10 Best PLM Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
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.
Tool | Best For | Trial Info | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Best product lifecycle management for software devs | 7-day free trial | From $20/user/month (billed annually) | Website | |
2 | Best for all sizes of companies where web-applications are their main product | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
3 | Best for product lifecycle management through real-time performance insights and analytics | Free trial + demo available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
4 | Best for those in the Salesforce ecosystem | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
5 | Best for idea and roadmap management | 7-30 day free trial | From $25/user/month | Website | |
6 | Best for flexible BOM management | Free plan available | From $75/seat/month (billed annually) | Website | |
7 | Best managing catalogs, product development and collaboration | Free trial available | From $125/user/month | Website | |
8 | Best for North American teams | Not available | Pricing Upon Request | Website | |
9 | Best for SMBs | Free Demo | From $30/user | Website | |
10 | Best for multicategory retail companies | Not available | Pricing Upon Request | Website |
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 management for software devs
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.
QA Wolf
Best for all sizes of companies where web-applications are their main product
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Upchain is a cloud PLM software solution for modern manufacturing that allows users to securely collaborate on a global scale. Upchain enables users to work together in real time to keep projects going without delays, allowing you to stay within budget. Upchain comes with CAD and Microsoft Office plugins, BOM management, API integrations, ECR creation and management and so much more.
Upchain provides users with a single source of truth where documentation is easily accessible and their cloud technology makes it so that no matter where team members and collaborators are, all the information is available to everyone. Their transparent and modest pricing makes them a great PIM starting point for small and medium businesses.
As Upchain continues to improve its services, many features customers are looking for are still in the works. One thing they’ve managed to overlook is the fact that their tutorials have now become outdated. It doesn’t help that some terms may cause confusion in entry-level users.
Upchain costs from $30/user, offers 3 pricing plans, and a free demo.
Centric Retail PLM comes with features that let users speed up time to market, increase product introduction success, boost product innovation, launch more SKUs, get closer to customers, lower COGS & improve product margins, streamline private/white label and supplier co-created development, and maximize product assortment value.
Centric Retail PLM not only serves as a central process and storage solution, it is also a global platform that allows companies to respond to their customers and communicate with team members no matter where they are.
Centric Retail PLM is designed for companies with thousands of suppliers, vendors, retailers, and products in mind and so the many features in the software, a number of them customizable, may pose a challenge to new users.
Centric Retail PLM offers a free demo 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.
- Andromeda PLM by NGC
For manufacturing giants
- Siemens Teamcenter
For companies with advanced needs
- Bamboo Rose
For multi-enterprise supply chains
- ClickUp
Collaborative, free PLM software
- Wrike
Product lifecycle dashboards & data visualizations
- Zeda.io
For AI-driven product insights
- Jama Software
For its version control and requirements authoring features
- PathPro
For tracking and prioritizing feature requests
- Productboard
For tech companies
- OpenText
For information management
Other Product Management Software Reviews
Looking for more software to support your product team? Here are some other software reviews we’ve written:
- Digital asset management software
- Agile PLM software
- Product Design Software For 3D/2D Rendering
- ALM Software For Managing Digital Product Life Cycles
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:
- 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.
- Product information management: This includes bill of materials or BOM management and the storage of other important data and documents.
- Quality management: Any tools that help with quality control and testing, as well as regulatory compliance for your products.
- Portfolio management: It’s great to be able to manage your entire product portfolio in the same PLM system.
- 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:
- Introduction: New product introduction is when you come up with a concept, establish a product market fit, and bring your new product to market.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.