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With so many different PLM solutions available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to streamline processes and ensure that product information is efficiently managed and accessible throughout the entire lifecycle but need to figure out which tool is best for it. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different tools with large teams and complex products, with my picks of the best PLM software.

What is PLM software?

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software is a type of tool that supports product development and management processes. It serves as a digital platform for organizations to coordinate and manage product-related data, documents, and workflows throughout the entire product lifecycle. PLM software aims to enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and accelerate time-to-market for new products.

Product managers and product development teams rely on the software to plan and manage their work and see new products and features through to completion. Among the features that make this possible are document management, version control, change management, Bill of Materials (BOM) management, collaboration tools, and integration with other enterprise systems like CAD and ERP.

The Top PLM Software Comparison Chart

Here is a table where you can compare the tools we just covered in the overviews.

Overviews Of The Top PLM Software

Here’s a brief description of each of the PLM software tools that are featured on my top list. I’ve added screenshots of each platform’s user interface as well as notes on its best use case and overall functionality.

Best product lifecycle dashboards & data visualizations

  • Freemium version available
  • From $10/user/month (min of 2 seats)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.2/5

Wrike is a collaboration and project management platform that can be used to help manage a product’s life cycle by bringing the entire operation into a single platform, from conception to analysis. Increased communication and documentation between team members ensure that all relevant schedules and data are easily accessible, allowing for easy communication between integrated platforms and even external stakeholders.

Wrike has five different software packages with varying feature sets, with the most limited one being the Free plan and the most extensive one being the Pinnacle plan. The PLM process involves planning, designing, marketing, producing, and managing resources, which are covered by Wrike’s features in any plan. The more feature-heavy plans can make PLM easier since they come with dedicated PPM, real-time reports, AI project risk prediction, and extensive collaboration tools.

Wrike works well as a product lifecycle management software thanks to its suite of product management features that allow you to monitor a product’s health during its introduction, growth, maturity, and decline stages. This can help users understand their products more to prepare for the next launch or to find ways to improve upon existing products.

Different products will naturally have different PLMs and Wrike’s customizable templates can help accommodate these. This is locked behind the Business plan’s paywall, which is extremely useful when paired with other Business-exclusive features. The more limited Wrike plans may not work well as a PLM software solution, but most of the paid plans should be fine for most managers.

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.

New Product Updates from Wrike

June 29 2025
Launch of the Wrike MCP Server

Wrike's MCP Server enables AI agents to access real-time work data, facilitating automation and insights with robust security measures, transforming AI into integrated workflow partners. For more details, visit Wrike News.

Best product lifecycle management for software devs

  • 7-day free trial
  • From $20/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4/5

Jira Service Management is a product lifecycle software that helps teams manage and resolve customer service requests efficiently and collaboratively. Jira Service Management provides a customizable platform for planning, tracking, and executing release activities, supporting version control, collaboration, and automation to streamline the release management process.

Jira Service Management can be used for product lifecycle management by providing a platform for tracking and managing product-related tasks and activities, from initial ideation through to retirement. Teams can use Jira Service Management to capture and track requirements, manage backlogs, and coordinate development and release activities. Additionally, Jira Service Management offers powerful visualization and reporting tools that enable teams to track progress and identify potential issues or opportunities throughout the product lifecycle.

Key features include incident management, problem management, change management, and service request management, all of which are fully customizable to fit the unique needs of each organization. Other features include a self-service portal for end-users to submit requests and track their status, SLA tracking and reporting, automation rules for ticket routing and escalation, and integration with other tools and services such as Confluence and Slack. Jira Service Management also offers powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing organizations to track their performance and identify areas for improvement.

Jira Service Management integrates with other Atlassian platforms as well as third-party apps like Slack, Mircosoft, Google Workspace, Zoom, AdobeXD, Invision, Figma, Gliffy, Draw.io, Balsamiq, Lucidchart, Miro, Opsgenie, Jenkins, Dynatrace, GitHub, Zendesk, Trello, Optimizely, and hundreds of others via their apps marketplace. You can also build your own using their API. 

Jira Service Management costs from $21/agent/month and comes with a 7-day free trial. 

