Canny vs Productboard (2026): Per Voter vs Per Maker Seat
Shayan, FounderUpdated 16 min read
Canny and Productboard get compared on almost every shortlist for customer feedback software, but they are built around opposite workflows and opposite billing meters. Canny is a public voting board where your customers browse ideas, upvote, and comment, and it bills you by "tracked users": the free plan stops at 25 voters, and Canny Pro climbs from $79 a month billed yearly at 100 voters to $529 a month yearly, or $661 monthly, once 1,000 customers have interacted with your board. Productboard is an internal prioritization suite for product managers billed per "Maker" seat with a five-Maker minimum and no listed price, and its customer portal keeps every submission private to the person who sent it, so your users cannot see or vote on each other's requests.
That structural difference catches a lot of teams off guard after they sign up. If you buy Productboard expecting an open community board where users rally around ideas, you quickly discover that customer submissions land in a private inbox and stay invisible unless a product manager manually turns them into portal cards. If you buy Canny expecting a predictable monthly software bill, a single popular feature request that gets shared in your user community or release notes can bring in a few hundred voters and multiply your invoice before the quarter is over.
Below is how Canny and Productboard actually compare on pricing, portal visibility, roadmapping, and AI in 2026, followed by how UserJot gives software teams public feedback boards on every plan, private boards from $29 a month, a roadmap, a changelog, and a support inbox for a flat $0, $29, or $59 a month with no per-voter or per-seat meter.
Side-by-side comparison
| Canny | Productboard | UserJot | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core workflow | Public customer voting board | Internal PM prioritization and roadmaps | Public and private boards, roadmap, changelog, chat |
| Billing meter | Per tracked user who posts, votes, or comments | Per internal Maker seat | Flat workspace price, no user or seat meter |
| Free plan | 25 tracked users, 5 managers | None on its pricing page | Unlimited users and posts, 2 boards, 3 admins |
| Entry paid plan | Pro at $79/mo yearly or $99/mo monthly | Business, no listed price, 5 Makers minimum | Starter at $29/mo flat for up to 100 admins |
| 1,000 voters / 10 PMs | $529/mo yearly or $661/mo monthly on Pro | Ten Maker seats, by quote | $29 or $59/mo flat |
| Portal visibility | Public threads and voting | Submissions private to each customer | Public boards on Free; private boards from $29/mo |
| Post without an account | Not documented; requires sign-in or SDK | With a verified email address | Included on every plan, on by default |
| Changelog | Dedicated public changelog on all plans | Portal "Launched" tab only | Dedicated public changelog on all plans |
| Remove vendor branding | Paid add-on on custom Business contract | Enterprise custom contract only | Included on $59/mo Professional |
Canny: public voting boards billed by tracked user
Canny is built around a public feedback portal where customers search existing feature requests, add their upvote, and discuss use cases in comment threads. When your team updates a request's status to Planned, In Progress, or Complete, the post moves onto a three-column public roadmap and Canny emails everyone who voted on it. Customers can also submit feedback from inside your app through an embedded widget, though they have to sign in or be identified through Canny's JavaScript SDK first, since Canny documents no way for unauthenticated visitors to post or vote without an account.
Where Canny bites is its tracked-user meter, which replaced its older flat-tier pricing in May 2025. Every person who ever creates a post, casts a vote, leaves a comment, or has feedback logged on their behalf by an admin or Canny's Autopilot AI counts as a tracked user. In December 2025, Canny retired its legacy free plans and required existing workspaces with more than 25 voters to upgrade or lose admin access. Then in mid-2026, Canny removed its entry Core plan, which had run $19 a month billed yearly or $24 monthly at 100 users and $249 yearly or $311 monthly at 1,000 users, from its public pricing page. New signups today start on a Free plan that caps your workspace at 25 tracked users total, a ceiling most active SaaS products hit within days of sharing their board link.
Once your 26th customer votes, moving to Canny Pro costs $79 a month billed yearly, or $99 month-to-month, for your first 100 tracked users and up to 10 manager seats. Pro is also the first tier that unlocks a custom domain, internal team comments, user and company segmentation, and issue sync with Jira, Linear, GitHub, Asana, and ClickUp. If you want to remove the "Powered by Canny" badge, connect Salesforce or HubSpot, or turn on Okta or OIDC single sign-on, you have to negotiate an annual Business contract marketed for 5,000 or more tracked users, where branding removal and CRM integrations are billed as extra add-ons on top of the base contract.
