The Best Free Product Development Tools
Here’s a shortlist of the best free roadmap tools:
- monday.com
Best product development software with pre-built templates
- QA Wolf
Best for all sizes of companies where web-applications are their main product
- Amplitude
Best for gathering product intelligence
- Pendo
Best to understand your users interaction with your product
- Planview Enterprise One
Best for enterprise agile product development
- Pie
Best for visualizing complex portfolios
- Zoho Sprints
Best for backlog prioritization & release management
- Favro
Best for roadmapping and team planning
- Planview Clarizen
Best new product development platform for rapidly growing enterprise organizations
- Planview
Best new product development lifecycle solution for rapidly growing enterprise organizations
There are so many components to planning and building a viable product that it can make your head spin. Product development software is useful for syncing your product teams, taking your product strategy and using it to develop your product through prioritization, prototyping, testing, and all the way through to launch and post-launch.
In this post, I’ll explain what this software does and highlight some of the best product development software on the market today. I will also answer some FAQs that product managers are sure to find helpful.
How We Picked 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.
- 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.
- Usability: I looked for software that is easy to learn. Therefore, I looked at the UX + documentation, training, and tutorials.
- 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.
- Pricing: I looked at the real pricing per month for each tool. Also, I provide information on free trials or free versions available.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Development Software
Here’s a brief description of each of the NPD software that are featured on this top 10 list.
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.
QA Wolf
Best for all sizes of companies where web-applications are their main product
QA Wolf is a product development tool that helps product teams at SaaS companies go to market faster by ensuring new software features are bug-free.
Why I picked QA Wolf: Product teams can benefit from using QA Wolf because it’s fast and can get teams to 80% automated test coverage in about 3 months while traditional QA teams/tools either take years to get to 80% test coverage or simply never get there.
QA Wolf demands no more than low effort by creating test matrices for users and thinking critically on their behalf. They create new tests and ensure they’re always at the 80% coverage benchmark. They also analyze data and synthesize findings so product managers immediately know what went wrong instead of having to investigate themselves while other tools/services may require you to be prescriptive and closely manage testing.
QA Wolf also happens to be affordable because they charge for coverage and not for hours worked making using it cost as little as half the price of a QA Engineer. With QA Wolf, users get unlimited tests and test runs, full web application testing, the benefits of no vendor lock-in, and 100% parallelization.
QA Wolf integrates with CI/CD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Planview
Best new product development lifecycle solution 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 and managing multiple products at various lifecycle stages. 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.
The 10 Best Product Development Software Summary
Here’s a quick comparison of everything we discussed above.
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | monday.com Best product development software with pre-built templates | 14-day free trial + freemium plan available | From $10/user/month | Visit Website |
2 | QA Wolf Best for all sizes of companies where web-applications are their main product | Two-month, risk-free pilot | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
3 | Amplitude Best for gathering product intelligence | Free version | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
4 | Pendo Best to understand your users interaction with your product | Free version available | From $7,000/year | Visit Website |
5 | Planview Enterprise One Best for enterprise agile product development | 30-day free trial | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
6 | Pie Best for visualizing complex portfolios | Not available | From $5/user/month | Visit Website |
7 | Zoho Sprints Best for backlog prioritization & release management | 15-day free trial | From $3/user/month | Visit Website |
8 | Favro Best for roadmapping and team planning | 14-day free trial | From $12/month | Visit Website |
9 | Planview Clarizen Best new product development platform for rapidly growing enterprise organizations | Free trial + free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
10 | Planview Best new product development lifecycle solution for rapidly growing enterprise organizations | 30-day free trial | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
Other Tools
Here are a few more tools that didn’t make the top list.
- Airfocus - Best for clear, coherent roadmaps.
- Creately - Great for planning, brainstorming or designing anything visually.
- Canny - Great for collecting feedback for projects on your product roadmap.
- Bubble - Great for large-scale enterprise product portfolio management.
- Airtable - Great for road mapping with powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping.
- Zenhub - Great for a road mapping solution inside GitHub.
- Coda.io - Great for planning using “building blocks”—like tables and buttons.
- Aha.io - Great for capturing breakthrough ideas using their voting-based ideas portal.
- ProductBoard.com - Great for intelligent prioritizing of features and tasks.
- Jama Software -Great for defining, aligning, and developing complex products.
- HCL Software - Great for building a next-generation software portfolio.
- Whatfix - Great for driving digital adoption of your new product.
- WalkMe - Great for collecting and analyzing user journey data.
- Sopheon - Great for enterprise innovation management software and services.
Product Development Management Software FAQ
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.