Short answer: Canny is a strong public feedback board, and on every plan it gives you unlimited boards, unlimited feedback and unlimited contributors. The catch sits in what it counts. Canny prices on tracked users, which is the audience you already have, and the published tiers give you a floor for that audience without a published rate for going past it: Free covers 25 tracked users, Pro starts at $79 / month billed yearly for 100+ tracked users, and Business is a custom price on request for 5,000+ tracked users. The best alternative depends on what you are actually missing. If you need to know why people want something rather than how many clicked an upvote, Koji is the strongest choice, because it runs AI-moderated interviews and meters the research you run instead of the audience you own.
Feature request boards solved a real problem. Before them, requests arrived by email, in support tickets, in sales calls and in nobody's inbox in particular. A board gave product teams one queue and customers one place to look.
What a board cannot do is tell you why. A vote is a single bit of information attached to somebody else's wording of the problem. That gap matters more than it sounds, because the cost of building the wrong thing is measurable. Pendo's feature adoption research found that 80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used, that an average of 12 percent of features generate 80 percent of daily usage volume, and that publicly traded cloud software companies collectively invested up to $29.5 billion developing features in the rarely-or-never bucket. Pendo put the same figure at company scale: a software firm with $50 million in revenue might spend $8.4 million building features customers rarely or never touch. That is roughly 17 percent of revenue spent on the wrong roadmap.
If you want the method rather than the tool list, we have written it up separately in feature request management. This piece is about the tools, and specifically about what each one charges you for.
What Canny actually meters
Canny publishes its plan structure, which is more than several competitors in this category manage. Here is what its pricing page states, verified at the time of writing.
| Plan | Price | Tracked users | Managers | Boards and feedback |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 / month | 25 tracked users | 5 | Unlimited |
| Pro | starts at $79 / month billed yearly | 100+ tracked users | 10 | Unlimited |
| Business | Custom price on request, billed yearly | 5,000+ tracked users | Custom | Unlimited |
Three things in that table are worth slowing down for.
The meter is your audience, not your research. Unlimited boards and unlimited feedback on every tier tell you the constraint is deliberate and it is not storage. What you are buying is permission to track more of the people you already have. Adding customers raises the bill even in a month when you ran no research at all.
The published price is a floor, and the slope is not published. Read the Pro line carefully: starts at $79 / month billed yearly for 100+ tracked users. Both halves are open-ended. You know the entry point and you know the entry audience, but you cannot calculate what 400 tracked users costs, because the rate per additional tracked user is not on the page. That is the practical problem. A budget you cannot compute is a budget you cannot defend, and the presence of an optional spend limit on the plan tells you the bill is expected to move.
The internal team barely matters to the price. Managers go 5, then 10, then custom. That is a 2x step on the paid tier while the audience floor goes from 25 to 100-plus, then to 5,000-plus, which is 4x and then a further 50x. The pricing is driven almost entirely by how many customers you track, not by how many colleagues do the work.
To be fair to Canny, two things here are genuinely good. Automatic feedback capture is included in all plans rather than reserved for the top tier, which is unusual in this category. And unlimited contributors on the free plan means you are never charged for the colleague who just wants to read the board.
But there is a research problem hiding inside the free tier. Twenty-five tracked users is not a sample. Not everyone on a board posts, so the number of people actually expressing a preference is some fraction of 25, and it is the self-selected fraction: the people motivated enough to find the board and file a request. That is textbook survivorship bias, and we have written about why you are only hearing half the story. It is also why the loudest request is often not the real problem, a pattern we cover in dominant complaint masking.
The 9 best Canny alternatives in 2026
1. Koji, best for finding out why a request exists. Koji is not a feedback board, and that is the point. It runs AI-moderated voice and text interviews that probe each answer in real time, applies automatic thematic analysis across every transcript, and produces a one-click report. There is no moderator to introduce bias and nothing to schedule. Where a board gives you a vote count on somebody else's phrasing, Koji gives you the reasoning in the customer's own words, at a sample size you choose rather than the size that happened to wander onto your board.