Best for all sizes of companies where web-applications are their main product

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request
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Rating: 4.8/5

QA Wolf is a PLM tool that helps product teams at SaaS companies go-to-market faster by ensuring new software features are bug-free.

QA Wolf is fast, getting teams to 80% automated test coverage in about 3 months compared to traditional QA teams/tools that either take years to get to 80% test coverage or simply never get there.

QA Wolf aslo happens to require low effort because of their test matrices. QA Wolf does the work for you by analyzing data and synthesizing the findings so that product managers immediately know what went wrong instead of having to investigate themselves.

QA Wolf comes with unlimited tests and test runs, full web application testing, no vendor lock-in, and 100% parallelization.

QA Wolf integrates with CI/CD.

Best for product lifecycle management through real-time performance insights and analytics

  • Free plan + demo available
  • Pricing upon request
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Rating: 4.3/5

New Relic is a SaaS product that's all about application performance management (APM) and software analytics. It helps you monitor and manage the performance of your software and web applications in real-time. It's great for businesses of all sizes, especially those with complex software environments. It's also perfect for developers and IT operations teams who need to keep a close eye on how their applications are performing.

The platform gives you deep, granular insights into your software's performance. It's not just about uptime and response times, it's about understanding the user experience, tracking errors, and identifying bottlenecks. It's like having a microscope for your software.

New Relic's APM gives you real-time performance metrics for all your applications. The error tracking feature helps you pinpoint and fix issues before they affect your users. And the user experience monitoring helps you understand how they interact with your software.

Features include backend monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, mobile monitoring, model performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, log management, error tracking, network monitoring, vulnerability management, and browser monitoring. 

Integrations include over 500 apps, like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI, communication tools like Slack and PagerDuty, and other monitoring and analytics tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk. It also has an API you can use to build custom integrations.

New Relic costs from $49/user/month and offers a free plan for 1 user and 100 GB/month of data ingest.

Best for those in the Salesforce ecosystem

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing available upon request
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Rating: 4.5/5

Propel is a cloud-native product solution that allows its users to gather and optimize new product introduction, collaborate on a company-wide scale, design quality data databases, and leverage productivity tools. Propel even offers accessibility through your phone using their smart mobile app.

Propel is a user-friendly platform that helps you stay organised with workflow customization features that enable you to provide customers with better service, monitor product details and operations, and even compare revisions details.

Because Propel is built on Salesforce, having no previous experience with Salesforce may result in an additional learning curve.

Propel offers a free demo and customized pricing is available upon request. Note that Propel offers packages with a minimum of 10 users.

Best for idea and roadmap management

  • 7-30 day free trial
  • From $25/user/month
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Rating: 4.3/5

ProdPad is a product management software that aims to improve product management processes by providing a platform for effective feedback management, feature request prioritization, and user review capture. It is designed to align teams and enhance customer success through a structured yet flexible product development process.

ProdPad offers robust idea management and backlog workflow tools to help capture, organize, and prioritize ideas and customer feedback from various sources. This feature is crucial for PLM as it enables teams to maintain a continuous pipeline of ideas that can be evaluated and refined over time.

The software also offers highly customizable lean product roadmaps, allowing teams to create detailed plans that reflect the strategic direction of their products. These roadmaps can be easily shared with stakeholders to communicate progress and align expectations. The flexibility of ProdPad's roadmaps is particularly valuable in the PLM context, where product development often involves multiple phases, dependencies, and adjustments.

Pricing begins from $25/user/month with a free trial available.

Best for flexible BOM management

  • Free plan available
  • From $75/seat/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.2/5

OpenBOM is a cloud-based SaaS platform that focuses on managing product data, including bills of materials (BOM), product data management (PDM), and product lifecycle management (PLM). It integrates with CAD, ERP, and PDM systems, supporting industries like machine design and high-tech electronics.

OpenBOM lets your team manage complex BOMs in a flexible way. You can build and update multi-level BOMs that evolve as your products do, with real-time collaboration across teams. Whether you're working with engineers, designers, or suppliers, OpenBOM lets everyone stay on the same page with accurate product data.

