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10 Best Product Management Tools Of 2023

The Best Product Management Tools List

Here’s a list of the best product management software I’ve come across:

  1. 1. monday.com — Best for scalability
  2. 2. Jira Software — Best for digital product development like apps & SaaS tools
  3. 3. Craft.io — Best product feature prioritization engine
  4. 4. Confluence — Best for its wide variety of product collaboration templates
  5. 5. ProductPlan — Product development software with beautiful UI
  6. 6. Productboard — Best product development with customer research
  7. 7. ProdPad — Best product lifecycle management tools
  8. 8. dragonboat — Best for connecting product development to OKRs
  9. 9. ClickUp — Best modular product management software
  10. 10. Peoplebox — Best for collaboration

Product management tools help you navigate day-to-day task management while keeping an eye on the big picture. They encourage collaboration throughout the product development process and ensure that everyone is on the same page whether working in-house or remotely. The best product management tools offer all-in-one convenience, helping teams manage the entire product life cycle from a single handy interface.

This article will help you quickly compare and evaluate the best product management tools. You’ll find a shortlist of tools, things to look for when selecting the PM tool for your organization, and in-depth reviews for each tool.

What Are Product Management Tools?

Product management tools are software applications that help product teams carry out some or all phases of the product lifecycle, from planning, researching, and developing to launching, assessing, and iterating on a product.

Product management tools are used by product teams for any or all of these product-related tasks: prototyping, defining a product roadmap, user journey mapping, user behavior research, product road mapping, feature prioritization, managing sprints, analyzing product data, process mapping, and managing product releases.

Product management tools are also critical for remote product management teams who need a central place to develop and manage their products.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Management Tools

1

monday.com

Best for scalability

monday.com is an online product management platform that enables teams of all sizes to plan, track, and manage their daily work. From large scope product roadmaps to weekly iterations, monday.com helps teams define clear ownership, analyze and track their work, manage sprints, and collaborate together. monday.com’s easy-to-use agile platform makes it simple for teams to work together from anywhere.

monday.com’s Work OS is built from visual and flexible features that come together to create any agile workflow your team needs. It supports milestones, Gantt and Kanban views, task dependencies, and project analysis.

monday.com has a simple and intuitive UI, and onboarding is quick and efficient. Teams in any department can easily find the features they need to customize their account to fit their needs. monday.com also offers 24/7 support, recorded webinars and tutorials, and thorough Knowledge Base articles to ensure teams always have answers to their questions.

Why I Picked monday.com: monday.com has customizable project templates for any team or stage of product management. Use the template as is, or customize by adding column types (such as numbers for calculations, deadline, rating) or switching between views (such as Kanban, Gantt, calendar, and more). monday.com’s flexible scrum platform provides value to managers and can support teams with anywhere from 5 to 5,000 members.

monday.com Standout Features & Integrations

Features include project management, task scheduling/tracking, resource management, scheduling, budgeting, API, calendar management, Gantt charts, file sharing, time management, email integration, third party plugins, and notifications.

Integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform and many more, accessible through a paid plan with Zapier.

monday.com Pricing & Plans

Pricing for monday.com starts from $11/user/month. The tool offers a 14-day free trial. They have a freemium plan for up to 2 users.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 6745

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats)

2

Jira Software

Best for digital product development like apps & SaaS tools

Jira Software is a SaaS project and product management platform that is a major part of the Atlassian family of products and software development tools. It is a project management solution for medium to large-sized teams in the software development sector.

Why I Picked Jira: Jira Software can incorporate a wide variety of tools on top of its built-in features, offering them to users within a unified platform. This helps executives and agile product owners manage and oversee their ongoing projects and keep track of their development teams throughout the entire product development lifecycle.

Product managers and teams use Jira to conduct Q&As, plan build sprints, create stories, and track issue resolutions in real time. Jira can be easily optimized for more efficient ticketing and issue resolution. It can even function as a business intelligence tool.

Moreover, Jira Software can serve as a single source of truth for project and product teams. With user stories, issues, and tasks, Jira can help product managers break bigger concepts and ideas so they are more manageable across all teams and team members. Users can also discuss and prioritize allocated tasks within context by having complete visibility at every stage of the product development process.

