Tool Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best idea management systems that I’ll cover in this article.
According to a Forbes article, 92% of consumers believe that innovation is a key factor in society’s progress. Any good product can tap into the innovation mindset by sourcing and testing new ideas.
One of the best ways to develop innovative products is to collect new ideas from team members and users—and idea management software can help you collate these ideas as you plan your next big product.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Idea Management Software Solutions
Here’s a brief description of each idea management platform to showcase each tool’s best use case and some noteworthy features. Feel free to read how I picked the software on this list at any time.
Wrike
Best idea management with to-do lists, timelines, & collaboration features
Wrike is a product management software that many businesses can effectively use to manage ideas for products through either the custom work views or the Wrike dashboard. The user-friendly dashboard can be used to pin to-do’s to efficiently manage tasks and review ideas by making sure that all ideas are visible.
Businesses can select from five different subscription plans and all plans can be used to manage product ideas. Even the freemium plan is useful thanks to the task and subtask management features that people can use to assign tasks on thinking of ideas. Being able to send messages is a plus as different members can collaborate to formulate new ideas for future products.
Wrike’s paid plans provide users with customizable dashboards, a real-time workspace, and calendars, which are ideal for making it easy to schedule tasks and keep the team on the same page. Users will be able to streamline management and keep discussions organized to keep any idea mismanagement from occurring. Using Wrike effectively simplifies processes since users will be able to share their progress at each stage of the project, identify and prevent delays through Gantt charts and Kanban boards, unlock advanced insights to get more ideas on which products perform well and formulate new products, and drive results through streamlined processes.
Using Wrike allows users to effectively manage their ideas for product management and development. Users can do so using the freemium, free trial, and paid software with no issue so different businesses, including smaller ones, will be able to effectively manage new ideas for product development. Of all the paid plans, the Business plan is the most popular plan with plenty of features that make formulating new ideas for new products or making adjustments to old products seamless.
Features include project management, task scheduling/tracking, resource management, expense tracking, API, budgeting, Gantt charts, marketing automations, collaboration support, and reporting.
Integrations include 400+ pre-built native integrations, including integrations with the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.
Craft.io
Best idea management software with a strategic roadmap feature
Craft.io is a product management platform for managing the entire life cycle of new product development. It acts as a collaborative space where product design and development teams can communicate and share files, product updates, and other critical information.
This product and project management software has a prioritization feature to rank new ideas and then start executing them based on urgency. Craft.io has a capacity planning feature to ensure that you have enough human resources to deliver new products on time.
Craft.io has a strategy roadmap feature to help you visually monitor product development and ensure that the features of your new product utilize ideas submitted by team members. You can also use this road mapping feature to visualize how your new product will affect objectives and KPIs.
Craft.io’s strategy roadmap provides collaborators with a private space to communicate to follow up on their ideas and suggested features. Craft.io integrates with other collaboration and idea management tools, including GitLab, Dropbox, Jira, and Pivotal Tracker.
You can connect Craft.io to a paid Zapier account to access other product development tools.
Craft.io pricing starts at $49/month/user, and they offer a 14-day free trial.
Brightidea
Best idea management software with a native whiteboard feature
Brightidea is an idea management software to collect, screen, evaluate, and develop ideas in product development. It has an idea box feature where employees can submit new ideas anytime.
Brightidea has a labs feature for facilitating design research for new products without installing a separate PLM software. This idea management tool also has an external innovation feature to help you explore ideas from outside sources like universities and startups.
Brainstorming is one of the best ways to gather ideas for new products and Brightidea has a native whiteboard feature to help you make brainstorming more productive. It has stickies you can use to take note of suggestions for new products.
Brightidea’s whiteboard has markers and pens that team members can use to illustrate ideas to make them easier to understand. It also allows participants to upload images to show other participants pictures of prototypes or features they want to add.
Brightidea offers customized pricing and a free demo upon request.
Ignition
Best idea management with idea submission & voting
Ignition is an idea management software that helps companies capture, curate, and collaborate on new ideas for products. It enables businesses to identify trends that can be leveraged to create innovative solutions that provide value to customers. Organizations can unlock the potential of their most creative employees and develop ideas that can make a real difference in their bottom line.
Ignition provides users with a centralized repository for collecting and organizing ideas from all sources, internal or external. Once collected, users can assign tasks and deadlines to ensure the timely completion of projects. Additionally, team members can give priority levels to each idea which helps them track progress against deadlines.
