billing | What you get with Ideas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Up to 25 | $0/month | $0/month | Base Ideas hierarchy, 5 manager seats, capped at 25 tracked users total |
| Pro | 100 to 5,000 | $99 to $1,349/mo | $79 to $1,079/mo | Custom scoring fields, AI Themes, Jira and Linear two-way sync, MCP server |
| Business | 5,000+ | Custom quote | Custom quote | Ideas view sharing permissions, custom admin roles, HubSpot and Salesforce add-on |
While the base Ideas hierarchy is now turned on for new Free workspaces, the Free plan caps your entire account at 25 tracked users total. A tracked user is anyone who creates a post, casts a vote, leaves a comment, or has feedback logged on their behalf by an admin or Autopilot, and that count never resets at the end of the month. For almost any live SaaS product, 25 voters is a ceiling you hit in your first week.
As soon as your 26th user votes, or the moment you want the planning features Canny Ideas is built around, like custom fields for weighted scoring formulas, AI Themes, two-way Jira or Linear sync, or Canny's MCP server, you have to jump straight to Pro. There is no middle tier anymore.
Pro starts at $79 a month billed yearly, or $99 month-to-month, for 100 tracked users. Because every new customer who upvotes a post adds to your cumulative tracked-user count, the invoice climbs alongside your community engagement. At 500 tracked users, Pro costs $279 a month billed yearly, or $349 month-to-month. At 1,000 tracked users, you pay $529 a month billed yearly, or $661 month-to-month. At 5,000 tracked users, Pro reaches $1,079 a month billed yearly, or $1,349 month-to-month, before pushing you onto an annual Business contract. Even on Business, removing the "Powered by Canny" badge and connecting HubSpot or Salesforce revenue data to your Ideas cost extra as paid add-ons. See our Canny pricing breakdown for the full tier table.
Who actually needs Canny Ideas?
There is a specific kind of company where five levels of hierarchy and dual internal-external views make sense. If you run a large enterprise product organization with thirty or fifty product managers split across multiple product lines, you have a coordination problem before you have a building problem. When a dedicated product operations team spends its week pulling customer quotes from Gong calls, Zendesk tickets, and Salesforce opportunities and packaging them into executive roadmaps for sales and leadership, Canny Ideas is built for that workflow. At that scale, spending $6,000 to $15,000 a year on feedback software and sending new PMs to a 30-minute onboarding webinar is normal.
If you are a startup or a 5-to-30 person SaaS team building one product, your bottleneck is completely different. The founder, the product lead, and the engineers all read the same feedback board and talk in the same Slack channel. You already know your top three product areas without nesting subgroups three levels deep, and you don't need weighted RICE formulas to tell you what customers are asking for most this month.
When a small team adopts an enterprise planning hierarchy, one of two things happens: either one person gets stuck spending Friday afternoons filing Insights into Sub-ideas so the system stays tidy, or the team quietly stops updating the tool after three weeks.
What Ideas signals about where Canny is heading
Watching a product add five-level hierarchies, audience-specific view permissions, CRM opportunity linking, and $1,000-plus monthly tiers tells you clearly who they are building for next. Canny is moving upmarket to compete with enterprise roadmapping suites like Productboard, Aha! Ideas, and UserVoice.
There is nothing wrong with a company choosing to go after enterprise contracts. Every feature Canny has shipped around Ideas, from Business-tier view permissions to paid Salesforce add-ons, is designed to win larger multi-department deals and justify higher annual contract values.
The catch is that if you signed up for Canny because you wanted a clean, affordable place for users to post feature requests and vote, you are no longer the customer the product is being shaped around. You end up navigating extra layers of UI built for fifty-person product orgs while paying a tracked-user tax every time your customers participate.
A simpler approach to product feedback
We built UserJot for software teams that want to collect feedback, talk to their users, and ship features without needing a webinar to explain how the backlog works.
Instead of a five-level hierarchy and split internal-external records, UserJot keeps the structure flat and transparent:
- Boards group requests by product area or topic, and can be public or private.
- Posts hold the customer's actual request, votes, comments, and any annotated screenshots they captured from your app.
- Statuses track progress through six clear stages: Pending, Reviewing, Planned, In Progress, Completed, and Closed.
When you mark a request Planned or In Progress, it appears on your public roadmap automatically with its votes attached, with no second view to sync. Every status change emails everyone who posted, voted, or commented so customers never feel like their feedback disappeared into a black box. When you mark a request Completed, voters get notified automatically, and Juno, our AI assistant inside the changelog editor, can read your completed requests and draft the release note for you to edit and publish.
| Feature | Canny with Ideas | UserJot |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | 5-level hierarchy with separate internal views | Boards > Posts > Statuses |
| Training | 30-minute webinars and Office Hours | None needed |
| Tracked user limits | 25 on Free; 100 to 5,000+ metered | Unlimited on every plan |
| Pricing | $0, or $79 to $1,079/mo billed yearly | $0, $29, or $59/mo flat |
| Post without an account | Not documented; sign-in or SDK identify required | Yes, every plan |
| Live chat and inbox | None built in | Included in beta on every plan |
| Setup time | Hours of hierarchy and view configuration | Live in minutes |
Because UserJot charges a flat workspace price rather than metering tracked users, a feature request that gets 2,000 upvotes costs the exact same as one that gets ten. The Free plan never expires and includes unlimited end users and posts, two feedback boards, three admin seats, the public roadmap, the changelog, duplicate detection as users type, and the in-app widget. It also includes live chat and a shared support inbox, currently in beta and free on every plan while in beta, where Juno answers customer questions from your docs first and can file a feedback request or add a vote right from chat once the customer confirms.
