Two completely different products answer a search for the best product roadmap software, and the price difference between them is about twenty to one.
One kind is a planning system for the people building the thing. The roadmap inside it is a view for executives and product managers, it is rich, it is expensive per person, and in one case here it cannot be shown to a customer at all.
Roadmunk belongs to that first kind and is sold as Tempo's Strategic Roadmaps now, priced per editor with reviewers metered on top of them. The other kind is a page your customers read and add to, and the roadmap is the public artefact rather than the internal one.
Most people typing this phrase want the second and land on the first, because the first has the bigger marketing budget. So this page sorts by the only question that separates them, which is who is allowed to look.
The table
Every figure below was read on that vendor's own pricing or product page on 9 September 2026, in a browser rather than by a script.
| Tool | Who can see it | From | Who is metered |
|---|---|---|---|
| VoteFirst | Customers, no account | $9/mo | Nobody |
| Nolt | Customers, 1 board | $29/mo billed yearly | Nobody |
| Canny | Customers, free plan too | $79/mo billed yearly | Tracked users |
| Trello | Anybody with the link | $5/user/mo billed yearly | Every user |
| Productboard | Customers, through portals | $19/maker/mo billed yearly | Every maker |
| Aha! Ideas | Customers, any number of portals | $39/user/mo billed yearly | Every internal role |
| ProdPad | Customers, a public portal | – | Per module |
| Pendo | Internal teams only | – | Monthly active users |
Nobody in the last column means the price does not move with the number of people who look or vote. Aha! counts every internal role, a viewer who can only look and vote included, and has a floor of three paid seats. Productboard's Business minimum is printed three different ways on one page.
Trello is free through Premium per user and $210/user/yr on Enterprise, and its own documentation says a public board is not indexed by search engines. Pendo's own roadmap FAQ says roadmaps made there are private or visible only to internal teams, with external sharing planned.
ProdPad's pricing builder rendered blank on two separate loads, so no figure was shown.
If the shortlist is already down to two, a 14 day trial with a card at signup settles it faster than another list does.
What does product roadmap software actually mean?
Two different jobs that share a word, and the confusion is expensive.
The first job is deciding what to build. That is portfolio planning, objectives, capacity, dependencies and a view a leadership team can read.
It is real work and the tools that do it well are worth what they cost to the companies that need them. The roadmap in that world is an output of the planning, and its audience is inside the building.
The second job is telling people what is coming and finding out what they want instead. That roadmap is a page, its audience is your customers, and the thing it produces is not a plan but a conversation.
It needs almost none of the first list and it needs one thing the first list mostly treats as an extra, which is somewhere a person outside your company can say that is wrong, do this one first.
Nearly every disappointing purchase in this category is somebody buying the first when they wanted the second. The tell is the pricing page. If the price is per person on your side, the product is built for your side.
Who is allowed to look at the roadmap?
On seven of the eight, your customers. On one of them, nobody outside your company.
That is the single most useful row in the table above and it is not a criticism.
Pendo's own roadmap FAQ asks whether a roadmap can be made visible to customers and answers that it cannot right now, that roadmaps created there are private or visible only to internal teams, and that external sharing is planned.
That is a clear answer, published by them, and it is exactly the sort of thing that never appears in a roundup. If a public roadmap is why you are shopping, that one is answered before you start.
Trello sits in its own position. A board can be made public by any board admin on any plan, and Atlassian's own documentation says a public board is visible to anyone on the internet but is not indexed by search engines.
So it works perfectly for people you send a link to and it is invisible to anybody looking for the problem you have not solved yet. For an internal roadmap that costs you nothing at all.
The rest publish a portal or a board that your customers can open, and the differences between them are about price and about what a customer can do once they arrive.
The demo board is open and it asks for no account.
What does it cost to let one more person look?
On Aha! Ideas it costs a full paid seat, even for somebody who can only look and vote. This is where the two kinds of product separate hardest and the numbers are not close.
The people in your portal are free and every role on your own side is a paid seat. Their own definitions are unusually clear about this. A contributor needs a paid seat. A reviewer, who can see ideas, add them and vote, needs a paid seat.
A viewer, who can only look at ideas and vote for them, also needs a paid seat.
Ideas Essentials is 39 dollars a user a month billed annually with a minimum of three paid users, so one person on their own still pays for three, and that minimum is printed under the price on the card rather than hidden in a footnote, which deserves saying.
Productboard prices per maker, which is their word for a seat, at 19 dollars a maker a month billed annually on Plus. Their own minimum is the odd part.