Ignition includes features such as data visualization capabilities that enable users to see insights at a glance. This allows decision-makers to quickly evaluate potential opportunities before investing resources into developing them further. Other features include automated notifications and integrated project management tools which help streamline project collaboration efforts and keep everyone on the same page. Ignition’s ability to collect ideas from multiple sources makes it ideal for businesses that want to capitalize on trends in their industry before their competitors do.
Additionally, its intuitive interface makes it easy for users of all skill levels to navigate the software quickly and efficiently. This helps teams stay organized while ensuring that each idea gets equal consideration by decision-makers who need quick access to critical information. Its robust analytics features provide valuable insights into how well individual ideas are performing so that organizations can make informed decisions based on real-time data.
Ignition costs from $99/month and offers a freemium version.
Ideawake
Best idea management software with customizable submission forms
Ideawake is an innovation management software to collect, evaluate, and implement ideas for new products. You can use it to allow team members to vote on ideas to gain the group’s consensus.
This innovation management software has custom scorecards you can use to ensure uniformity in judging new ideas. Ideawake also allows you to assign ideas for the review of subject matter experts to ensure that they get judged by qualified reviewers.
Ideawake is the best idea management software because it has customizable submission forms if you want to make idea submission more organized. With the help of Ideawake’s submission forms, you can ensure that submissions contain the same information to make assessing ideas more consistent.
The fields in Ideawake’s submission forms can help you filter submissions to make categorizing them easier.Ideawake integrates with other idea management tools like Microsoft 365, Slack, Trello, Dropbox, and Zoom.
Ideawake provides pricing information and a free demo upon customer request.
Google Workspace
Best idea management software with video conferencing with collaborators
Google Workspace is a collection of productivity and collaboration tools that allows team members to contribute ideas in text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or IRL by video or chat.
Google Workspace is cloud-based to give team members access to documents and other crucial files wherever they are. This makes it a great option for remote or hybrid teams. Because it’s free, you might want to combine it with other (paid) software for a more complete approach to idea management. Video conferences have become the norm as more companies turn to telecommuting and Google Workspace is the best idea management software if you want one to help you conduct video conferences with team members.
What’s great about Google Workspace is that it allows up to 100 participants to join a video meeting to gather as many team members as you want to collect all the ideas you need.
Google Workspace allows you to record meetings and store them in Google Drive so you can replay meetings and note ideas you might have missed.
Google Workspace is free to use.
Mural
Best idea management software with a digital whiteboard & collaboration features
Mural is an innovation management software with a digital whiteboard and plenty of collaboration tools. It has a private mode to ensure the confidentiality of new product development. Mural also has a design research and analysis feature to gather feedback on prototypes of new products and plan changes to address feedback.With Mural, product managers can choose from a wide range of brainstorming templates to help them gather ideas.
Mural has virtual reactions and animations to help celebrate good ideas and encourage other employee ideas. It also has a meeting notes feature to document ideas and create detailed action plans to push promising ideas to the next step in the product development process.
Mural integrates with other product development tools like Microsoft Teams, Webex, Asana, and Zoom. You can connect Mural to a paid Zapier account to get access to other premium apps.
Mural has a free forever plan with limited features for an unlimited number of users, while the pricing for the paid plans starts at $9/user/month.
Canny
Best idea management software with a feature request system
Canny is an idea management software to help you collect, manage, and evaluate product feedback. It has a product roadmap feature with an idea ranking functionality to score projects and feature requests and help you prioritize projects. You can use Canny to monitor the status of projects to help you focus on product development stages experiencing bottlenecks.
Canny is the best idea management software for a feature request system. This request system provides you with a centralized location for feature requests from customers, stakeholders, and employees. It also gives you a means of reaching out to customers who made similar requests for further discussions. You can use Canny to check the profiles of request submitters to understand the target demographic of a new product.
Canny integrates with other product development and project management tools, including HubSpot, Salesforce, G Suite, Jira, and Zendesk.
Canny has a free forever plan with limited features, while the pricing of its paid plans starts at $400/month/up to 5 administrators and an unlimited number of contributors.
Planbox
Best idea management software with an idea portal + campaign management
Planbox is an idea management system for identifying insights, trends, and emerging technologies you can use in developing new products. It has a corporate venturing feature to help you target the right partnerships and investment opportunities.
Planbox has a continuous improvement platform to help you comment and vote on ideas. An innovative idea can come from anywhere, and Planbox is the best idea management software if you want to gather good ideas from outside sources like startups, academe, government, and the online community.
You can use Planbox to host co-creation activities like hackathons, shark tanks, and idea challenges to quickly discover new ideas for products. It has embedded and customizable evaluation methods to help you consistently assess new ideas.