Jira Software provides product managers with real-time visual data. With no-code automation, users can keep their team members focused on their tasks, streamline workflows, and save a lot of time and effort.

Jira Standout Features & Integrations

Features include product management, project management, issue tracking, collaboration, customizable workflows, reporting & analytics, mobile support, permission & access management, time tracking, custom data fields, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include Confluence, Slack, Trello, Google Drive, Bitbucket, GitHub, Salesforce, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.

Jira Pricing & Plans

A free plan is also available for up to 10 users. Pricing for Jira Software starts at $7.75/user/month with the Standard plan, which includes a 7-day free trial.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 4682

7-day free trial

$10/user/month

3

Craft.io

Best product feature prioritization engine

Craft.io is an end-to-end product management platform with best practices built in. It provides product professionals with an all-in-one solution to effectively manage the entire lifecycle of their digital products, from feedback collection and feature definition to prioritization, capacity planning, road mapping, and portfolio management. 

Product teams can use this tool to create a single source of truth where they can slice & dice their data to create tailored, always up-to-date roadmaps that seamlessly connect strategy to features and tell a compelling product story.

Why I Picked Craft: The platform is built to enable product professionals with best practices built into every step of the way. The platform can help even seasoned Product Managers create, view, update, adjust, and share the right product content more quickly and efficiently with the Guru layer. For example, pre-built templates for product epics, user personas, and prioritization frameworks can help an experienced Product Manager develop these assets in minutes—as opposed to spending hours building them manually in static files.

Craft Standout Features & Integrations

Features include roadmapping, dashboards, data visualization, project management, prioritization, customer management, Gantt charts, task scheduling/tracking, and resource management.

Integrations include Jira, Azure DevOps, GitLab, GitHub, Targetprocess, Teams, Slack, Dropbox, Okta, Google Workspace, Active Directory, SAML, Google Drive, Confluence, Salesforce, PingIdentity, and thousands of additional applications via Zapier.

Craft Pricing & Plans

Craft starts at $49/month/user and comes with a 14-day free trial.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5 42

14-day free trial

From $49/month/user

4

Confluence

Best for its wide variety of product collaboration templates

Confluence is a remote-friendly team workspace, project management, software development, product management, and marketing & sales management solution all rolled into one. It enables teams to create, organize, and collaborate on work in a single place, regardless of their location.

Powered by Atlassian, Confluence integrates seamlessly with Jira software and is a versatile virtual workspace that provides many features for project collaboration and knowledge management. It can serve as a single platform for product development teams and other personnel within an organization by allowing users to create a robust knowledge base for product requirements and documentation. The tool comes with advanced search and page tree functions, as well as best practice templates.

The platform’s product management module lets you keep track of everything related to your products from conception to the final launch, all in one place. With the built-in product management template, you can define, track, and scope the requirements for various products and/or features. You can also work together to capture the entire team’s high-level product roadmap, as well as prepare a product launch, document the launch strategy, and plan the launch activities.

There is also a product management template that is tailored for premortem activities. This template can be used to run a premortem session with the entire team to evaluate, identify, and plan for potential risks.

Confluence may also serve as a communication and collaboration tool for project planning and product management. Users are able to create, collaborate, and comment on different pages, project plans, and product requirements. Multiple team members and collaborators can comment on and edit project plans, product roadmaps, and requirements in real time.

Confluence is always free for up to 10 users. An Enterprise package is also available with quote-based pricing.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.1 3450

Free plan with limited features

From $5.75/user/month

5

ProductPlan

Product development software with beautiful UI

Used by HubSpot and Coca-Cola, ProductPlan is an easy way to plan, visualize, and communicate a product strategy using 25+ roadmap templates.

ProductPlan lets you collaborate with your team on live roadmaps using their simple drag and drop editor. Customize the way you view your timelines, lists, tables, and your portfolio layouts as well. ProductPlan makes it easy for your stakeholders to view your data without having to pay for using the tool and lets you send them links to editable roadmaps.