One plan card reads five makers minimum for Business, another rendering of the same card reads two, and the feature table reads two online and five on contract. Their entry price for Business cannot be given here because their page does not agree with itself, and the whole table is written out separately.
ProdPad cannot be priced at all. The pricing builder on their pricing page rendered blank on two separate loads on the same day, with no price in the accessibility tree either time. Writing a number here from memory or from somebody else's comparison page would be inventing one.
Against those, the flat tools are a different order of magnitude. Nolt is $29 a month billed yearly for one board whoever reads it.
Canny's public roadmap is on the free plan, and its meter is the people who take part rather than the people on your team, which is priced out in full because it is the pricing model most often misunderstood in this category.
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 tool should you choose for what you are doing?
Four situations, and the answer is different in each.
You are planning a portfolio across several teams. Buy one of the planning systems and accept the per seat price, because a public board is not what you are short of. The roadmap page is a by product for you rather than the point.
You want customers to see what is coming and tell you what is missing. Buy a flat priced board. Everything on the bottom half of the table does this, and the differences that matter are whether a visitor needs an account to vote and what the roadmap costs when a lot of people show up.
Your roadmap is internal and a free board already works. Keep it. A free board that everybody on your team already has open is a better roadmap than a paid one nobody opens, and moving costs you a week for nothing.
You want the roadmap page to be findable by people who are not customers yet. This is the one to read carefully, because it is the case where the most tools quietly fail. There is a section below about where VoteFirst stands on it.
Is planning software the same as a public roadmap tool?
No, and the free versions of each are free for opposite reasons.
Product roadmap planning software is the internal kind. Portfolio views, capacity, dependencies, objectives, and a price per seat for the people building rather than for the people reading. Three of the tools in the table above are that shape and it is why their prices are per maker rather than per board.
A public roadmap tool is the outward half. Its job is a page a customer opens, and what it charges for is usually the number of people who take part rather than the number of people who plan.
If you are looking for product roadmap software free of charge, read which half you are being given. A free planning tier usually caps the makers, and a free public tier usually caps the board or the audience, and those two ceilings arrive at completely different moments.
What are the best free product roadmap tools?
Yes. Jira Product Discovery is free forever for three creators, Productboard's free plan carries five hundred feedback notes with one teamspace and one portal, and Trello's free tier will hold a public board if you accept what it cannot do. All three were read on their own pages on 14 September 2026.
Pendo has a free tier too, and it is the one to rule out first, because their own roadmap FAQ says roadmaps made there are private or visible only to internal teams.
Past any of these the meter is per creator, per maker or per user, which is the unit that grows with your team rather than with your product. Every free plan in the wider feedback field, and the line each one stops at, is on its own page.
Are there Jira roadmap examples or Aha roadmap examples a customer can open?
On Aha! Ideas yes, and on Jira Product Discovery that was not found out.
Aha! Ideas publishes to portals, as many public and private ones as you need, so the roadmap a customer opens is a real address rather than a screenshot in a blog post. The cost sits on your side of it.
Portal users are free and every internal role needs a paid seat at 39 dollars a user a month billed annually with a floor of three, a viewer who can only look and vote included.
Jira Product Discovery prices the other way round. Creators are metered, at nothing for the first three and then ten dollars a creator a month, and contributors are unlimited and free on every plan.
Whether a view can be opened by somebody with no Atlassian account is not stated on their own pages.
That gap is the state of it. An example you can open is worth more than a picture of one, and the only roadmaps in this table that can be pointed to without an account are the portals and VoteFirst's own demo board.
What is a product roadmap for software actually made of?
A product roadmap for software is made of four columns and nothing else, if the audience is customers.
A software roadmap answers one question for the person reading it: is the thing they need being worked on. That needs a status per item and an item description a customer could have written. It does not need story points, sprint numbers, assignees or a release version, and every one of those on a public page is a thing a customer will ask about and nobody wants to answer.
Internally the same roadmap carries more: the effort estimate, the dependency, the person. Keeping one set of facts and two views of it is the arrangement that works, and the nine documents a roadmap gets confused with are set out separately.
Which is the best roadmap tool for Jira?
Jira Product Discovery, if the answer has to stay inside Atlassian, and a separate public board if the roadmap is for customers.
Jira Product Discovery is Atlassian's own, it hands ideas to delivery tickets without an integration, and everybody who needs to see it already has a login. Its price is per creator with contributors free, which is the right shape for a team and a real free tier for three creators.
The limit is the audience. A roadmap whose readers are your own company is a different artefact from one a customer opens without an account, and the second is what most people mean by a public roadmap. If you want both, the usual arrangement is planning in Jira and a public board somewhere a customer can reach.
