10 Best Product Management Software Shortlist
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
Product management software helps 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 working from home. The best product management software offers 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 software. You’ll find a shortlist of software, things to look for when selecting the PM tool for your organization, and in-depth reviews for each tool.
What Is Product Management Software?
Product management software is a specialized tool or suite of applications designed to help businesses and product teams effectively plan, develop, and manage their products throughout their lifecycle. It serves as a central hub for product managers, designers, developers, and other stakeholders to collaborate, streamline workflows, and make informed decisions. These software solutions are invaluable in today's fast-paced business environment, where bringing successful products to market requires careful planning and execution.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Management Software
Read more detailed information on each tool, what their standout features are and initial pricing information.
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.
Craft.io
Best for built-in industry-leading best practices
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.io: 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 data 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.io Standout Features & Integrations
Features include roadmapping, Guru views, data visualization, product management, prioritization, customer management, Gantt charts, workflow management/tracking, and capacity planning.
Integrations include Jira, Azure DevOps, GitLab, GitHub, Targetprocess, Okta, Google Workspace, Active Directory, SAML, Confluence, PingIdentity, and thousands of additional applications via a paid account with Zapier.
Craft.io Pricing & Plans
Craft.io starts at $19 per editor per month when billed annually. A 14-day free trial is also available.
Visor
Best for project management collaboration
Visor is a cloud-based product management tool that helps businesses streamline their product development process. It's designed to make it easier for product teams to collaborate, prioritize features, and track progress. Visor is best suited for businesses looking for a comprehensive product management tool that can help them manage their products from ideation to launch.
Why I picked Visor: I chose Visor as one of the best product management tools because it's easy to use, has a ton of useful features, and provides great value for its price. Plus, it's cloud-based, which means you can access it from anywhere and it's always up-to-date.
Visor Standout Features & Integrations
Features include include API, dashboards, data export/data import, data visualization, external integrations, Gantt charts, multi-user, project management, task scheduling/tracking, resource management and third-party plugins/add-ons.
Integrations include Jira, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
Visor Pricing & Plans
Visor starts at $9 per user per month and has a free forever plan available.
airfocus
Best modular product management software
airfocus is the market’s first and only modular product management platform, specifically tailored for product teams to manage market-facing products, internal products, IT portfolios, and more. The flexible platform helps product teams manage strategy, understand user needs, prioritize, and align their teams around clear roadmaps.
airfocus users can set up their roadmaps quickly with the intuitive drag-and-drop interface and use the library of fully adjustable templates built on proven product management and roadmapping methods.
Why I Picked airfocus: airfocus stands out in its ability to rate and rank each initiative and feature of your product based on customizable scoring criteria that users can input themselves. This capability will uniquely service product management teams who struggle with stable priority rankings.
airfocus Standout Features & Integrations
Features include roadmapping, project management, task scheduling/tracking, customer feedback management, prioritization, and notifications.
Integrations include Slack, Zendesk, Jira, Trello, Asana, Azure DevOps, Shortcut, Microsoft Planner, GitHub, Intercom, Google Chrome, and hundreds more through Zapier.
airfocus Pricing & Plans
airfocus starts from $19/month and offers a 14-day free trial.
Ignition
Best for full go-to-market functionality
Ignition is a go-to-market software with product management, research management, and launch tracking tools.
Why I picked Ignition: The software's product management features include roadmap planning, idea organization, and customer insight collection and management. Teams can turn end-user feedback into product releases, and gather their research on competitors and personas in the platform. Launch processes can be built and re-used in the system, reducing time spent on workflow planning.
In particular, the software's data collection abilities are a unique way to gather insights in the product development process. Teams can stay updated on their competitors, collect feedback with public-facing forms, and find persona and brand insights to fuel their go-to-market strategy. The software also tracks KPIs to give teams information on how their product launches perform.
Ignition Standout Features & Integrations
Features include unlimited users, roadmap planning, internal communications automation, release notes, battle cards, calendar and timeline views, product idea boards, competitive intelligence, research studies, and retrospectives.
Integrations include Asana, ClickUp, Confluence, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Docs, HubSpot, Jira, Linear, Microsoft Teams, Mixpanel, monday.com, Productboard, Salesforce, Slack, and Wrike.
Ignition Pricing & Plans
A free-forever plan is available, and various parts of the product can be purchased individually. For teams that only want access to the product management tool, plans start from $49/month.
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.
FigJam by Figma
Best for team collaboration and brainstorming
FigJam by Figma is an online collaborative whiteboarding tool that enables teams to work together in a digital space for brainstorming, planning, and designing. With over 300 templates available, FigJam aims to empower teams in the product development process, helping them to visualize possibilities and formulate actionable plans.
Why I Picked FigJam by Figma: FigJam by Figma is an online collaboration tool designed for teams to brainstorm, develop, and organize ideas. It can be employed for brainstorming sessions, visualizing product roadmaps, conducting retrospectives, and facilitating weekly team meetings. Users can create decision trees, diagrams, mind maps, run critiques, collect ideas, note feedback, organize research, and plan or run interactive sessions, all in one place.
The tool offers templates like the Product Vision Board and the Crazy 8's framework to aid in ideation, as well as structured processes for roadmap construction and retrospectives on product execution and market strategies. The platform additionally allows for real-time interaction with audio and live chat, commenting and voting features, and the ability to invite external contributors for temporary access, making it significantly easier for remote teams to effectively collaborate and brainstorm.
