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10 Best New Product Development Software For 2023

The Best Free Product Development Tools

Here’s a shortlist of the best free roadmap tools:

  1. 1. Wrike — Best for its cross-tagging feature for enhanced visibility
  2. 2. monday.com — Best product development software with pre-built templates
  3. 3. Unleash — Best for its feature toggles
  4. 4. Pendo — Best to understand your users interaction with your product
  5. 5. Amplitude — Best for gathering product intelligence
  6. 6. Planview Clarizen — Best new product development platform for rapidly growing enterprise organizations
  7. 7. Planview Enterprise One — Best for enterprise agile product development
  8. 8. Zoho Sprints — Best for backlog prioritization & release management
  9. 9. Favro — Best for roadmapping and team planning
  10. 10. Pie — Best for visualizing complex portfolios

There are so many components to planning and building a viable product that it can make your head spin. The best new product development software helps you streamline the process by syncing your product teams, clarifying your product strategy, and optimizing the development process from prioritization, to prototyping, to testing, and all the way through to launch and post-launch. 

In this article, I’ll explain what this software does and highlight some of the best new product development software on the market today. I will also answer some FAQs that product managers are sure to find helpful. 

What is New Product Development Software?

Product development software (sometimes called new product development software or just NPD software) is a digital tool that helps you flesh out a product concept from inception through to completion. New product developers can use these tools to develop minimum viable products or a fully fledged alpha product with a feedback system for ongoing development.

It can help you with product roadmaps and planning, analyzing your existing product data for better decision-making, task assignment and organization, communication and collaboration, bug tracking, and feedback/revisions/updates.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Development Software

Here’s a brief description of each of the best new product development software that are featured on this top 10 list.

1

Wrike

Best for its cross-tagging feature for enhanced visibility

Wrike is a product management software with robust collaboration and PLM features that effectively manages product development.

Why I picked Wrike: Using this software as a product development tool is ideal thanks to its suite of features to improve collaboration, enhance visibility, improve quality stakeholder decision-making, accelerate collaboration, and boost team productivity. Wrike can help you understand the different components of your product development and effectively manage them as they progress through different stages. Kanban boards and multiple views can help you see the information the way you need to.

Additionally, its approval and cross-tagging features will speed up product development and visibility. On the one hand, approval workflows can involve different stakeholders and request approvals in a streamlined interface that promotes discussion. On the other hand, cross-tagging lets you tag a task across many different initiatives to increase the visibility of important activities that feed a higher-level strategy.

Wrike Standout Features & Integrations

Features include pre-built templates, custom request forms, interactive Gantt charts, visual proofing, workflow automations, time tracking, project portfolio management, and dashboards.

Integrations in Wrike include 400+ pre-built native integrations, like the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 2544

Free plan available

From $9.80/user/month

2

monday.com

Best product development software with pre-built templates

monday.com is a project management software to help project managers plan and execute projects.

Why I picked monday.com: It has informative dashboards to help keep team members in the loop of news and other project developments. You can also use it to streamline the product development process by automating repetitive and straightforward tasks so product team members can concentrate on other crucial tasks. monday.com is the best product development software for large teams because it makes collaboration easier.

monday.com acts as a centralized platform where product team members can share files and communicate with each other. This product management software has pre-built templates product managers can use to launch new projects quickly. Its task management feature lets product managers assign tasks and monitor their progress to ensure that they meet deadlines.

monday.com Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource and project management, time tracking, collaboration, file management, collaborative docs and reporting dashboards.

Integrations are available with other software critical to new product development, including Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Google Calendar, Zoom, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Overall, monday.com is a great tool both for teams who need high customization to adapt to their workflows and teams who are looking for a quick start using templates.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 8065

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

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

3

Unleash

Best for its feature toggles

Unleash is a product management platform that simplifies the development process, helping teams move from ideation to launch more efficiently. It offers an ecosystem of tools, templates, and workflows that enable teams to focus on innovation and creativity while minimizing the effort required for administration and documentation. The software helps teams align their development efforts with strategies and goals by setting KPIs, tracking performance, and analyzing metrics. Users can submit ideas, prioritize them based on impact, feasibility, and effort, and assign them to specific team members.