Productboard: internal prioritization with a private portal
Teams that compare Productboard against Canny often assume Productboard's Product Portal works like a public voting board. It doesn't. When a customer submits an idea to a Productboard portal, that submission stays private to the person who sent it. Other customers visiting your portal cannot browse what anyone else asked for, comment on existing requests, or upvote a peer's idea. Visitors can only score the importance of feature cards that a Maker on your team has manually curated and published to the portal.
That design makes sense once you see what Productboard is built to do. It is an internal repository and roadmapping suite for product management departments. Incoming messages from Zendesk, Intercom, Slack, Gong call transcripts, and sales notes flow into an internal Insights feed. Product managers highlight sentences inside those notes, link them as evidence to a multi-level hierarchy of products, components, features, and subfeatures, and score the backlog using RICE or custom weighted formulas.
Because the product is built for internal planning, Productboard charges per Maker seat, which means anyone on your team who creates roadmap cards or prioritizes features needs a paid license. Its pricing page lists only two plans, Business and Enterprise, with no Free or Plus plan, no listed prices, and a five-Maker minimum on both, and Business sits behind a "Request demo" button. Business includes unlimited feedback, 25 contributors, two product portals and an embedded portal, dependency tracking, customer segments, Amplitude and Mixpanel integrations, and portal single sign-on. If you want SAML and SCIM, Salesforce, a white-label portal, custom roles, audit logs, or unlimited contributors, you need Enterprise.
Canny vs Productboard pricing at scale
The two billing models scale along completely different axes: Canny charges you more as your customers participate, while Productboard charges you more as your internal team grows.
What Canny costs as customers vote
Canny's tracked-user count does not reset at the end of the month, so your bill ratchets up as more customers vote or comment over the life of your board. Here is Canny's published Pro pricing ladder, alongside the retired Core tier that still appears on older quotes:
| Tracked users | Pro billed yearly | Pro billed monthly | Legacy Core monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 or fewer | $0 on Free | $0 on Free | $0 on Free |
| 100 | $79/mo | $99/mo | $24/mo |
| 500 | $279/mo | $349/mo | $156/mo |
| 1,000 | $529/mo | $661/mo | $311/mo |
| 2,500 | $829/mo | $1,036/mo | $499/mo |
| 5,000 | $1,079/mo | $1,349/mo | $656/mo |
If you don't set a hard spend limit in your Canny billing settings, crossing a tracked-user threshold automatically bumps your subscription to the next tier and bills a prorated charge mid-cycle. If you do set a spend cap, Canny stops tracking feedback from new users once you hit your ceiling, and Autopilot pauses conversation analysis until you pay for the next rung. At 1,000 tracked users on Pro, you are paying $6,348 a year on annual billing or $7,932 a year month-to-month.
What Productboard costs as your team grows
Productboard's invoice ignores how many customers submit portal notes. Instead, your bill multiplies by how many product managers, designers, and engineering leads need Maker access. Productboard lists no price on its pricing page, so here is an estimate from list prices it no longer shows, applying the Business rates that were on its pricing page on October 1, 2026 to today's five-Maker minimum:
| Makers | At $59 a Maker, billed yearly | At $75 a Maker, billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | $295/mo | $375/mo |
| 10 | $590/mo | $750/mo |
| 20 | $1,180/mo | $1,500/mo |
New buyers request a demo or contact sales for a price, and extra Makers add prorated charges. Engineers and designers without a Maker seat can view roadmaps and comment as viewers, but they cannot move roadmap cards or change statuses. Also keep in mind that removing a Maker mid-term does not reduce your Productboard bill until your next renewal, and annual contracts require 30 days' written notice before renewal to cancel or drop seats.
How the features compare in daily use
Collecting feedback from customers
On Canny, collection is self-serve and community-driven. A customer opens your board or in-app widget, starts typing a title, and sees matching requests right away so they can upvote an existing thread instead of filing a duplicate. Because posts and comments are public by default, other users jump into the thread to add edge cases or explain how they work around the problem today.
On Productboard, customer collection happens mostly through support and sales channels or one-way portal forms. When a visitor submits an idea on a Productboard portal, there is no public thread for other customers to join. Instead, the note lands in the team's private repository, where a Maker decides what becomes a public card.
Prioritization and roadmapping
Canny keeps its public roadmap intentionally simple: three status columns on your portal showing what is Planned, In Progress, and Complete. For internal planning, Canny added Canny Ideas, which lets teams group requests three levels deep and rank them in tables using custom impact-and-effort formulas. However, Canny's own documentation notes that it does not offer timeline or Gantt roadmap views, and it documents no dependency tracking between features.