FigJam by Figma Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include various whiteboard editing tools, such as sticky notes, shapes and lines, emojis and reactions, and drawing tools, that can be used for diagramming and strategy planning. Other features include interactive meetings and workshops facilitation tools, Agile workflow planning capabilities, and AI features that can generate custom templates and visuals based on user input.
Integrations include GitLab, Slack, Notion, Asana, Dropbox, Jira, Confluence, MixPanel, Sprig, and Google Workspace.
FigJam by Figma Pricing and Plans
Pricing for FigJam starts from $3/user/month. A free plan is also available.
Miro
Best for seamless collaboration and visualization for effective product management
Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform that's designed to help teams work more effectively together. It's like having a giant, interactive canvas where you can brainstorm, plan, visualize, and manage projects.
Why I picked Miro: It's incredibly flexible and versatile. You can use it for everything from creating user story maps and product roadmaps to running sprint retrospectives and design sprints. Plus, it's super easy to use. You don't need to be a tech whiz to get the hang of it.
There are a few standout features that I really love about Miro. First off, the infinite canvas. You can zoom in, zoom out, and move around as much as you want. Then there's the real-time collaboration. You can work on the same board with your team, see what everyone's doing, and even chat and leave comments. It's a great way to keep everyone on the same page. And let's not forget about the pre-built templates. They have plenty of them for different use cases, which can save you a lot of time.
Miro Standout Features & Integrations
Features include mind mapping, task tracking, user story mapping, PI planning, online workshops, brainwriting, timebox sessions, digital sticky notes, video conferencing, webinars, asset sharing, data visualization, customizable templates, and employee photos.
Integrations include Google Drive, Microsoft Excel, Slack, Trello, Google Workspace, DropBox Business, Zoom, Survey Monkey, Adobe Creative Cloud, and GitHub.
Miro Pricing & Plans
Pricing starts at $10/user/month and they offer a free plan.
ProductPlan
Best product development software for its 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 $49/user/month and has a 14-day free trial.
Productboard
Best product development software for 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.
The Best Product Management Tools Comparison Chart
Here is a table where you can compare the tools we just covered in the overviews.
Tool | Trial Info | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | monday.com Best for scalability | 14-day free trial + free plan available | From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats) | Website |
2 | Craft.io Best for built-in industry-leading best practices | 14-day free trial available | From $24/editor/month | Website |
3 | Visor Best for project management collaboration | Free plan available | From $9/user/month | Website |
4 | airfocus Best modular product management software | 14-day free trial | From $83 /editor/month | Website |
5 | Ignition Best for full go-to-market functionality | Free version available | From $99/month | Website |
6 | Jira Software Best for digital product development like apps & SaaS tools | 7-day free trial | $10/user/month | Website |
7 | FigJam by Figma Best for team collaboration and brainstorming | Free plan available | From $3/user/month | Website |
8 | Miro Best for seamless collaboration and visualization for effective product management | Free plan available | From $10/user/month | Website |
9 | ProductPlan Best product development software for its beautiful UI | 14-day free trial | From $49/user/month | Website |
10 | Productboard Best product development software for customer research | 15-day free trial | From $25/user/month | Website |
Other Product Management Software
Here are a few more product management software that didn’t make the top list. I encourage you to experiment with these great options as well!
- ProdPad
Best product lifecycle management tools
- Confluence
Best for its wide variety of product collaboration templates
- dragonboat
Best for connecting product development to OKRs
- Reveall
Best product management software for product discovery
- ClickUp
Best modular product management software
- QA Wolf
Best for companies where web-applications are their main product
- Peoplebox
Best for collaboration
- Wrike
Best product management analytics
- Planview
Best product management roadmap tool for enterprise organizations
- Walling
Best for visually organizing project ideas and tasks
- Creately
Visual workspace for team collaboration used to draw flowcharts, diagrams, and mindmaps
- Aha
Best product management software for road mapping
- API Fuse
Best to build product integrations for your SaaS app
- Canny
Best to track feedback from customers and teammates
How I Picked The Best Product Management Software
Perhaps you're wondering how I selected the best product management tools for this list? To build this top 10 list, I evaluated and compared a wide range of product development software with positive user ratings.
After determining my long list of top choices, I further honed my list using the selection criteria below to see how each platform stacked up against the next one. I also drew on my years of experience in product management to pinpoint the features that add a lot of value.
Selection Criteria
What was I looking for when I selected the best product management software for review? I took into account the core functionality and key features of each product management tool. Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
Road mapping
The software should have a way for you to turn the new product ideation into roadmaps that can help you see the evolution of your product over time. For this, you need a clean user interface that provides an intuitive user experience, like the one you can experience in products like Figma or Miro.
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 interactive materials to assist learning?
Integrations
This criterion explores the ways in which the software can expand its capabilities. For example, how it connects to software that helps your user research through heatmaps, roadmapping software or other tools like survey tools. Therefore, I will tell you about native integrations, connections to apps using third-party software, and custom integrations using APIs.
Pricing
How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible?
People Also Ask
Find answers to common questions other people ask about this topic.
What is a product roadmap used for?
Why is product management important?
What Are The Benefits Of Product Development Software?
Product Management Software vs Project Management Software
What is feature flagging in product management?
Are there other types of product management software?
What's Next?
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 software?
Related tool lists:
Weigh in with the rest of The PM community and product experts in the comments below especially if there's a software platform that you use that we didn't include in this list!