Why I picked Unleash: Unleash provides Agile boards and development workflow features that help teams manage their projects and sprints effectively. The agile boards give teams a visual representation of their product backlog, sprint planning, progress, and testing. Users can move cards from one column to another, indicating their status and progress. It enhances team collaboration by enforcing code review, merge policies, and status updates on pull requests.

Unleash Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a feedback mechanism, feature toggles, analytical reports, templates, and Agile boards.

Integrations include Jenkins and GitLab, enabling automatic builds, continuous integration, and deployment.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.6 63

14-day free trial + free demo available

From $80/month for 5 users

4

Pendo

Best to understand your users interaction with your product

Pendo is a product adoption software to help you develop products with features that matter to customers.

Why I picked Pendo: The software has an analytics feature that lets you track user behavior and gives you an idea of features that users adopt and those they ignore. You can use Pendo to include in-app guides during software product development to cut onboarding time and provide user support to improve customer satisfaction.

One of the best ways to improve a project is by gathering feedback from team members, and Pendo is the best product management tool for you if you want an efficient way of collecting and managing feedback. You can use Pendo to solicit new product ideas or share a product idea with team members or customers to ensure that a feature will make a product more usable and help increase revenues.

Pendo Standout Features & Integrations

Features include in-app tooltips and best practices, onboarding guides, analytics, sentiment analysis, road mapping with customizable swimlanes, customer feedback collection and grouping, and product journey analysis of your mobile app.

Integrations include Jira, Hubspot, Zendesk, Salesforce, Calendly, InVision, Gainsight, Looker, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Additionally, you can access thousands of additional integrations through Zapier.

Pendo has analytics and sentiment analysis tools that will help you deliver better product experiences for your users.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.4 1199

Free trial + free plan available

From $7,000/year (up to 2,000 users/month)

5

Amplitude

Best for gathering product intelligence

Amplitude is a data analytics tool to help you develop a combination of product features that can improve customer engagement and increase revenues. You can use Amplitude to identify weak points you can improve.

Why I picked Amplitude: The tool lets you conduct A/B tests to identify which product version customers like better. You can also use Amplitude to analyze product intelligence from multiple data sources, ensuring you have all the information you need to make an informed decision. Product data is critical in new product development because it can help you understand your customers’ needs, and Amplitude is the best software for gathering product intelligence.

You can use Amplitude to automatically capture user behavior and identify features that need improvement. You can use Amplitude as a central hub for product intelligence to guide the management and development team in making product development decisions. Amplitude also recommends content you can include in your software to improve customer engagement and conversion.

Amplitude Standout Features & Integrations

Features include advanced behavioral analytics, automatic syncs to 3rd party software, unlimited data sources, unlimited data destinations, dashboard templates, and collaborations tools.

Integrations include connections with other product development tools like Adobe Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce-CRM, and Zendesk.

Amplitude has a free version with limited features, and they provide pricing details for paid plans upon request.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5 1976

Free version

Pricing upon request

6

Planview Clarizen

Best new product development platform for rapidly growing enterprise organizations

Planview is a new product development platform that makes it easy to prioritize and manage new product ideas for an accelerated go-to-market solution. Concepts can be collected and reviewed in a centralized location. Integration with gated project management software allows organizations to tailor new product development to their specific needs.  

The platform excels for cross-functional teams working on new product development. With features specifically designed to improve collaboration, various teams working through different methods can communicate complex issues with the push of a button.

Additional features in the platform integrate with other business systems to provide data crucial to a successful new product launch. Comprehensive reporting capabilities add more visibility to the ROI of new product development and help drive continuous improvements.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 530

Free trial + free demo available

Pricing upon request

7

Planview Enterprise One

Best for enterprise agile product development

Planview is a project portfolio management software for cross-functional teams that enables product organizations to optimize product portfolios and accelerate time-to-market.