The full Jira Product Discovery comparison is its own page.
Is there a Microsoft product roadmap tool?
None of the eight tools read for this page is a Microsoft product, and the question usually means one of two different things.
If it means somewhere inside the Microsoft stack to plan work, the general purpose planners there are delivery planners: they arrange tasks, owners and dates. That is a project plan rather than a product roadmap, and the difference is not cosmetic.
If it means a page your customers can open, showing what is planned and what shipped, with votes on it, that is the job every tool in the table above is built for and a general planner is the wrong shape for it. A roadmap built in a planner also has the indexing problem Trello has, which is that the page a customer would find is not a page search engines read.
Is there an open source roadmap tool?
Yes, if what you want is the public kind, and the projects are feedback boards that publish a roadmap rather than roadmap planners.
Fider, Quackback and LogChimp each turn a request's status into a public page of planned, in progress and shipped work. That is the roadmap most people searching for one actually want, and the license cost is nothing. Every one of them, with its license, its last push and its star count read in the repository, is on its own page.
What none of them does is the internal planning kind. For that the open source options are general project planners, so you would be adapting something rather than installing something.
What are the best product management roadmap tools, as opposed to project management ones?
The best product management roadmap tools are the ones whose unit of work is a customer outcome rather than a task.
A project management tool holds tasks, owners, dependencies and dates. A product management roadmap tool holds requests, demand, effort and status, and the thing it is good at is deciding which of them to do, which no task tracker helps with at all.
From the table above, Productboard, Aha! Ideas, ProdPad and Pendo are the product management shape, priced per person who plans. Trello is the project management shape being borrowed. The feedback boards are the narrow product management shape: they do the deciding and leave the delivery to whatever you already use.
Which you want follows from where the roadmap's inputs come from. If the roadmap is assembled from what customers asked for, a board is the cheapest correct answer. If it is assembled from what the business decided, a planner is.
Is there a roadmap tool free online, with nothing to install?
Yes, several, and free online means two different things depending on which tool you land on.
On some of the eight above, free online means a demo you can open in a browser with no signup, the kind VoteFirst's own demo board is. On others, it means a free tier of the paid product, capped the way the free plans further up this page are capped.
Jira Product Discovery's free tier holds three creators, contributors free, no card, read on their own pricing page. Trello's free plan will hold a board shaped like a roadmap for as many people as want to look at the link, with the search engine limitation this page already covered.
If what you actually want is to see a roadmap running before you build one, the demo board here needs no account and no download, and that answers the question faster than reading about it does.
Is there a roadmap builder tool, or a roadmap generator that just makes one?
Both phrases point at the same want, something that turns a list of items into a roadmap without you designing the page yourself, and the answer sits between two kinds of product.
The cheap end is a template inside a general tool. Trello's own roadmap boards are a template of lists and cards, not a purpose built roadmap, and what you get out of it is whatever discipline your team applies going in.
The purpose built end is a small board product that already has columns for planned, in progress and shipped, and a public address to hand to a customer. Productroad and Quackback are both that shape, priced flat rather than per seat, at nine and twenty nine dollars a month, each with a fourteen day trial and no card required.
What neither a builder nor a generator does well is decide what goes on the roadmap. That part is still the demand data underneath it, which is why the four columns a roadmap actually needs matter more than the tool that draws them.
Is there a roadmap tool on GitHub worth running yourself?
Yes, though almost none of the repositories called a roadmap tool are only a roadmap. What is on GitHub is mostly the same feedback boards this page already named as open source, with a roadmap view built into the board rather than sold as a second product.
LogChimp's own repository describes itself as an open source Canny, Productboard and UserJot alternative, and its roadmap is the same board with a status column rather than a separate tool. Fider and Quackback work the same way, a board that becomes a roadmap once an item is marked planned or shipped.
None of the three is a standalone roadmap generator with no feedback board attached, so running one from GitHub means taking the whole board, not just the column that says what ships next. Which of the open source boards actually holds up under its own license is checked separately.
Where VoteFirst fits
Nine dollars a month, one project, and nothing counts the people who look at it. Voting needs no account at all, so a visitor can vote, comment and suggest from the first page load without signing up, which is the whole design of the board.
The roadmap is an ordinary page with its own address rather than an app screen shared by a link. It carries a title, a description and a canonical link, and the robots file in front of it lets a crawler read it, on a customer's own domain and on app.votefirst.app alike. Only the signed in screens are closed to crawlers.
So on the fourth situation above, VoteFirst is an answer. The full field with the unit each vendor bills on is one page, and what each one costs at a number of voters you choose is another.
14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.