Seven tools that describe themselves as idea management software are below, with what each one bills on and what it costs, read on the vendor's own pricing page on 2 October 2026.
They are in alphabetical order. There is no ranking on this page, no score out of anything and no best overall, because the answer depends entirely on how many people will use the board and whether you can predict that number in advance.
VoteFirst builds one of the seven. It is last because of its name and for no other reason, and it is described in the same shape as the rest.
The enterprise platforms sold to innovation programmes are priced further down, each from its own site on 3 October 2026.
What is idea management software, and what do idea management tools actually do?
Three things, and the third one is where the tools separate.
They collect ideas from customers and colleagues in one place, usually a board anybody can read. They count, so the same idea arriving eleven times becomes one entry with eleven people behind it rather than eleven entries.
And they answer, which means the person who suggested something finds out what happened to it without anybody keeping a private list.
Everything that happens between collecting and deciding is the definition itself, including the one question worth asking a vendor, which is what their tool does when the same idea arrives twice.
What does each tool bill on, and what does it cost?
Seven vendors, read on their own pricing pages on 2 October 2026.
| Vendor | From | Billed per | Free plan | Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VoteFirst | $7.50/mo | plan | – | 14 days, card |
| Convas | $15/mo | tracked user | 25 users | – |
| FeedBear | $15/mo | project | – | 14 days |
| ProductLift | $19/mo | workspace | – | 14 days |
| Frill | $22/mo | workspace | – | 14 days |
| UserJot | $29/mo | workspace | 2 boards | 14 days |
| Canny | $79/mo | tracked user | 25 users | – |
Four different meters across seven tools. Two count the people who take part, one counts projects, one counts admins, one caps the number of live ideas, and two count nothing at all. Until you know which row you are reading, the monthly figures in the first column cannot be compared with each other.
The dangerous one is the tracked user, because the number is not yours to control. A board that works produces more of them, which is the invoice arriving at the moment you were hoping to be pleased. What a tracked user is, and the six vendors who disagree about it, has its own page.
Frill's cap is the other kind of limit worth noticing. Fifty active ideas is a ceiling on the board rather than on the audience, which behaves very differently as the board fills up.
What this costs
Lite
$9 /mo
Pro
$39 /mo
Lifetime
$999 once
Fourteen day trial of Pro, card asked for at signup. Nothing here counts the people who vote, so the bill does not move when the board starts working. The long version, with what happens if you stop paying.
Which is the best idea management software for a small team?
Nobody can answer that without the number of people who will use it, which is the point of the table above.
Under twenty five participants, Canny and Convas are genuinely free and are the cheapest thing here by a distance. Past a few hundred, both meters start climbing and a flat priced tool costs less every month after that.
A workspace price is predictable and a tracked user price is not, and which of those matters more is a question about your own board rather than about the software.
The second question is whether anybody on your team will actually run it. Every tool here collects. None of them decides. A board with four hundred ideas and no denied column is worse than a spreadsheet, because it looks like an answer.
Nine dollars a month for one project, with weighted voting on it.
Is an idea management system different from a feedback board?
The words are different and the software is the same.
An idea management system is what the enterprise half of this market calls a feedback board, and the difference is the buyer rather than the product.
A board is sold to a product team who wants to know what to build next. A system is sold to a programme owner who wants stage gates, a portfolio view and a report at the end of the quarter.
The enterprise vendors sell the second thing, and none of them is in the table above.
Ideanote, IdeaScale, Hives and HYPE Boards (the platform formerly sold as Viima, now under HYPE Innovation) are enterprise innovation platforms with stage counts, scoring committees and internal campaign tooling, and a team of four buying one of them is buying a programme they will not run. Where that boundary actually sits is written out separately.
How much does enterprise brainstorming and ideation software cost?
