10 Best Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Software In 2023

Productboard is an agile product management tool best suited for digital industries that lets users scrap spreadsheets, consolidate user feedback, define product strategy, earn buy-in for plans, and preserve existing workflows. Productboard is an IoT company trusted by customers like Zoom, Zendesk, and Avast.

Productboard has a pleasant visual interface that maps insights out into product ideas and features that make it easy to create timely and relevant products using organized and detailed information from different sources across the production process.

Because Productboard caters to clients in tech, many features can take more time to learn. More training videos and tutorials would be helpful to users who are just getting started with such robust software.

Productboard costs from $20 and offers a 15-day free trial.

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.

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.

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.

Andromeda PLM by NGC is a cloud-based product lifecycle management system made for the fashion and footwear industries. It comes with features for planning, merchandising, design, costing, sampling, quality, bill of materials creation, and sourcing. It’s also equipped with workflow calendars and customisable dashboards.

With Andromeda PLM by NGC, companies can create a database of all the information necessary for the manufacturing processes all the way through launch and marketing. Transactions are a breeze with no more missing information from suppliers, vendors, and collaborators. Technical specifications are standardised and quickly understood by manufacturers.

Andromeda PLM comes across as slightly outdated when it comes to their graphical user interface. Cutting edge brands may not feel inspired by the lackluster UI or stale. Text-heavy layout. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this can all be overlooked.

Andromeda PLM by NGC offers a free demo and customized pricing is available upon request.

Bamboo Rose is a multi-enterprise and supply chain platform that strives to reduce cycle time and sampling costs through a variety of productivity and efficiency features. The tool can help by giving users one version of truth, real-time design and product development processing features, standardized design elements, and collaborative 3D designing, as well as a strong private label product portfolio.

Bamboo Rose enables users to work with various suppliers in one platform, streamlining multiple processes and getting rid of siloed information. The platform makes it easy to see all the relevant data across different aspects of the development and production cycle.

Bamboo Rose is packed with features which means that there could be a learning curve in terms of navigation and feature set mastery.

Bamboo Rose provides 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.

Jama Software is a requirements management software that helps companies manage all aspects of the product lifecycle from concept to delivery. It combines powerful requirements management capabilities with advanced analytics for smarter decision-making and offers intuitive user interfaces and configurable workflows.

Jama Software’s PLM capabilities help teams plan, design, build, test, and launch products on time and within budget. It provides visibility into every step of the product lifecycle so that teams can identify bottlenecks before they become problems. It also allows users to track changes in real-time so that everyone is up to date on the latest version of a product or feature. This version control lets you track, audit, and compare different versions of a project before releasing it in its final form, helping ensure accuracy and thoroughness throughout the development process.

Jama Software's requirements authoring feature is an advanced product requirements software solution designed to help businesses and organizations create, manage, and track product requirements throughout the development process. Critically, this feature allows end users to collaborate on requirements in real-time and generate detailed reports that include filters. With straightforward review capabilities, stakeholders can easily approve or reject changes as they are made.

Jama Software integrates with other applications through Jama Connect. This connector lets you sync traceable information without replacing the current tools in your tech stack. Integrations include MathWorks, Jira, TFS, Windchill, Jenkins, Bugzilla, Excel, and GitHub.

Pricing for this tool is available upon request, and a 30-day free trial is available upon registration through the website.

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.

QA Wolf costs from $1000/engineer.