Short answer: UserVoice publishes no plan names and no prices, directing you to talk to an expert instead. What it does publish is the shape of the meter, and it is unusually direct about it: "Your plan is based on feedback volume, tools leveraged and the integrations you connect, never by seat." Refusing to charge per seat is a genuine advantage in a category full of seat sprawl. The trade-off is that the bill now scales with how much feedback you collect, so the better your participation, the more you pay. If what you need is the reasoning behind the feedback rather than more of it, Koji is the strongest alternative, because it meters the interviews you actually complete.
Every tool in the feedback management category has to meter something. What is striking, once you line them up, is that the three best-known options meter three completely different things, and none of them meters insight.
- Canny counts tracked users, which is the audience you already have.
- Productboard counts makers, which is your own headcount.
- UserVoice counts feedback volume, tools and integrations, which is your programme participation.
That third one deserves more attention than it gets, because it is the only meter in the category that gets more expensive as you do better research.
What UserVoice actually charges for
UserVoice does not publish tiers. There are no plan names and no dollar figures on its pricing page, only calls to talk to an expert, and a demo booking that comes with hands-on workspace access for 30 days. What it does state plainly, and identically across its pricing and plans pages, is the basis of the meter: "Your plan is based on feedback volume, tools leveraged and the integrations you connect, never by seat."
Give credit where it is due. The no-seat stance is real and it is rare. In a category where Productboard requires two makers minimum on its middle tier and five on Enterprise, a vendor that lets your whole team participate without a per-head charge has removed a genuine source of friction. Nobody has to ration logins. Support can file what they heard, sales can attach a request to an account, and none of it costs another seat.
Now the trade-off, which follows directly from the same sentence.
A volume meter prices participation, not insight.
If your bill is a function of feedback volume, then every action that increases participation increases cost. That produces an incentive structure a research team should notice:
- Running a campaign to hear from quieter customers raises the bill.
- Opening intake to a second product line raises the bill.
- Getting support to log what they hear instead of closing tickets silently raises the bill.
- Doing none of those things and letting your most vocal 2 percent supply the roadmap keeps the bill flat.
Nobody at UserVoice designed it as a penalty on good practice, and volume-based pricing is defensible: it roughly tracks the value delivered. But the effect is that the cheapest way to run the tool is to hear from fewer people, and hearing from fewer people is the original problem. The self-selected minority who file requests are not a sample of your customers, a failure mode we cover in survivorship bias in customer research.
An unpublished price is a procurement cost.
There is a second, more mundane cost. Because nothing is published, you cannot size the spend before booking a call, cannot compare against a budget you already hold, and cannot let a colleague sanity-check the number without repeating the sales process. For a team that needs a decision this quarter, that is real friction, and it is the most common practical reason teams in this category start shopping.
Why the meter matters more than the feature list
The stakes here are not abstract. 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 that rarely-touched bucket. At company scale, Pendo put it as a software firm with $50 million in revenue spending perhaps $8.4 million on features customers rarely or never use, which is roughly 17 percent of revenue.
A feedback tool is supposed to reduce that waste. It can only do so if the feedback inside it represents your customers rather than your most motivated ones, and if the volume of requests translates into an understanding of why those requests exist. Volume alone does neither. A thousand upvotes on somebody else's phrasing of a problem is still a single bit of information per person, and the loudest request routinely masks the real one, a pattern we unpack in dominant complaint masking. For the underlying method rather than the tooling, see feature request management.
The 8 best UserVoice alternatives in 2026
1. Koji, best for the reasoning behind the request. Koji meters the one thing the rest of this category does not: research you actually completed. 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, so no moderator bias, and nothing to schedule.
The whole price is published, which in this category is the differentiator. Insights is EUR 29 a month for 29 credits, Interviews is EUR 79 a month for 79 credits, annual billing gives two months free, and overage is 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, and new accounts get 10 credits at signup with no subscription needed.
Koji matches UserVoice on the thing UserVoice gets right, since there is no seat charge either, and then removes the volume penalty: hearing from more people costs what the interviews cost, at a published rate you can compute in advance. Koji supports all six structured question types alongside open conversation, so one study returns both a distribution and the reasons behind it: open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking and yes_no. The ranking type is the one a feedback portal structurally cannot offer, because it forces customers to order competing options against each other rather than approve each one in isolation. See structured questions.
2. Canny, best for a clean public board. The most direct like-for-like swap, with published plan structure, unlimited boards and feedback on every tier, and automatic capture included throughout. Read its meter carefully though: it counts tracked users, and the Pro tier is published only as a floor at starts at $79 / month billed yearly for 100+ tracked users, with no published rate beyond that.
3. Productboard, best if you need the roadmap as well. A full product management platform rather than a feedback portal. Worth it if prioritisation and stakeholder communication are your bottleneck. Note the seat mechanics that UserVoice deliberately avoids: $19 maker/month on Plus rising to $59 maker/month, 2 makers minimum on Business, and a contributor allowance that stays at 25 Contributors across three tiers.
4. Aha! Ideas, best for enterprise idea governance. Dedicated idea portals, proxy voting so customer-facing teams can submit on behalf of accounts, and structured scoring. The closest match to UserVoice on enterprise process depth, and the right answer if you have a real intake committee.
5. Pendo Feedback, best if you already own Pendo. Sits beside product analytics, so a request arrives next to data showing whether the requester uses that part of the product at all. That adjacency is genuinely valuable and hard to justify as a standalone buy.