The platform is especially useful for tracking materials and keeping inventory in check, making it ideal for managing your product lifecycle. You can track costs, quantities, and supplier details right from the platform, so when it’s time to order parts, OpenBOM automatically generates the purchase orders. This flexibility helps you handle production changes, supplier updates, or shifts in material availability.

OpenBOM integrates with a range of tools, including Autodesk Fusion 360, Altium Designer, Autodesk Eagle, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Revit, SOLIDWORKS, Kubotek KeyCreator, Onshape, Siemens Solid Edge, Oracle NetSuite, and QuickBooks.

Best managing catalogs, product development and collaboration

  • Free trial available
  • From $125/user/month
Visit Website
Rating: 5/5

Surefront is a comprehensive product collaboration platform that integrates Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Information Management (PIM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to enhance various business processes such as merchandising, product development, vendor management, and sales management. The platform's robust features enable teams to collaborate on each product attribute, ensuring alignment across all teams.

With Surefront, all historical conversations and attachments related to each product are securely stored and easily accessible, providing a single source of truth for all product-related information. This feature enhances cross-functional collaboration and ensures that all team members and suppliers are on the same page throughout the product lifecycle.

It also includes catalog management to organize product information and order and quote management capabilities, allowing businesses to handle these processes efficiently within a single platform. The workflow management feature lets users customize workflows for products, quotes, and orders, ensuring tasks are assigned to the appropriate internal teams and external suppliers.

Furthermore, Surefront offers discounted licenses to all suppliers, encouraging greater participation and collaboration across the supply chain. Users can also collaborate on new ideas with Surefront's image markup feature, allowing for prototyping concepts, designs, innovations, and quality assurance improvements. 

Best for North American teams

  • Pricing Upon Request

Aras Innovator is trusted by companies such as GE, Honda, Motorola, and XEROX and is used in almost 150 countries. It comes with the following features: new product development and introduction, multi-CAD data management and visualization, project management, and configuration and change management.

Aras Innovator makes it easy to connect with other software through its many integrations, allowing users to put things in and pull things out of the software without much trouble.

Unfortunately for more simple users, Aras Innovator can come off as a rather sophisticated or more advanced piece of software. There are a lot of opportunities to customize but it’s not easy doing so, making it seem like Aras Innovator enjoys making users rack up on their number of clicks within the software.

Aras Innovator offers pricing details upon request.

Best for companies with advanced needs

  • 30 days free trial
  • Pricing Upon Request

Teamcenter is Siemens PLM software—an adaptable product lifecycle management system that’s deployable on-premise or by cloud SaaS that has features for BOM management, change management, document management, and NX integration among others. It promises to connect people and processes across domains and departments and throughout your supply chain.

Siemens Teamcenter has a simple interface that makes the software easy to understand and use. CAD history and revisions are accessible and easy to import and export, toolbars are customizable, and viewing 3D models without the need for integrations makes Teamcenter one of the best in the market.

Because Siemens Teamcenter caters to more comprehensive and advanced needs, opening large data files, 3D models, tends to cause delay and lag. Some may find navigation a bit of a challenge due to the sheer number of features within the software.

Siemens Teamcenter offers a 30-day free trial and customized pricing is available upon request.

Other PLM Tools

Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list. If you need additional suggestions for product lifecycle management, check these out.

  1. Centric Retail PLM

    For multicategory retail companies

  2. Upchain

    For SMBs

  3. Bamboo Rose

    For multi-enterprise supply chains

  4. Andromeda PLM by NGC

    For manufacturing giants

  5. ClickUp

    Collaborative, free PLM software

  6. Zeda.io

    For AI-driven product insights

  7. Jama Software

    For its version control and requirements authoring features

  8. PathPro

    For tracking and prioritizing feature requests

  9. Productboard

    For tech companies

  10. OpenText

    For information management

Looking for more software to support your product team? Here are some other software reviews we’ve written:

Selection Criteria for the Best Product Lifecycle Management Software

Here are the top factors I took into consideration while putting together my list of top PLM software solutions:

Core Functionality

As a baseline, a PLM system should help you streamline and automate various processes within your product management lifecycle. This means having resource management tools and the ability to oversee the team members and time that contributes to your product’s development. It should also have process management capabilities to facilitate each stage of the product lifecycle.

