Most alternative pages start by explaining what is wrong with the other tool. This one starts by saying that if a changelog is what you need, Headway's free plan is probably the answer and you can stop reading.
The reason to look elsewhere is not that Headway is bad at changelogs. It is that a changelog is the last step of a loop, and if the earlier steps are missing you end up announcing into a room where nobody asked for anything.
Everything below was read on Headway's own site on 9 September 2026.
What is Headway?
Headway is a changelog product and nothing else. It publishes release notes to a hosted page and an in app widget, and there is no board for customers to post on and no roadmap.
What does Headway cost?
Nothing, or twenty nine dollars a month.
The free plan carries unlimited changelogs, customisation of the public page and of the widget, custom categories and their attention badge. There is no seat count and no entry limit on it, which makes it one of the more generous free plans anywhere in this category.
Pro is twenty nine dollars a month, flat rather than per user. It adds whitelabelling, a custom domain, all the integrations, team management, scheduled publishing, a private changelog and the option to keep search engines off it.
That last one is worth pausing on, because it runs the opposite way to most tools. Their free changelog is a public page that search engines can read, and paying is what buys you the ability to hide it. Several tools in this category have that backwards.
The version of this argument worth having is the one you run yourself, and a trial takes 14 days and a card.
Does Headway do feature requests or a roadmap?
No, and they never suggest otherwise.
We read their site looking for the words vote, voting, upvote, roadmap, feature request, feedback and board. Their marketing site is a single page, since the pricing link is an anchor on it and the pricing path returns a four oh four, and not one of those seven words appears on it anywhere.
That is the clearest possible statement of scope rather than a criticism, and it is why the honest version of this comparison is not a feature table.
Headway is a changelog. Ours is a board that produces a changelog as a consequence. Those are different purchases and the query that brought you here does not distinguish them.
Does Headway have a public roadmap, single sign on and an API?
Headway's own pages read on 14 September 2026 never use the word roadmap, because the product is a changelog and nothing else. Single sign on is not published anywhere on Headway's own pages read on 14 September 2026, so nobody could read whether it exists.
The Headway API is on the free plan, which is unusual in a category that treats an API as the thing you upgrade for.
Headway does not weight votes by revenue, because Headway has no voting to weight. Ours publishes a public roadmap with a Denied column on every plan, and signs a voter in with a token from your own application on the thirty nine dollar plan rather than with SAML.
Is there a free Headway alternative?
Yes, and Headway is one of them, which is why this page is about what its free tier does not cover rather than about price. Headway's free tier carries unlimited changelogs, and Beamer's runs to a thousand monthly active users with one teammate.
Both were read on their own pages on 14 September 2026, and both are announcement tools rather than places customers ask for things. This product is not one of them. There is no free plan here, only a fourteen day trial that asks for a card at signup.
Is Headway worth it, and when should you stay on it?
When the announcement is the whole job.
If you already know what to build, if requests reach you through support or sales or your own head, and if what you want is a well made public page and an in product widget saying what shipped, Headway free does that and charges you nothing.
Moving to a nine dollar tool to get the same thing would be a worse deal and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Stay too if you need a custom domain and a team on the cheapest possible terms. Twenty nine dollars flat for whitelabelling, a domain and team management is less than we charge for the plan that carries a custom domain.
What does ours do that Headway does not?
The three steps before the announcement.
People can ask. A public board where anybody can post a request and vote on one, with no account needed at any point. That is the product, and the changelog is downstream of it rather than beside it.
The entries make themselves. A release on ours is a container for requests that reached your Completed column, so the changelog entry is built out of work you already tracked. There is no second document to keep in sync, which is the actual reason changelogs lapse rather than a lack of formatting.
The people who asked get told. Publishing a release emails the voters on the requests inside it, and that message names the thing that specific person asked for. It lands differently from an announcement to everybody.
One honest limit on that last one. Only voters who were signed in get the email, because an anonymous voter has no address to send to.
Anonymous voting is the reason our vote counts are worth reading and it is also the reason a share of your voters cannot be told directly. Both halves are true and you should know both before you rely on it.
14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.
What does Headway do that ours does not?
Two things at least, and one of them may matter to you more than everything above.
Scheduled publishing. Write it now, have it go out later. We do not have that.
A free plan. Ours starts at nine dollars. Theirs starts at nothing, with no seat count.
There is also a gap on our side worth naming, which is that we ship no RSS feed and no Atom feed of any kind.
We searched our own code for it on the day this page was written and there is nothing. Several tools in this category do ship one, and if a feed is on your list we are not the tool.
What moving actually involves
More work than a button, and the honest version is short. There is no importer for requests or votes on our side.
Voters and the revenue behind them come in from a CSV or from a billing connection, which is the part the weighting needs. The requests themselves are rebuilt by hand or by a script against the API, and the vote counts start again.
That is a real cost and it is worth naming before anybody moves. The five steps, with the endpoint each one uses, are written out in full, and they are the same five whatever you are leaving.
What does ours cost?
Nine dollars a month, and thirty nine if you want a custom domain or colleagues.
The nine dollar plan is one project and one person, and it carries the board, the roadmap page, the changelog and the widgets. Thirty nine adds more projects, the API, a custom domain and team members, with no count on the team.
Neither plan meters the people who vote or the people who read the changelog. Both figures are published and a card is required for the fourteen day trial.
If you are weighing several of these, the real billing unit of every tool in the category is on one page, and the changelog tools are compared separately on what each one actually delivers.