A Featurebase seat and a Productboard maker do not count the same person

Featurebase and Productboard both bill by the colleague rather than by the customer, so on the surface the two look like the same kind of meter. They are not. A Featurebase seat is anyone on your side who logs in.

A Productboard maker is one specific role, and their own pricing page lets everyone else in for free. Everything below was read on each vendor's own pricing page on 15 September 2026.

What does each one charge?

Twenty nine dollars a seat against nineteen dollars a maker, and the unit each rate is charged on is where the two prices stop being comparable.

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

Featurebase's Growth plan is twenty nine dollars a seat a month billed yearly, or thirty seven billed monthly. Productboard's Plus plan is nineteen dollars a maker a month billed annually, or twenty five billed monthly. Both numbers arrive switched to the yearly rate by default on their own pages.

The word choice matters more than the number. Featurebase counts every person who needs to log in and touch a ticket or a board. Productboard counts only the maker, its word for a product manager, and a colleague who only reads and tags feedback is a free contributor who never appears on the invoice.

How much does Featurebase cost compared to Productboard?

The answer depends on how many of your colleagues need to be makers rather than contributors, and on which version of Productboard's own page you land on.

Productboard's own page states its Business minimum two different ways, two makers on one card and five on another, and the gap between those readings is $59 a month at four people. That is not a rounding error, it is a hundred and seventy seven dollars a year decided by which sentence loaded.

Featurebase has no such ambiguity in what we read, but it has its own extra meters. A team paying for moderation on Professional is also the plan where removing the Featurebase badge becomes possible, at another sixty nine dollars a month on top.

Which one should you choose?

They are built for different jobs inside a company, and naming both honestly is the point of this section.

Productboard is the better system for a product organisation that already has more than one product manager, because teamspaces, a shared strategy layer and per maker access exist for exactly that coordination problem, and Featurebase has nothing built for it.

Featurebase is the better single subscription if you also want a helpdesk, because live chat, ticketing, an AI agent and a help centre sit under the same login as the feedback board, and Productboard has no support desk at all.

If the job is a public board that a customer understands in five seconds, both are heavier than that job needs, and this product was built for exactly that gap.

Why choose Featurebase over Productboard, or Productboard over Featurebase?

Because one is a support desk with a board attached and the other is a product management system with a portal attached.

Choose Featurebase when you want one bill for feedback and support together, and when your team is small enough that a flat per seat rate stays cheap. Their free plan covers one person completely, with no card and no time limit.

Choose Productboard when several product managers need to agree on a roadmap before anything ships, because the insights layer and the prioritization tools are where that argument gets settled, and a support desk was never the problem you had.

Neither choice is about which product is better built. Both are well built for what they are selling.

The demo board is open and it asks for no account.

Is there a cheaper alternative to both?

Yes, and the saving is largest for a team that only wanted the board and bought a bundle to get it.

Anything priced flat by project rather than by seat or by maker stops growing the moment you add a colleague, which a per seat or per maker rate never does. The full field, with the billing unit each vendor uses, is one page, and the calculator works the arithmetic at a headcount you choose.

This product is nine dollars a month for one project with no seat count anywhere in the price, which is worth knowing before you buy either bundle above it for a board alone.

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

Featurebase sorts by the revenue behind a request, Productboard's pages carry no revenue wording at all, and ours multiplies the vote itself.

Read on each vendor's own pricing page 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 line is to sort feedback by revenue impact and sync a user's monthly spending in from Stripe or a similar source, starting on Growth at twenty nine dollars a seat.

That orders a list by size. It does not multiply what one vote is worth.

Can I move from one to the other?

Both vendors let you take your data out, and what an export keeps is narrower than what the board holds.

Productboard's own page says the CSV it exports is the list of requesters against a feature, rather than the full history of votes, comments and timestamps behind it. We did not find an equivalent description of Featurebase's export format on the pages we read, so we are not going to guess at what it contains.

Anybody moving between the two should ask each vendor directly what a export actually carries before committing to a date, rather than assume parity with what the board shows on screen.

Where we fit, and where we do not

This product has one module. There is no helpdesk, no product strategy layer, no teamspaces and no AI feature of any kind, and none is planned.

Both Featurebase and Productboard ship a free plan for a single person, and we do not have one at any price. Both also ship an AI feature set of their own, Featurebase's AI agent and copilot seats, Productboard's AI tooling metered in credits per maker, and we ship none of that by design.

What this product does instead is put a whole number multiplier on a customer tier, write that weight onto the vote the moment it is cast, and show the plain count next to the weighted total on the same card.

Neither Featurebase nor Productboard's own pages describe multiplying a vote that way, though Featurebase's revenue sort comes closest of the two.

The price here does not move with your team size or your customer count. One project is nine dollars, everything else is thirty nine, and that is the whole of the billing argument.

What is Featurebase, and what is Productboard?

Featurebase is a support desk and a public feedback board sold as one subscription, billed by the seat, meaning by the colleague who logs in to answer tickets or moderate the board.

Productboard is a product management system, with a strategy layer, prioritization, roadmaps and a customer portal, billed by the maker, meaning the product manager who owns the plan rather than everyone who touches feedback.

Does either one have a free plan?

Both do, and each caps a different thing. Featurebase's pricing page read on 14 September 2026 gives one seat free, with unlimited end users and unlimited posts on it.

Productboard's, read the same day, gives five hundred feedback notes with one teamspace and twenty five contributors, so the ceiling there is the volume of feedback rather than the number of colleagues who can read it.

The honest summary

Two different definitions of a paying colleague, one unresolved ambiguity in Productboard's own maker minimum, and one revenue feature that only Featurebase documents. Featurebase for a small team that also wants a helpdesk. Productboard for a product organisation with more than one product manager to coordinate.

Ours if the job is a public board and you want the vote itself to carry what the voter pays, at nine dollars flat.

The Featurebase alternative page and the Productboard one carry each side on its own.

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