Key Features

Here are a few specific key features I looked for in the PLM platforms I tested:

  1. Product roadmapping: The ability to outline the stages of your product’s development and plan projects and features. Bonus points if there are templates available.
  2. Product information management: This includes bill of materials or BOM management and the storage of other important data and documents.
  3. Quality management: Any tools that help with quality control and testing, as well as regulatory compliance for your products.
  4. Portfolio management: It’s great to be able to manage your entire product portfolio in the same PLM system.
  5. Analytics and reporting dashboards: The ability to monitor product performance metrics in real-time and assess opportunities for improvement.

Usability

The user-friendliness of software solutions is always important to me. It’s frustrating when a tool that’s meant to support your team takes too long to implement and get the hang of. I looked for PLM platforms with simple user interfaces and intuitive functionality.

Integrations

Ideally, you’ll want a PLM software that connects to your other important product development tools. I looked for software that integrates with computer-aided design (CAD) software, project management software, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. I also kept an eye out for tools that could import data from spreadsheets or have APIs you can use to build custom integrations.

FAQ: More on Product Lifecycle Management

Have some questions about the processes and management tools used across a product lifecycle? Check out this handy FAQ for answers!

What is Product Lifecycle Management?

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process by which product teams plan, create, launch, and eventually retire new products. It also covers the iterative process of updating existing products and launching new features, or removing existing features and functionalities. The stages of an entire product lifecycle are:

  1. Introduction: New product introduction is when you come up with a concept, establish a product market fit, and bring your new product to market.
  2. Growth: At this stage, your product has reached profitability and you’re developing new features, related products, or additional services. It’s about turning a good idea into a scalable product with longevity.
  3. Maturity: Most products will eventually hit a plateau and have reached their peak. At this stage, you may decide to shift your priorities to a new product or invest in reinventing your existing product.
  4. Decline: Eventually, your product will face an over-saturated market, redundancy, or replacement. You’ll offboard existing clients and plan how you’ll phase out your product.

To manage your product’s lifecycle, you’ll want to have systems and processes in place. This includes your supply chain and manufacturing process, data and document management systems, product testing and quality control methods, and regulatory compliance safeguards. It’s also about ensuring you have the right business processes in place for effective project management and roadmap planning.

While the above information outlines a more traditional product lifecycle approach, there are also newer approaches to the product lifecycle. An Agile methodology can make for a quicker time to market, but usually also means compromising product quality for development velocity. This is a powerful approach for startups and small businesses embracing a ‘win fast, fail fast’ approach or companies seeking to expand their product portfolio.

What’s the Difference Between PLM Software and PDM Software?

Product lifecycle management (PLM) and product data management (PDM) software have some overlapping tools and features. But these two types of platforms ultimately serve different functions in the product development process.

PLM tools are centered around the planning, design, execution, testing, launch, and marketing of a single product or series of products. PLM software tends to encompass:

  • Workflows
  • Milestones or stage gates
  • CAD/BOM syncing
  • Change management processes

PDM tools, on the other hand, are all about the collection, navigation, storage, and security of a different type of asset: data. They may host data in the cloud or on-premise, and tend to encompass:

  • Controlling and maintaining a “master file”
  • Tracking each changes with each new version update
  • Assigning part numbers for each part/file across the overarching assembly

What Do You Think About the Above Product Lifecycle Management Software?

Have you tried out any of the software product life cycle tools listed above? What product lifecycle management marketing tools would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments section.

Ben Aston
By Ben Aston

Ben Aston is an online media entrepreneur and founder of Black & White Zebra, an indie media company on a mission to help people and organizations succeed.

Ben applies his expertise in design and strategy to enable businesses to deliver innovative products and services that delight customers. Ben is passionate about understanding customer needs through design research, identifying opportunities based on those insights, and empowering designers and technologists to create solutions. He is driven to develop and uncover new opportunities for clients, establishing strong connections with their customers through product solutions that create lasting value.