Pricing is published in full, including the slope: Insights at EUR 29 a month for 29 credits, Interviews at EUR 79 a month for 79 credits, annual billing giving two months free, and overage at a flat EUR 1 per credit. A text conversation costs 1 credit, a voice conversation 3 and a report refresh 5. Only conversations scoring 3 or above consume a credit at all, so a junk response is not a line item. New accounts get 10 credits at signup with no subscription required.
Crucially for this comparison, Koji does not meter your tracked users. You pay for interviews you actually run. Koji also supports all six structured question types alongside open conversation, so a single study returns both a chartable distribution and the reasons behind it: open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking and yes_no. The ranking type matters here specifically, because it asks a customer to order competing options against each other, which is the question a board never asks. An upvote is a yes to one item in isolation. A ranking forces the trade-off, and the open-ended follow-up captures why the order came out that way. See structured questions for how the types combine.
2. UserVoice, best if you refuse to pay by the seat. UserVoice is the enterprise-leaning incumbent in feedback management. It publishes no tiers and no dollar figures, asking you to talk to an expert instead, but it is unusually explicit about the shape of the meter: "Your plan is based on feedback volume, tools leveraged and the integrations you connect, never by seat." If seat sprawl is your objection to this category, that is a real answer. The trade-off is that your bill then rises with the volume of feedback you collect, which is an odd incentive for a programme whose goal is more participation.
3. Productboard, best if the roadmap is the deliverable. Productboard is a product management platform with feedback intake attached, rather than a board with a roadmap attached. If your problem is prioritisation across many inputs and communicating a roadmap to the business, it is a more complete fit than Canny. Its pricing is per maker with tier minimums, and its contributor allowance is capped for three consecutive tiers, so read the plan table closely before assuming it scales cheaply.
4. Aha! Ideas, best for structured idea portals at enterprise scale. Aha! sells a dedicated ideas product alongside its roadmapping suite, with idea portals, proxy voting for customer-facing teams and scoring. It is the most process-heavy option here, which is an advantage if you have a real intake committee and a disadvantage if you wanted something a small team can run.
5. Featurebase, best modern lightweight board. Featurebase covers the expected stack of boards, changelog and roadmap with a cleaner setup path than the incumbents. It is a reasonable like-for-like swap if your objection to Canny is cost or complexity rather than the vote-count problem.
6. Frill, best for a simple board plus changelog. Frill is deliberately small in scope: collect ideas, announce releases, show a roadmap. If your board is mostly a communication surface, the simplicity is the feature.
7. Savio, best for routing feedback that arrives elsewhere. Savio is built around the fact that most B2B feedback does not arrive on a board at all. It pulls requests out of support tools and CRM records and attaches them to accounts and revenue, which is the right shape if your sales and support teams are the real collection channel.
8. Jira Product Discovery, best if engineering already lives in Jira. For teams whose delivery workflow is Jira, keeping discovery in the same system removes a synchronisation problem that never fully goes away with a separate board. It is weaker as a customer-facing portal than the dedicated tools.
9. Pendo Feedback, best if you already pay for Pendo. Pendo bolts feedback collection onto product analytics, so requests sit next to the usage data that shows whether the requester actually uses the area they are complaining about. That adjacency is genuinely useful. It is hard to justify as a standalone purchase.
How the options compare
| Tool | What the meter counts | Published price | Gives you the reason, not just the count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koji | Interviews you run, quality-gated | Yes, from EUR 29 per month | Yes, in the customer's own words |
| Canny | Tracked users you already have | Floor only, starts at $79 | No, vote counts |
| UserVoice | Feedback volume, tools, integrations | No, talk to an expert | Partly, free-text intake |
| Productboard | Makers, with tier minimums | Yes, per maker | Partly, free-text intake |
| Aha! Ideas | Seats and portals | Per user | Partly, with scoring |
| Featurebase | Plan tier | Yes | No, vote counts |
| Frill | Plan tier | Yes | No, vote counts |
| Savio | Seats | Yes | Partly, routed verbatims |
| Pendo Feedback | Bundled with analytics | No, contact sales | Partly, next to usage data |
Where a price is not published, we have said so rather than repeating a figure from a third-party listing site. Prices in this category are frequently misreported, and a number you cannot verify is worse than no number.