Despite the strong features list above, ProductPlan is missing an adequate way to handle requirement management for the products they host. For many users, this won’t be an issue as requirements are often handled separately; however, it’s a good thing to keep in mind.

Why I Picked ProductPlan: Something I highlight as important in the review criteria for product management tools is an available selection of product spec templates. ProductPlan is great for this, as they not only have product roadmap templates but also offer templates for launch plans, executive-facing portfolios, OKRs, and IT strategy.

ProductPlan Standout Features & Integrations

Features include Features include roadmapping, project management, resource management, task scheduling/tracking, dashboards, Gantt charts, notifications, prioritization, and scheduling.

Integrations include Jira, GitHub, Slack, PivotalTracker, Trello, Azure DevOps, Confluence, and Microsoft Teams. More options are available using the ProductPlan REST API.

ProductPlan Pricing & Plans

ProductPlan costs from $39/user/month and has a 14-day free trial.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.4 145

14-day free trial

From $39/user/month

6

Productboard

Best product development with customer research

Used by the likes of Microsoft and Zendesk, Productboard is a product management system that helps your team understand what target users need, prioritize what features to build (and when), and unify everyone from planning to QA around your product roadmap.

You can use Productboard to collect customer feedback on planned features to gauge which ones resonate more with customers. Customers who have features they want are happy customers, and Productboard can help you get feedback on the features that customers want to see on your products. You can use customer insights gained through Productboard to prioritize features that can increase customer satisfaction.

One of the things I looked for in my review was the depth and breadth of third-party integration options with popular project management tools. While Productboard has a handful of integration options, a slight downside is that their available connections are fewer than most on this list.

Why I Picked Productboard: Productboard does a lot of things well but one thing in particular that stood out is the usefulness for being able to aggregate product insights and customer requirements/requests across multiple inboxes, including slack. If an ongoing product feedback loop is important to you, Productboard will stand out.

Productboard Standout Features & Integrations

Features include roadmapping, project management, task scheduling/tracking, customer management, prioritization, and notifications.

Integrations include Slack, Intercom, Zendesk, Gainsight, Trello, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, and GitHub.

Productboard Pricing & Plans

Productboard costs from $25/user/month and has a 15-day free trial.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3 197

15-day free trial available

From $20/user/month

7

ProdPad

Best product lifecycle management tools

ProdPad is a lean product roadmap tool that keeps everyone on your team informed and aligned. Product management gurus will appreciate features such as product spec templates, annotated designs and versioning, and realistic user personas.

Some users might struggle with ProdPad’s browsing and search capabilities, which are not nearly as streamlined as they could be (good luck hunting for that “one” important item in your ideas bank). Regular clean-up and internal naming conventions can ease this pain.

Why I Picked ProdPad: ProdPad spends considerable effort on ensuring their planning, ideas, and roadmaps solutions are strong; they meet and exceed what I am looking for when I list idea capturing as a must-have in any product management tools review criteria.

ProdPad Standout Features & Integrations

Features include roadmapping, project management, task scheduling/tracking, customer management, prioritization, and notifications.

Integration include Slack, Trello, Jira, Active Directory, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Doorbell.io, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Apps, Pivotal Tracker, Rally, TFS, UserVoice, and over 1000 more options with a connection through Zapier.

ProdPad Pricing & Plans

ProdPad costs from $25/user/month and has a free 7-30 day free trial (see: their “free trial” rewards system).

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3 40

7-30 day free trial

From $25/user/month

8

dragonboat

Best for connecting product development to OKRs

Dragonboat is a comprehensive, user-friendly product portfolio management platform for outcome-focused teams. Connecting OKRs, customer feedback, and roadmaps, Dragonboat offers integrated product planning, resource forecasting, automated tracking, and dynamic stakeholder reporting.

With Dragonboat, product managers can centralize feedback and requests, prioritize features and build Stakeholders can follow along with permission-controlled roles as Reader or Editor. Dragonboat lets you set resource allocation towards objectives and key results (OKRs) and other initiatives. This way, you can track the direct ROI of new product features and updates to ensure you are using your team’s time effectively.