6. Savio, best for B2B feedback that arrives everywhere else. Built on the premise that most B2B feedback never reaches a portal. It pulls requests from support tools and CRM records and ties them to accounts and revenue, which fits a sales-led motion better than a public board does.
7. Featurebase, best lightweight modern replacement. Boards, changelog and roadmap with a faster setup than the incumbents, and published pricing. A sensible option if your objection to UserVoice is opacity and overhead rather than the data format.
8. Jira Product Discovery, best if the team already lives in Jira. Keeps discovery adjacent to delivery and removes a synchronisation problem that never quite goes away with a separate portal. Weaker as a customer-facing portal.
How the options compare
| Tool | What the meter counts | Charges per seat | Published price | Gives you the reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koji | Interviews completed, quality-gated | No | Yes, plan and overage | Yes, in the customer's own words |
| UserVoice | Feedback volume, tools, integrations | No | No, talk to an expert | Partly, free-text intake |
| Canny | Tracked users | No | Floor only | No, vote counts |
| Productboard | Makers, with minimums | Yes | Yes, per maker | Partly, free-text intake |
| Aha! Ideas | Seats and portals | Yes | Per user | Partly, with scoring |
| Pendo Feedback | Bundled with analytics | Tier-dependent | No, contact sales | Partly, next to usage data |
| Savio | Seats | Yes | Yes | Partly, routed verbatims |
| Featurebase | Plan tier | Tier-dependent | Yes | No, vote counts |
Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we say so rather than repeating a number from a listing site. Third-party pricing for this category is frequently wrong, and an unverifiable figure is worse than none.
How to choose
Decide which of three problems you have, because these tools are not interchangeable.
If you need somewhere for requests to land, and your objection to UserVoice is opacity, go to a vendor that publishes: Canny or Featurebase. You will trade enterprise governance for a price you can read.
If you need structured intake across a large organisation, with proxy submission and scoring, UserVoice and Aha! Ideas are the serious options, and you will be booking a call either way.
If you need to know why customers are asking, changing portals will not help, because the format is the limit. A vote is one bit attached to somebody else's wording. Ten interviews that probe why a request exists typically reshape a roadmap more than a thousand upvotes, and interviews reach the customers who never visit a portal, including those who already churned. For the method see how many interviews are enough, thematic analysis, surveys versus interviews and feature prioritisation with AI interviews. For ranking what you already have, see how to prioritise customer feedback, the ICE framework and dot voting.
The research on AI-assisted synthesis is consistent on one point: adoption is running ahead of trust. 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% found the output too generic, 42% said it lost context, only 21% trusted it with minimal review, and 81% planned to increase use regardless. Lyssna surveyed 300 professionals, finding 54.7% using AI in synthesis while 60.3% still reported time-consuming manual work. Maze surveyed roughly 500 practitioners and put AI use at 69%, up 19 percentage points year over year. The practical conclusion is to require that every theme stay one click from the verbatim underneath it, which is how Koji builds reports.
Frequently asked questions
How much does UserVoice cost?
UserVoice does not publish prices or plan names. Its pricing page carries no dollar figures and no named tiers, directing visitors to talk to an expert or book a demo, which includes hands-on workspace access for 30 days. It does state the basis of the meter: your plan depends on feedback volume, the tools you use and the integrations you connect, and explicitly not on seats.
Does UserVoice charge per user?
No, and it is unusually clear about this. Its pricing page states that a plan is based on feedback volume, tools leveraged and the integrations you connect, never by seat. That is a real advantage over seat-metered competitors such as Productboard, which requires a 2 makers minimum on Business and 5 on Enterprise, because it means no one on your team has to ration access.
What is the catch with volume-based feedback pricing?
The bill rises as participation rises. Every action that makes your feedback more representative, such as opening intake to more customers or getting support to log what they hear, increases the metered volume and therefore the cost. The cheapest way to run the tool is to hear from fewer people, which is the opposite of what a research programme needs.
What is the best UserVoice alternative with published pricing?
Koji publishes the plan price and the overage rate together: EUR 29 a month for 29 credits on Insights, EUR 79 for 79 credits on Interviews, annual billing giving two months free, and overage at a flat EUR 1 per credit. Among feedback portals, Canny and Featurebase publish plan structures, though Canny publishes its Pro tier as a floor of $79 per month billed yearly without a published rate beyond 100 tracked users.
Which feedback tool tells me why customers want a feature?
None of the portals do, because a vote or a free-text request is a single input on somebody else's framing of the problem. Koji is built for that question instead: AI-moderated voice and text interviews that probe each answer, automatic thematic analysis across all transcripts, and ranking questions that force customers to trade competing options against each other rather than approving each in isolation.
Can I run a feedback portal and customer interviews together?
Yes, and that is the combination that works. Keep a portal as the always-open channel that catches requests you would never have thought to ask about, then run interviews when a decision is expensive enough to need reasons rather than counts. The mistake is treating portal volume as a priority ranking, since it measures who was motivated to write in, not what the request is worth.
The bottom line
UserVoice deserves credit for the thing it got right. Refusing to charge by the seat removes a real barrier, and saying so plainly on the pricing page is more honesty than most of this category offers.
But the meter it chose instead prices the wrong variable. Charging on feedback volume means the bill grows exactly as your programme becomes more representative, and because nothing is published, you cannot size any of it before a sales call.
Koji charges for neither seats nor volume of opinion. It charges for interviews you complete, at a published rate, with a quality gate so weak conversations are not billed at all. Start a free Koji study with 10 credits and find out why your top request exists.