Productboard is built for multi-layered roadmapping. Makers can switch between timeline views, Gantt timeframe bars, swimlanes, and status columns, and connect features to company objectives and release groups. On the Business tier, teams can map blocking dependencies across features and tailor separate roadmap views for executives, sales, and customers. The trade-off is setup and maintenance overhead: keeping a multi-level hierarchy of products, components, features, and drivers accurate takes ongoing product operations work every week.
Changelog and voter emails
Canny includes a standalone public changelog on every plan, complete with labels, scheduled publishing, and an embeddable widget that shows a notification dot inside your app. When you change a feedback post's status, voters receive an automatic status email linking back to the thread.
Productboard documents no standalone changelog product. To show customers what shipped, Makers move feature cards into a "Launched" tab on the Product Portal and manually compose card-update emails to voters.
AI, integrations, and data export
Canny bundles its Autopilot AI into all current plans without a separate credit fee, using your tracked-user tier as the meter. Autopilot scans connected Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout, and Freshdesk conversations to extract feature requests, while Pro unlocks AI comment thread summaries, Smart Replies that ask follow-up questions, and an MCP server. Canny's project management integrations with Jira, Linear, GitHub, Asana, ClickUp, and Azure DevOps also start on Pro, while HubSpot and Salesforce sit on Business as paid add-ons.
Productboard sold Spark at $15 to $19 per Maker in beta, and both plans now pool workspace credits that expire monthly. Business gets 500 credits per Maker, and Enterprise gets 1,500 base plus 800 per additional Maker. Built for the product team, not a public board, Spark drafts briefs and specifications, runs competitive research, summarizes feedback, and connects to code repositories. Business includes five Jira and five Azure DevOps integrations, while Enterprise adds Salesforce and unlimited Jira integrations. If you ever leave Productboard, watch out for its export limitations: Productboard's help center notes that there is no efficient way to export a whole workspace, and feedback CSV exports omit the message body for notes imported from Zendesk, Slack, and Intercom.
When to pick Canny vs Productboard
Pick Canny when you want an open community feedback board where customers browse and upvote each other's ideas, you need native two-way Jira or Linear sync wired directly to your board, and your budget can absorb a monthly bill that climbs from $79 to $529 or more as customers engage. See our Canny alternatives comparison and Canny pricing breakdown for the full tracked-user rate table.
Pick Productboard when you run a larger product organization with multiple product managers who want a private evidence repository for support tickets and sales calls, weighted RICE scoring, and timeline roadmaps synced with Jira or Azure DevOps, and you specifically do not want customers seeing each other's requests. See our Productboard alternatives guide and Productboard pricing breakdown for more detail on Maker seats.
UserJot: public boards, roadmap, and inbox at a flat price
We built UserJot because software teams shouldn't have to choose between a feedback board that taxes them every time a customer votes and a product management tool that charges per Maker seat with a five-Maker minimum and doesn't list a price. UserJot puts your public and private feedback boards, product roadmap, changelog, and in-app widget in one fast workspace. It also includes live chat and a shared support inbox, currently in beta and free on every plan while in beta, with Juno, our AI agent who answers customer questions from your help docs and crawled websites, hands off to your team when a question needs a person, and searches your public feedback board right inside the chat so she can add a vote or file a new request once the customer confirms.
Our Free plan never expires and includes unlimited end users and posts, two feedback boards, three admin seats, guest posting and voting without an account, the public three-column roadmap, the changelog, and the in-app widget where customers can capture and annotate screenshots with arrows, boxes, text, and redaction. As users type a request on the board or widget, embedding search surfaces similar posts in real time so they can jump to an existing thread instead of creating a duplicate. When you ship a feature and mark the request Completed, everyone with an email on file who posted, voted, or commented gets an email automatically, and Juno can draft your changelog announcement from those completed requests right inside the changelog editor.
| Scenario | Canny Pro yearly | Productboard Business | UserJot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 25 tracked users | None on its pricing page | $0, 2 boards, 3 seats |
| 500 voters and 5 teammates | $279/mo | 5 Makers, by quote | $29/mo |
| 1,000 voters and 10 teammates | $529/mo | 10 Makers, by quote | $29 or $59/mo |
| 2,500 voters and 20 teammates | $829/mo | 20 Makers, by quote | $29 or $59/mo |
Instead of per-voter or per-Maker meters, UserJot charges a flat $0, $29, or $59 a month for your entire workspace. Upgrading to Starter at $29 a month covers up to 100 admin seats and five feedback boards, and adds 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, post moderation, and automatic login from your app onto the board. The REST API and MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other remote Streamable HTTP clients are on every plan, including Free, so an agent or integration works from day one without paying. Professional at $59 a month scales to 100 boards and adds single sign-on where your server signs a JWT, public identity masking, and the option to remove the "Powered by UserJot" badge. UserJot has a built-in importer for Canny that brings over your posts, votes, comments, images, and changelog entries, plus CSV import with AI column mapping for Productboard, and you can export your posts as a CSV any time on every plan. 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 Salesforce sync, Jira two-way sync, or Gantt dependency charts.