Most of it has no public price. Of nineteen enterprise idea management vendors whose sites were opened on 3 October 2026, fourteen could be read, and three of those print a price.
| Vendor | Entry plan | Price as printed | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ideanote | Scale | $6 a user a month billed yearly, $7 monthly | Up to 50 users, and a free plan covers 10 |
| HYPE Boards, formerly Viima | Basic | 79 euros a month billed yearly | 10 users, then 7 euros a month for each extra user, with a 14 day trial |
| Hives | Core | 695 euros a month, billed yearly | 2 managers and 500 contributors |
Above those, Ideanote's Ultimate plan starts at $899 a month for 100 users, and Hives's Pro and Enterprise plans are 1,495 and 1,995 euros a month. HYPE Boards quotes its Pro and Advanced tiers on request.
The other eleven print no number and send every buyer to a demo or a quote: HYPE Enterprise, Sideways 6, ITONICS, Qmarkets, innosabi, IdeaScale, whose old price lists and federal contracts are public, Braineet, Yambla, Planview IdeaPlace, Rever and Exago. Brightidea, Wazoku, InnovationCast, Ideawake and Accept Mission turned away an automated read, and Planbox and Crowdicity now redirect to HYPE and to Medallia.
Roundups that rank for this search quote prices these vendors do not publish. One lists Sideways 6 as free up to ten users and Viima as free without a limit, and neither site showed a free plan on 3 October. The same roundup puts HYPE at about $50,000 a year and IdeaScale at about $13,000, figures neither vendor prints.
The real split in this category is that gap. The seven tools in the first table publish a number anyone can read, and so do three enterprise platforms. The rest do not, because the quote depends on a headcount a sales call still has to work out.
Are these for ideas from employees, or ideas from customers?
Mostly customers. Canny, Convas, FeedBear, Frill, ProductLift, UserJot and VoteFirst are all public feedback boards built for people outside the company to post requests, even though every one of them lets anyone inside the company post too.
An internal suggestion box, one company collecting ideas from its own staff and nobody else, is a narrower job, and what that costs free versus paid is covered on its own page. VoteFirst's board opens with no account and no email address, which fits that case as well as the customer facing one, but none of the seven here is built only for internal use.
The enterprise platforms above exist because of the opposite problem: a company with a bigger internal programme than any of these seven is sized for, where ideas are screened, scored and reported on, not just posted and voted on.
What is the best ideation software, and is ideation the same thing?
Ideation is the first ten minutes and idea management is everything after.
Ideation software is whiteboards, sticky notes and workshop facilitation, and it is a genuinely different category with different vendors in it. Nothing on this page runs a workshop. Every tool here starts from the assumption that the ideas already exist and somebody has to decide between them.
If the problem is that nobody has any ideas, none of these seven helps. If the problem is that there are four hundred and no order, all seven do something about it.
Is there idea management software free of charge?
Three of the seven have a real free tier and the other four have trials.
Canny is free to 25 tracked users and Convas is free to 25, plus free entirely for non commercial open source projects. UserJot's free plan gives 2 boards and 3 admin roles with no time limit.
Those are the three places a board can run at no cost, and all three stop being free at the point the board starts working. Among the enterprise platforms, Ideanote has a free plan for up to 10 users.
The four others run trials rather than free tiers. FeedBear, Frill and ProductLift each publish a 14 day trial that their own pages say needs no card.
VoteFirst's is 14 days and asks for a card at signup, which is a worse trial.
What ideation tools and techniques do these actually support?
Ideation is the generating half and idea management is what happens afterwards, so most of the techniques sit outside the software rather than inside it.
The techniques people mean are brainstorming with a group, a structured challenge with a question and a deadline, crowdsourcing across a company, mind mapping, and the six thinking hats style of forced perspective. Of those, only the challenge is a software feature: a question, a window, an audience and a way to vote.
What the tools in the table above actually provide for the rest is a place to put the output. A whiteboard session produces forty sticky notes, and the value of an idea management tool starts the moment somebody has to turn those into a list that other people can agree with.
That is the split. Buy a whiteboard for the generating and an idea management tool for the counting, and do not expect either to do the other's job.
Is there idea management software, open source and self hosted?
For customer requests yes, for internal innovation programmes essentially no.