Why I Picked Dragonboat: Past results can inform future iterations of products. This tool is an excellent choice for teams focused on a diverse and complex product portfolio. It connects OKRs, KPIs, product strategies, and customer needs using Agile execution.

Dragonboat Standout Features & Integrations

Features include roadmapping, task scheduling/tracking, campaign management, calendar management, notifications, project management, dashboard, and data visualization.

Integrations include Jira, Clubhouse, Azure DevOps, Asana, and Github.

Dragonboat Pricing & Plans

Dragonboat costs from $39/user/month and comes with a free demo. They have a free plan for single users and startups; contact their team for details.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.9 10

From $39/user/month

9

ClickUp

Best modular product management software

ClickUp is a product management tool that bills itself as the “one app to replace them all,” packaging tasks, docs, chat, goals, and dashboards into one solution. They are used by over 800,000 teams across companies like Samsung, Belmond, Booking.com, and IBM. Because it does so much, you might wonder about the learning curve; ClickUp has you covered with hep docs, on-demand demos, webinars, and even the “ClickUp university” to make sure you’re getting the most out of the platform.

Key product management features include task boards for product roadmaps, collaborative docs for idea sharing, spring management tools for development, and guest accounts for stakeholder access. You’ll also have access to native time tracking and workload capacity reports so you can see what each team member has on their plate in real time.

Why I Picked ClickUp: If you want to nix the digital clutter and have all workflow functionality tied to one app, then ClickUp is the way to go.

ClickUp Standout Features & Integrations

Features include task scheduling/tracking, project management, resource management, budgeting, contact management, data visualizations, employee database, expense tracking, file sharing, third-party plugins, collaboration support, timesheets, roadmapping, chat, customer management, email integration, feedback management, and process reporting.

Integrations include Slack, Google Workspace, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.

ClickUp Pricing & Plans

ClickUp is free to use for unlimited users with some feature limitations. Paid plans cost from $5/user/month and offer a 30-day refund policy if you’re unsatisfied with the app.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 4135

Freemium plan available

From $9/user/month

10

Peoplebox

Best for collaboration

Peoplebox is an AI-powered product management tool that helps teams make data-driven decisions. It combines customer feedback, user behavior, and product analytics into one platform to help businesses understand how people interact with their products. This comprehensive approach to product management can be invaluable for teams looking to stay ahead of the competition. Peoplebox collects customer feedback from multiple sources and channels, such as surveys, NPS, and live chats. It then aggregates this data into an easy-to-view dashboard where users can quickly see what customers say about a product or service. Additionally, the platform uses AI algorithms to identify trends in customer feedback that enable users to pinpoint areas of improvement and prioritize changes accordingly.

In addition to customer feedback, Peoplebox also collects user behavior data such as clicks and pageviews from the web and mobile apps. This helps you gain insights into how users are interacting with your digital products so that you can optimize their experience accordingly. Peoplebox integrates with popular analytics tools like Google Analytics so that users can access all product metrics in one place. It offers a comprehensive view of customer feedback and user behavior, allowing teams to make better-informed decisions regarding product development and design. By utilizing real-time data from both customers and users alike, teams can quickly identify areas of improvement and act accordingly without having to switch between multiple platforms or dashboards.

Why I Picked Peoplebox: Peoplebox enables easy collaboration between team members by providing tools such as message boards, comment threads, and collaboration spaces. These tools allow team members to communicate easily with each other to stay up to date on progress and share ideas quickly and efficiently. The software’s product roadmaps allow users to create detailed plans for products, from concept to launch. They can organize tasks into sprints, track progress on each task and prioritize tasks based on importance or urgency.

Peoplebox Standout Features & Integrations

Features include project management, task scheduling/tracking, resource management, scheduling, budgeting, API, calendar management, Gantt charts, file sharing, time management, email integration, third party plugins, and notifications.

Integrations include Slack, Zoho People, BambooHR, Darwinbox, Outlook, Google pltforms, MS Teams, Salesforce, Hubspot, Tableau, Big Query, Notion, Asana, and Jira.

Peoplebox Pricing & Plans

Peoplebox costs from $7/user/month and offers a 14-day free trial.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 155

14-day free trial

From $7/user/month

Need expert help finding the right Product Management Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company, and you can access exclusive software discounts!