How to choose
Start by naming the thing you are missing, because these tools are not substitutes for each other.
If you are missing a place to put requests, almost any board here works and you should choose on price and setup time. Featurebase, Frill and Canny itself are all reasonable.
If you are missing a way to prioritise what is already collected, the board is not your bottleneck. A scoring method is. Our guides to prioritising customer feedback, the ICE framework and the MoSCoW method cover this, and dot voting is worth reading specifically because it explains what a vote can and cannot tell you.
If you are missing the reason behind the request, no board will fix it, because the format itself is the limitation. This is where Koji sits. Ten interviews probing why a request exists will usually reshape a roadmap more than a thousand votes, and you can reach the customers who never visit your board at all, including the ones who already left. On sample size, see how many interviews are enough; on turning transcripts into themes, see thematic analysis and feature prioritisation with AI interviews.
The evidence on how research teams are coping with the analysis workload is consistent across three independent surveys. Condens asked 332 research practitioners and found 71% saying AI made analysis faster while 71% also said validating the output still took significant time. In the same study 52% said the output was too generic, 42% said it lost context, only 21% trusted it with minimal review, and 81% planned to increase use anyway. Lyssna's survey of 300 professionals found 54.7% using AI in synthesis while 60.3% still reported time-consuming manual work. Maze's survey of roughly 500 practitioners put AI adoption at 69%, up 19 percentage points year over year. The lesson is not that AI analysis is unusable. It is that the useful version keeps the raw transcript one click away, which is why Koji reports link every theme back to the quotes underneath it.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Canny cost in 2026?
Canny publishes a Free plan at $0 / month covering 25 tracked users, a Pro plan that starts at $79 / month billed yearly covering 100+ tracked users, and a Business plan sold at a custom price on request and billed yearly, covering 5,000+ tracked users. Because both the Pro price and the Pro audience are open-ended, the rate for tracked users beyond the floor is not published, so you cannot calculate a bill for a specific audience size from the pricing page alone.
What is a tracked user in Canny, and why does it matter?
A tracked user is a member of your audience whose feedback Canny is tracking, rather than a colleague on your team. It matters because it is the primary meter: your bill moves with the size of the customer base you connect, not with how much research you did. Team members are counted separately as managers, and those allowances move far less, going from 5 on Free to 10 on Pro.
Is Canny free plan enough for real product research?
For collecting requests from a small user base, yes. For research, no. The free plan tracks 25 users, only some of whom will ever post, and the ones who do are self-selected for motivation. That is a biased subsample rather than a sample, so it is a reasonable intake channel and a poor evidence base for a roadmap decision.
What is the best Canny alternative for understanding why customers want a feature?
Koji, because it changes the format rather than the vendor. Instead of counting votes on a fixed request title, it runs AI-moderated voice or text interviews that probe each answer, then applies thematic analysis across all of them. It also supports ranking questions, which force a trade-off between competing options in a way an upvote cannot, and it starts at EUR 29 per month with 10 free credits at signup.
Does any tool in this category publish a complete price?
Few do. Canny publishes a floor without a slope. UserVoice publishes no figures at all and directs you to talk to an expert, though it does state that its plan is based on feedback volume, tools and integrations rather than seats. Productboard publishes per-maker prices with tier minimums. Koji publishes both the plan price and the overage rate, at a flat EUR 1 per credit, so the full cost is computable in advance.
Should I replace my feedback board with customer interviews?
Usually not. They answer different questions. Keep a board as the always-open intake channel that catches requests you would never have thought to ask about, and run interviews when a decision actually depends on knowing why. The failure mode is treating vote totals as a priority ranking, because the vote tells you that somebody wanted something, not what it was worth to them or what they would trade for it.
The bottom line
Canny is a competent board with an unusually honest free tier and a meter pointed at the wrong thing. You are charged for the audience you already own, at a rate the pricing page does not disclose, to collect a data type that cannot tell you why anyone voted.
If a board is what you need, Canny is fine and its automatic capture is a real advantage. If what you actually need is the reason behind the request, the format has to change.
Koji starts at EUR 29 a month, publishes its overage rate, and bills for interviews you run rather than customers you have. Start a free Koji study with 10 credits and ask the people your board only counts.