Why I picked Planview: First, Planview has a resource management feature to help you allocate budget, resources, and manpower to projects. Then, the tool has a forecasting feature to help you anticipate demands and plan contingencies. It can also help you automate simple tasks to ensure that team members can concentrate on their assignments. One of the best ways to simplify complex projects is by breaking them down into simple tasks, and Planview is one of the best project management tools if you want to use agile in your product development.

This project management tool gives agile teams visibility of their progress to create a sense of urgency and identify project weaknesses they need to address. Finally, it has a visual analytics feature to help you track costs and revenue projections across your portfolio.

Planview Standout Features & Integrations

Features include configurable financial and resource capacity planning, portfolio management dashboards and analytics, multiple product roadmap displays, customer requirements and feedback capture, and product launch planning.

Integrations include out-of-the-box connections to Jira, Microsoft Teams, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Slack.

Planview is an integrated solution that connects product strategy, planning, ideation, prioritization, and development to delivery.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
3.8 28

30-day free trial

Pricing upon request

8

Zoho Sprints

Best for backlog prioritization & release management

Zoho Sprints is an agile project management tool that empowers agile teams to plan, track, and ship the best products for their customers. It helps product teams maintain an organized and transparent product backlog.

Why I picked Zoho Sprints: You can track the progress of your epics, sprints, and releases through customizable reports and dashboards. Scrum teams can move work items from their product backlog to their sprint backlog with ease. From planning to deployment, this tool helps teams navigate through the interdependencies of their release cycles.

In Zoho Sprints, product teams can collaborate within the context of their work through functionalities like built-in chat, virtual meetings, and an interactive project feed, as communication and collaboration are crucial in every product development team.

Zoho Sprints Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a sprint backlog, epics, releases, a scrum board, status, @mention users, an in-app chat, notifications and reports. these reports include velocity charts, burndown and burnup, epic progress, and cumulative flow diagrams.

Integrations include popular code repository management tools like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket. DevOps teams can automate their CI/CD pipelines by integrating with Jenkins or Azure DevOps. Product developers can leverage webhooks and APIs to build their integrations or browse through a growing library of apps listed on Zoho’s marketplace.

If you are part of a small team, Zoho Sprints has a free forever plan for up to 3 users.

15-day free trial

From $3/user/month

9

Favro

Best for roadmapping and team planning

Favro is a collaborative planning app developers can use to view backlogs and sprints. Favro allows real-time collaboration through messages and comments, making it ideal for groups with members in different locations.

Why I picked Favro: Having a well-planned product roadmap can help ensure smooth product development. Favro has automatic notifications to alert managers of pending approvals to prevent project delays.

Further, Favro has planning boards you can use to create a roadmap that your product development team can follow to ensure that team members are aware of their tasks and goals. You can use Favro to create a project timeline to guide team members and ensure they complete tasks on time. Additionally, you can use the dashboard to identify struggling team members so they can assist if needed.

Favro Standout Features & Integrations

Features include team and planning boards, roadmaps, automations, scheduling, sheets, shared tasks, goals and user stories, and collaborative docs.

Integrations include other project development tools, like Jira, Slack, Microsoft Calendar, Zapier, and Google Drive.

Favro pricing starts at $10.2/month/user, and they offer a 14-day free trial.

14-day free trial

From $12/month

10

Pie

Best for visualizing complex portfolios

Pie is a visual project and process management application to help you simplify complicated projects and tasks.

Why I picked Pie: You can use this product development software to create an unlimited number of workspaces so your organization can handle multiple projects simultaneously. Its Kanban boards help give team members a visual idea of what they’re working on and if they can hit a target product launch date. Pie acts as a collaboration tool that allows team members to post messages at the project level to protect sensitive information and keep the project moving forward.