Unlimited users, predictable costs. See how flat pricing compares.
UserJot keeps feedback, roadmap, and changelog in one simple loop.
More comparisons
- Canny pricing: the full tracked-user rate ladder from 100 to 5,000 voters, what happened to the $24 Core plan, and Autopilot limits.
- Productboard pricing: Business and Enterprise plans, the five-Maker minimum, the last published rates, Spark AI credit pools, and renewal terms.
- Canny alternatives: UserJot and six other feedback boards compared side by side against Canny's voter meter.
- Productboard alternatives: public voting boards and roadmapping suites compared against Productboard's per-Maker plans.
- Best customer feedback tools: eight feedback platforms compared on pricing model, portal privacy, and data export.
Frequently asked questions
Which is more expensive: Canny or Productboard?
It depends on whether your customer community or your internal product team grows faster. For a product with 1,000 customers voting and commenting on feedback, Canny Pro runs $529 a month billed yearly or $661 a month billed monthly, while the retired Canny Core tier ran $249 a month billed yearly or $311 monthly. For an internal team of 10 Makers, Productboard Business now has a five-Maker minimum and no price on its pricing page, though at the rates on its pricing page on October 1, 2026 those 10 seats would run $590 a month billed yearly or $750 billed monthly. By contrast, UserJot costs a flat $29 or $59 a month for the entire workspace regardless of how many customers vote.
Can Productboard replace Canny for a public voting board?
No, because Productboard's customer portal is private to each visitor. Customers can submit ideas to your Productboard portal and vote on feature cards that your team manually publishes, but they cannot browse, comment on, or vote on requests submitted by other customers. If you want an open community board where users discover and upvote each other's ideas, you need a public voting board like UserJot or Canny.
Can I use Canny and Productboard together?
Some larger companies run Canny on the front end for public voting and Productboard on the back end for internal roadmap scoring, but doing so means paying two separate bills, one per voter and one per Maker, while maintaining two overlapping backlogs. If your team wants both public voting boards and private customer boards where users only see their own submissions, UserJot supports both in one workspace starting on the $29 a month Starter plan.
What happened to Canny's free plan and Core plan?
Canny switched to tracked-user billing in May 2025 and retired its legacy free plans on December 15, 2025, requiring workspaces with more than 25 tracked users to upgrade or lose admin access. In mid-2026, Canny also removed the entry Core tier from its public pricing page. Today, Canny's Free plan caps you at 25 tracked users total, and the first paid self-serve plan is Pro at $79 a month billed yearly, or $99 monthly, for 100 tracked users.
Does Productboard have a free plan?
Not on its pricing page, which no longer lists a Free or Plus plan. It shows only Business and Enterprise, both starting at five Makers, with "Request demo" and "Contact sales" buttons instead of prices. A 14-day trial signup that asks for no card and names no plan is still live at app.productboard.com/register, though only two help center articles link to it, not the homepage or pricing page.
How do Canny Autopilot and Productboard Spark compare?
Canny's Autopilot focuses on feedback intake: it extracts feature requests from Intercom and Zendesk conversations, detects duplicates, and on the Pro plan summarizes comment threads and drafts follow-up replies. Productboard's Spark is an internal PM assistant that drafts product briefs and specifications, summarizes feedback, runs competitive research, and connects to code repositories. Autopilot is included in Canny's tracked-user tiers, while Spark runs on monthly-expiring credit pools of 500 per Maker on Business and 1,500 base credits plus 800 per additional Maker on Enterprise.
How do I migrate from Canny or Productboard to UserJot?
Moving from Canny uses UserJot's built-in importer, which brings over your posts, votes, comments, attached images, and changelog entries. Moving from Productboard uses UserJot's CSV importer, where AI maps your exported columns to titles, descriptions, statuses, and authors before you confirm the import. Note that Productboard's own CSV export strips body text from notes that were originally imported from Zendesk, Slack, or Intercom.
Which tool is best for a B2B SaaS team?
For most B2B SaaS teams, UserJot is the best fit because it combines public voting boards, private customer boards, a roadmap, a changelog, and a support inbox for a flat $0, $29, or $59 a month, with JWT single sign-on and identity masking on the $59 Professional plan. Pick Canny if your team requires native Jira or Linear sync on the board and has the budget for tracked-user pricing, or pick Productboard if you have a large product management department that wants internal RICE scoring and timeline roadmaps rather than a public voting board.
