Aha and Featurebase both bill a seat, and only one hands some of them out free

Aha and Featurebase are the rare pair in this category that meter the same thing, a person on your own team rather than a customer who votes. That agreement stops the moment you ask who counts as a person.

Everything below was read on each vendor's own pricing page on 15 September 2026.

What does each one charge?

Thirty nine dollars a user with a floor of three, twenty nine dollars a seat with no floor at all, and nine.

Read on each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-15.

Aha prints a three person minimum right under its rate, and that line is what turns the sticker price into the real one: a hundred and seventeen dollars a month for Ideas Essentials rather than thirty nine.

Every role counts toward it, the person who builds the roadmap, the reviewer who can vote, and the viewer who can only look.

Featurebase's own card carries no such floor. One seat is a real number, and their free plan gives you that first seat for nothing. What it does add is a switch that turns twenty nine dollars into thirty seven if you pay monthly instead of yearly.

How much does Aha cost compared to Featurebase?

It depends on how many of your people never touch the roadmap and only look, because that is the one place the two vendors count differently.

The gap is small at a busy, hands on team and enormous the moment a company has more watchers than editors. Featurebase's Lite seat allowance exists for exactly that shape, and Aha has nothing like it on this plan.

Featurebase's Lite seats only start on Professional. Growth, the plan in the middle row above, has no free allowance for a reader, so a solo founder or a small editing team pays the same rate per head on either vendor's cheapest tier.

Which one should you choose?

They solve overlapping jobs from different directions, and the honest answer names something real about both.

Featurebase bundles a genuine help desk into the same subscription as the board. Live chat, ticketing, a knowledge base and a survey module sit behind the same login as the feedback portal, and that is a larger product for one seat price than anything Aha Ideas offers on its own.

Aha never puts your customers on the bill, at any size. The people reading and voting on your public portal are unlimited and free on every plan, so a viral idea with ten thousand votes costs exactly what a quiet one does.

Choose Featurebase if a help desk and a feedback board from one vendor solves two problems at once. Choose Aha if your own team is the part doing the work and you want the wider suite behind it.

One project is nine dollars a month. Unlimited projects is thirty nine.

Why choose Aha over Featurebase, or Featurebase over Aha?

Because the two products price the same unit around a different question.

Choose Aha when your company already runs a strategy process across several people, since Ideas is one product inside eight and the floor stops mattering once those seats are doing real planning work anyway.

Choose Featurebase when a chunk of your team only reads and never edits, because the Lite seat allowance on its second plan is the one mechanism in this pair built to make that cheap.

That question, editors against watchers, decides the bill above more than either vendor's headline number does.

Is there a cheaper alternative to both?

Yes, if the seat count itself is the problem rather than which vendor's seat is smaller.

Neither Aha's floor nor Featurebase's per head rate moves for us. Nine dollars a month is one project and one person, and thirty nine covers a whole team rather than one login on it.

The calculator works the seat arithmetic at a headcount you choose, and the whole field, with the unit each vendor bills on, is one page.

What does each do with a vote from a big customer?

Read on each vendor's own pages on 2026-09-15. A dash means nobody could read it on the pages opened that day, never that the capability is absent.

Featurebase's own page says it pulls in a customer's spend and their company name, then sorts requests by the revenue attached, which orders a list rather than changing the weight of a single vote. Nothing on the Aha pages we read for this comparison mentions revenue at all.

Can I move from one to the other?

Some of it, and the pages we read leave more unsaid than said.

Aha's own pages note that an export exists on Ideas without describing what it carries. We did not read anything on Featurebase's site stating what its own export contains, so we are not going to guess at it here.

Who cast each vote rather than the total, the comment threads underneath a request, and every portal link a customer has bookmarked are the kind of thing an export usually loses, whichever two tools sit on either end of the move.

Where we fit, and where we do not

We are one module, a public board with a roadmap, and neither of the two products above stops there.

Both ship a paid AI feature we do not. Aha's own pages fold an assistant into every Ideas plan, sorting themes and drafting text so a person does not have to. Featurebase charges forty nine cents for each AI resolution and nineteen dollars a seat for unlimited AI Copilot on top of that.

Both are sold as part of something wider than a feedback board. Aha sells eight products together and Ideas is only one of them. Featurebase folds a help desk, a changelog and a survey tool into the same login as the board.

We have neither the suite nor the help desk. What we do instead is put a whole number multiplier on a plan and write that weight onto the vote the moment it is cast, on the nine dollar plan as well as the thirty nine dollar one.

What is Aha, and what is Featurebase?

Aha bundles eight products under one company, and Ideas is the one facing the public. Every paid seat on it belongs to somebody on your own team, a builder, a reviewer or a plain viewer, and the customers reading the portal never appear on that bill.

Featurebase is a feedback board sold together with a help desk, a changelog and a survey module under one login, billed by the seat, with a free allowance for read only colleagues once you are past its cheapest plan.

Does either one have a free plan?

Featurebase does and Aha does not. Featurebase's pricing page read on 15 September 2026 gives one seat free, with unlimited posts, comments and end users on that tier, forever rather than as a trial.

Aha's own trial runs thirty days on the Advanced plan and states plainly that no card is needed to start it. There is no free tier under that, so the floor of three paid seats is the cheapest thing on offer.

The honest summary

Aha counts everyone who can even look, and its floor means a seat never comes any smaller than three. Featurebase counts your seats too, but once you are past its entry plan a chunk of read only colleagues stop costing anything at all.

A team with more watchers than editors favours Featurebase past its first plan. A company running a real strategy process, floor and all, favours Aha. Neither meters the customers voting on the board, and neither weights the vote itself the way ours does.

The Aha alternative page has more room for its own side of this, and the Featurebase one does the same on the other.

14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.