The 10 Best Product Management Tools Summary

Tool Free Option Price
1
monday.com

Best for scalability

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats) Visit Website
2
Jira Software

Best for digital product development like apps & SaaS tools

7-day free trial

$10/user/month Visit Website
3
Craft.io

Best product feature prioritization engine

14-day free trial

From $49/month/user Visit Website
4
Confluence

Best for its wide variety of product collaboration templates

Free plan with limited features

From $5.75/user/month Visit Website
5
ProductPlan

Product development software with beautiful UI

14-day free trial

From $39/user/month Visit Website
6
Productboard

Best product development with customer research

15-day free trial available

From $20/user/month Visit Website
7
ProdPad

Best product lifecycle management tools

7-30 day free trial

From $25/user/month Visit Website
8
dragonboat

Best for connecting product development to OKRs

Not available

From $39/user/month Visit Website
9
ClickUp

Best modular product management software

Freemium plan available

From $9/user/month Visit Website
10
Peoplebox

Best for collaboration

14-day free trial

From $7/user/month Visit Website

Other Types of Tools For Product Management

Some product tools are all-in-one suites, like several of the suites listed above. But there are also a number of great specialized tools that zero in on a particular niche within product planning, research, development, or strategy. 

Here is a list of a few types of tools for developing, prioritizing, designing, and planning products:

  1. OKR Software & Tools - Develop and track objectives and key results for your product lifecycle.
  2. Prototyping Tools - Build product prototypes with little to no coding knowledge.
  3. Wireframing Tools - Wireframe an app or website with drag-and-drop functionality.
  4. Customer Feedback Tools - Collect customer feedback and rate it according to priority.
  5. Roadmap Tools - Visualize the future of your product with product roadmap tools.
  6. Flowchart Tools - Visualize ideas, brainstorm, or cutomer pathways using online flowcharts.
  7. Backlog Tools - Log, track, and manage all the backlog items for your product.
  8. Analytics Tools - Learn about how your poduct is perfoming in the wild to craft actionable insights.
  9. Product Portfolio Tools - Manage multiple ongoing product projects in one central location.
  10. Agile Product Management Tools - For Agile product workflows that champion speed and revision.
  11. Product Adoption Software - Help users and customers make the most out of your product with wikis, wizards, and walkthroughs.

Other Product Manager Software

Here are a few more product management tools that didn’t make the top list. I encourage you to experiment with these great options as well!

  1. Wrike - Product development tool with flexible scheduling inputs to account for contracts and PT workforces.
  2. API Fuse - Build product integrations for your SaaS app.
  3. Creately  - Visual workspace for team collaboration used to draw flowcharts, diagrams, and mindmaps
  4. Canny - Track feedback to build better products by collecting feedback from customers as well as teammates
  5. Aha – Best product management tool for roadmapping

How I Selected The Best Product Management Tools

What was I looking for when I selected the best tools for review? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria: 

  1. User Interface (UI): Does the app have a clean, intuitive, and modern-looking user interface across different operating systems, including mobile and PC variants. 
  2. Usability: How steep is the software’s learning curve? Does it offer adequate customer support across different mediums (phone, chat, email, etc.)? Do they have the training, certificates, blogs, webinars, or other materials to assist learning?
  3. Integrations: Does the product management tool have an apps marketplace or other way to connect with first- and third-party apps to unlock additional features?
  4. Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible?

Product Management Tools FAQ

What Do You Think?

What do you think is the best product development software, and why? How do you use user stories for product focus and feature prioritization? Do you think it’s better to use an all-in-one tool or do you prefer a collection of product development tools? 

Weigh in with the rest of The PM community and product experts in the comments below especially if there's a tool that you use that we didn't include in this list!

By Hannah Clark

Hannah Clark is the Editor of The Product Manager. Following six years of experience in the tech industry, she pivoted into the content space where she's had the pleasure of working with some of the most brilliant voices in the product world. Driven by insatiable curiosity and a love of bringing people together, her mission is to foster a fun, vibrant, and inspiring community of product people.

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