Upgrading to Starter at $29 a month gives you five boards, up to 100 admin seats, a custom domain like feedback.yourcompany.com, private boards where a signed-in customer sees only their own requests while your team sees all of them, a moderation approval queue, and automatic login from your app onto the board. The REST API and MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT desktop are on every plan, including Free, so an agent or integration works from day one without paying. Professional at $59 a month adds single sign-on where your server signs a JWT, public identity masking, removing the "Powered by UserJot" badge, and all integrations. Because UserJot is built for software teams rather than enterprise procurement, it focuses on Slack, Discord, email-to-feedback, a REST API, and an MCP server rather than trying to replicate Jira or Salesforce inside your feedback board. See our full Canny alternative comparison for a side-by-side look.
Feedback doesn't need five levels of hierarchy. Unlimited users, simple structure, $29/mo.
UserJot keeps feedback, roadmap, and changelog in one simple loop.
Moving from Canny to UserJot in two minutes
If you are on Canny and want to step off the tracked-user escalator before learning a five-level hierarchy, you don't have to start your board from scratch. UserJot includes a built-in Canny importer on every plan, including Free.
To move your workspace over, generate an API key in Canny's settings and paste it into UserJot under Data & Import. Our AI maps your existing Canny boards and statuses to UserJot so you can review them on one screen, and clicking Start Import pulls over your posts, votes, comments, images, and changelog entries in the background. Every imported post, comment, and vote stays connected to the participating user by email, while inactive Canny profiles with no imported activity are skipped so your workspace stays clean. There is no downtime during the import, and you can follow the whole process in our step-by-step Canny migration guide.
Frequently asked questions
What is Canny Ideas?
Canny Ideas is Canny's internal feedback organization and prioritization system built around a five-level hierarchy: Groups, Subgroups, Ideas, Sub-ideas, and Insights. It splits every request into an admin-only internal view for scoring and notes and a public external view on your feedback portal. New Canny workspaces have Ideas enabled by default, and existing teams registered before May 2026 can turn it on.
Do I need Canny Pro to use Canny Ideas?
The basic Ideas hierarchy is available on Canny's current Free, Pro, and Business plans, but Free caps your entire workspace at 25 tracked users total. Any team with more than 25 participating users, or any team that wants custom scoring fields, AI Themes, two-way Jira or Linear sync, or the MCP server alongside Ideas, has to upgrade to Pro starting at $79 a month billed yearly or $99 month-to-month.
How much does Canny cost with Ideas access?
Once you pass the 25-user Free cap, Canny Pro starts at $79 a month billed yearly, or $99 monthly, for 100 tracked users. At 500 tracked users, Pro costs $279 a month billed yearly or $349 monthly; at 1,000 tracked users, it runs $529 a month billed yearly or $661 monthly; and at 5,000 tracked users, it reaches $1,079 a month billed yearly or $1,349 monthly. Above 5,000 tracked users requires a custom annual Business contract. See our Canny pricing guide for the full rate ladder.
Why did Canny remove the Core and Growth plans?
In May 2025, Canny replaced its older Starter and Growth plans with tracked-user billing across Free, Core, Pro, and Business. Then in June 2026, Canny removed the $19 a month Core plan from its pricing page as well, leaving Pro at $79 a month billed yearly as the first self-serve paid step above the 25-user Free tier.
What is the difference between Groups, Ideas, and Insights in Canny?
Groups and Subgroups are high-level folders and subfolders representing product areas or initiatives, such as a mobile app group and an authentication subgroup. Ideas and Sub-ideas are the features and sub-tasks your team is considering building inside those groups. Insights sit at the bottom as the individual pieces of customer evidence, such as support ticket quotes or portal posts, that explain why an Idea matters.
Why does Canny run training webinars for Ideas?
Because a five-level hierarchy with separate internal and external views introduces plenty of ambiguity around where feedback belongs. Canny hosts 30-minute training webinars and live "Office Hours" to teach teams when to create an Idea versus a Sub-idea, how to structure Groups and Subgroups, and how to manage internal versus public views.
Is there a simpler alternative to Canny Ideas?
Yes, UserJot organizes feedback with a flat structure of Boards, Posts, and six fixed Statuses, with no five-level hierarchy and no dual-view juggling. Every UserJot plan includes unlimited users and posts for a flat $0, $29, or $59 a month, along with a public roadmap, changelog, in-app widget, and live chat in beta.
Can I migrate from Canny to UserJot without losing votes and comments?
Yes. UserJot has a built-in Canny importer on every plan that connects with your Canny API key and imports your posts, votes, comments, images, and changelog entries in about two minutes. Each post, vote, and comment stays tied to the participating user by email, and our Canny migration guide walks through the mapping step by step.
Stop guessing what to build. Let your users vote.
UserJot keeps feedback, roadmap, and changelog in one simple loop.