Additionally, Pie has a file versioning feature to ensure that early versions of software products stay protected. Once you start finding your way through the best way to handle your projects, the software lets you create 'recipes' that you can use at a later date as templates.

Pie Standout Features & Integrations

Features include agile and waterfall methodology support, templates called 'pie recipes', stacks for layering projects visually, timeline view, task management, resource management, and reporting.

Integrations include thousands of apps that you can connect to thanks to Pie's support for Zapier.

Pie is great at handling portfolios with many projects, thanks to its visual pie representation. If you wish to try this software, there is a free version with limited features for an unlimited number of users.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
5 2

From $5/user/month

The 10 Best Product Development Software Summary

Here’s a quick comparison of everything we discussed above.

Tool Free Option Price
1
Wrike

Best for its cross-tagging feature for enhanced visibility

Free plan available

From $9.80/user/month Visit Website
2
monday.com

Best product development software with pre-built templates

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

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

Best for its feature toggles

14-day free trial + free demo available

From $80/month for 5 users Visit Website
4
Pendo

Best to understand your users interaction with your product

Free trial + free plan available

From $7,000/year (up to 2,000 users/month) Visit Website
5
Amplitude

Best for gathering product intelligence

Free version

Pricing upon request Visit Website
6
Planview Clarizen

Best new product development platform for rapidly growing enterprise organizations

Free trial + free demo available

Pricing upon request Visit Website
7
Planview Enterprise One

Best for enterprise agile product development

30-day free trial

Pricing upon request Visit Website
8
Zoho Sprints

Best for backlog prioritization & release management

15-day free trial

From $3/user/month Visit Website
9
Favro

Best for roadmapping and team planning

14-day free trial

From $12/month Visit Website
10
Pie

Best for visualizing complex portfolios

Not available

From $5/user/month Visit Website

Other Tools

Here are a few more tools that didn’t make the top list.

  1. Airfocus - Best for clear, coherent roadmaps.
  2. Creately - Great for planning, brainstorming or designing anything visually. 
  3. Canny -  Great for collecting feedback for projects on your product roadmap.
  4. Bubble - Great for large-scale enterprise product portfolio management. 
  5. Airtable - Great for road mapping with powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping.
  6. Zenhub - Great for a road mapping solution inside GitHub.
  7. Coda.io - Great for planning using “building blocks”—like tables and buttons.
  8. Aha.io - Great for capturing breakthrough ideas using their voting-based ideas portal.
  9. ProductBoard.com  - Great for intelligent prioritizing of features and tasks. 
  10. Jama Software -Great for defining, aligning, and developing complex products.
  11. HCL Software - Great for building a next-generation software portfolio. 
  12. Whatfix - Great for driving digital adoption of your new product. 
  13. WalkMe - Great for collecting and analyzing user journey data.
  14. Sopheon - Great for enterprise innovation management software and services.

How I Selected The Best Product Development Software

In choosing the best product development software, I handpicked tools that were a good fit for this topic according to the criteria below.

  1. User Interface (UI): I selected software that is easy on the eye. If this is a tool we're using throughout the entire project, it has to be visually attractive.
  2. Usability: I looked for software that is easy to learn. Therefore, I looked at the UX + documentation, training, and tutorials. 
  3. Integrations: I searched for the ways in which the software extends its functionality. Therefore, I will discuss the different integrations available. These can be pre-built, custom, or through a 3rd party software.
  4. Pricing: I looked at the real pricing per month for each tool. Also, I provide information on free trials or free versions available.

Product Development Management Software FAQ

Find answers to common questions other people ask about this topic.

What's Next?

Now that you know which tools you can use for product development, you can explore what is the role of marketing strategy in new product development.

If you are interested in the basics, read our guide on product lifecycle management and the details on what a product manager does in their day-to-day. And to stay up to date on all the latest industry tips and trends, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter.

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.

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