The customer facing side has several: Fider, Quackback and LogChimp all collect ideas, let people vote and merge the duplicates, and all of them are free to run on your own server. Each one's license, last push and star count, read in the repository, is on its own page.
The internal programme side is where the open source options run out. Challenges with stages, evaluation committees, scoring rubrics and programme reporting are what the commercial platforms in the table above sell, and nobody has built a widely used free equivalent. The likely reason is that the hard part of an innovation programme is the process rather than the software, and software does not fix a process nobody runs.
How does an entrepreneur use an idea management system differently from a product team?
The same software, a different scarce resource.
A product team has more requests than capacity, so the job is choosing, and the tool earns its place by counting agreement and making a refusal visible. Nothing is being generated; the ideas arrive whether you ask or not.
A founder has the opposite problem. The ideas are few, the evidence is thin, and the useful question is which of three directions has anybody at all behind it. There the tool is a way of finding out whether a need exists before building for it, and a public board with five votes on one idea and none on the other two is a cheaper answer than a quarter of building.
The practical consequence is that a founder should not buy a per employee innovation platform. The unit is wrong and so is the price. A board that costs a few dollars a month and is public from day one is the shape that fits.
Is there idea management software Microsoft sells?
No. On 3 October 2026 neither Microsoft's site nor its documentation listed an idea management product, and the Microsoft Lists template gallery had no template for ideas. The idea apps in Microsoft's AppSource store for Teams come from other companies, and among the enterprise platforms above, Ideanote, HYPE Boards, Hives, Sideways 6 and Qmarkets say they run inside Teams.
The search also comes from companies standardised on the Microsoft stack that want the ideas to live there. A Microsoft Form feeding a list collects ideas well. It does not do the two things this category exists for, counting agreement across many people and merging the same idea submitted twice.
Is there an idea feedback management system that connects to a CRM?
Two of the seven, read on their own pages. Canny lists CRM integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce. ProductLift pulls company name, MRR and deal data natively from HubSpot, and reaches Salesforce only through a third party connector, Pabbly, rather than a direct integration.
That's a different thing from what most people mean by CRM when they type this search. Neither tool is a CRM and neither replaces one. What both do is let a request carry the account and revenue data your CRM already holds, so a card on the board can be read alongside who asked for it and what they pay, rather than as an anonymous count.
If the CRM connection matters more to you than anything else on this page, start from that fact rather than from the price. A workspace priced tool with no CRM integration and a per user tool with one aren't interchangeable just because both call themselves idea management software.
Which tool should you choose?
Start from the meter, not the price.
| If this is true of you | The shape that fits |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 25 people will ever post or vote | Canny or Convas, both free at that size |
| You cannot predict how many people will take part | Anything with a workspace price, being FeedBear, Frill, ProductLift, UserJot or VoteFirst |
| You want the board to cost the same every month whatever happens to it | The same five |
| Your customers pay you very different amounts | ProductLift, Frill or VoteFirst, the three that weight a vote by revenue |
| You need stage gates and a portfolio view | None of these. The enterprise platforms named above |
| You need an internal programme on a budget you can read in advance | Ideanote, HYPE Boards or Hives, the three enterprise platforms that print a price |
| You want it free forever and will accept a ceiling | UserJot, at 2 boards |
Where does VoteFirst fit, and what does it not do?
$9/mo, weighted voting by customer tier built into that plan rather than sold as an upgrade, and no meter on the number of people who take part.
Anyone can post or vote on the board with no account, and the public roadmap next to it works the same way. The board holds a Denied column by default, which is the part most boards leave out, and publishing a release on the changelog emails everyone whose own vote sits inside it. The demo board carried twenty eight requests across five columns on 15 September 2026, three of them denied in public with the reason on the card.
What it does not do, stated where a buyer can read it. There is no private board with a password or an invite list, so a board is published or it is not. There is no self hosting.
Single sign on is a signed handoff from your own application on the 39 dollar plan and there is no SAML. And the trial takes a card, which three of the six others do not.
The board and the roadmap page are nine dollars a month, both figures are published, and a card is required for the fourteen day trial.
14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.