Planbox integrates with other idea management tools, including Microsoft Teams, G Suite, Sharepoint, and Slack. You can also connect PLanbox to a paid Zapier account if you want access to other premium apps.
Planbox provides pricing information and a free demo upon request.
Coda
Best idea management software for triaging ideas
Coda is a cloud-based document editor to help team members collaborate on brainstorming and product development. You can use it to facilitate meetings, create an agenda, and take meeting notes. It has a workflow automation feature to automate simple tasks and give you more time to attend to critical projects.
Coda has a document sharing feature to ensure that team members have access to information needed in planning new products. Coda has an idea triage feature to help you evaluate ideas to isolate that one great idea for a new product.
Coda lets you categorize ideas to assign them to reviewers for further evaluations. It also has graphs to help product managers visually assess the status of ideas and understand the percentage of useful ideas submitted.
Coda has an idea submission template, so you know the date of submission of ideas and the reviewer’s name to create follow-ups on ideas that lack status updates.
You can connect Coda to a paid Zapier account to give you access to premium apps that can help you develop new products.
Coda has a free plan with limited features, while the pricing for paid plans starts at $12/month/user.
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The 10 Best Idea Management Software Solutions Comparison Chart
Here is a table where you can compare all the tools we just covered in the overviews. If you want to expand your research, we have more options below.
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Wrike Best idea management with to-do lists, timelines, & collaboration features | Freemium version available | From $9.80/user/month | Visit Website |
2 | Craft.io Best idea management software with a strategic roadmap feature | 14-day free trial | From $49/month/user | Visit Website |
3 | Brightidea Best idea management software with a native whiteboard feature | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
4 | Ignition Best idea management with idea submission & voting | Free version available | Costs from $99/month | Visit Website |
5 | Ideawake Best idea management software with customizable submission forms | Free Demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
6 | Google Workspace Best idea management software with video conferencing with collaborators | 14-day free trial | From $6/user/month | Visit Website |
7 | Mural Best idea management software with a digital whiteboard & collaboration features | Free plan available | From $9/user/month | Visit Website |
8 | Canny Best idea management software with a feature request system | Free version available | From $400/month for 5 users | Visit Website |
9 | Planbox Best idea management software with an idea portal + campaign management | Free Demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
10 | Coda Best idea management software for triaging ideas | Free Plan Available | From $12/month/user | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list, but worth considering if you would like to expand your research.
- Lucidspark - Virtual whiteboard for sharing and capturing ideas with digital sticky notes, comments, and user mentions
- Wrike - Project management software for cross-departmental collaboration
- ClickUp - Platform for managing people, tasks, and projects.
- Asana - Work management software for organizing teams and managing projects.
- Smartsheet - SaaS for work management and collaboration.
- Ideanote - Innovation software for gathering, organizing, prioritizing, and developing ideas.
- Planview Spigit - Idea management software for crowdsourcing ideas.
- IdeaScale - Innovation management solution for linking organizations to outside sources of ideas.
- Nectir - Idea management and innovation software for crowdsourcing great ideas.
- Mindhive - Ideation platform for improving products.
- Confluence - Work management platform for sharing and storing ideas.
- Ideawake - Idea management platform for capturing and organizing collective intelligence.
- Miro - Online collaborative whiteboard for ideation and brainstorming.
- Viima - Innovation management software for collecting and developing ideas.
How I Picked The Best Idea Management Software
First, I researched and selected all the popular idea management software according to user reviews and ratings. Then, I narrowed down the list by weighing factors that make software a good option for managing ideas. Finally, using my experience in product ideation, I came up with criteria I would use for my evaluation, such as:
User Interface (UI)
Developing new products requires time, so I look for idea management software with a clean interface so I don’t waste time looking for the features I need.
Usability
Great ideas come from a wide range of sources, so I look for software that anyone can easily use to share their ideas.
Integrations
Companies use a wide range of software and tools, so I am looking for idea management software that will work well with other tools.
Pricing
Companies subscribe to many other software products, so I look for an idea management software with great features but reasonable pricing.
Idea Management Software FAQs
Find answers to common questions other people ask about this topic.
What is idea management?
What is idea management used for?
What key features should I look for in idea management software?
What's Next?
Now that you know a bit more about how to use idea management software to develop new ideas for products, I suggest you read about the idea management process. The article will explain the four steps you need to follow, plus five tips on how to get started.
Related tool lists:
- Product Requirements Software
- Best Product Management Tools
- Status Dashboard Software To Monitor Product Health
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