6 Best Product Management Software in 2024

Megan Saker

November 7, 2024 32 minute read

If you’re looking for the best product management software, chances are you’re a product person. And the chances are also high therefore, that you’re fairly into digital products. I’d bet my hat that you’re a software fan who welcomes the opportunity to geek out over a new tool. Why would you be a Product Manager (or similar) if you didn’t have a keen eye for software tools?

So, when it comes to finding the best product management software to use yourself, you’re going to have high standards. All the product know-how and experience that helps you build a great product for your customers, is going to be looking inwards and helping you find the best product management software solution to meet your needs.

Having said all that about your expertise, you’re also busy, so getting a bit of help to narrow down the shortlist is useful right? The product management software market is considerably busier than when the ProdPad Co-Founders first created it back in 2012 (that’s right, ProdPad was the first truly dedicated Product Management software tool on the market….but more on that later).

Let us, therefore, help you finalize your shortlist. After reading this article on the best product management software tools you should understand exactly what these tools do, how to spot the best ones and know a little about each of the major players that are worth evaluating further.

We we cover:

What is product management software?
Where do these tools sit in a product management tool stack?
What are the benefits of having the best product management software?
What features do the best product management software tools have?
Cost and pricing for product management software
What are the best product management software tools in 2024?
Frequently Asked Questions about product management software

Let’s get into it…

What is product management software?

It’s software that helps you do product management. Sorry, that sounds facetious… but in all seriousness, that’s what these software tools are designed to do – help Product Teams communicate their plans, run their processes and track their results. The very best product management software tools will help Product Managers make informed, smart decisions about the direction they should take their products and provide the tools to turn those decisions into actions and outcomes.

But there are lots of different types of product management software tools. And that’s because the discipline of Product Management is so far reaching. Afterall, Product Management encapsulates almost everything involved in getting a product to market and then working it through its entire lifecycle.

That includes initial ideation (market research, competitor analysis, discovery, prototyping, user testing and more) right through the development process (prioritization, speccing, delivery planning and more) and onto launch (release planning, beta launching, customer feedback gathering and analysis and more), and beyond!

And once that process has been worked through for a brand new product, the cycle continues for each new iteration and each new feature as you manage the product through its lifecycle.

That’s a lot of very different jobs to be done there, and an awful lot of variation. Because of that, there is a plethora of Product Management software solutions available on the market today. Some will cover multiple stages of the Product Management lifecycle, some will focus on one particular task.

The particular flavor of product management software we’re going to focus on in this list is the complete platform – the all-in-one tools that promise to provide you with one central home for all your Product Management work. While they may not help you with ALL the jobs you have to do as a Product Manager, they should allow you to connect all the pieces into a centralized hub, providing an easily accessible place to go for anyone interested in your product decision-making and process.

Typically these complete product management software platforms focus on the core PM triad of product roadmapping, idea backlog management and customer feedback management.

Where do these tools sit in a product management tool stack?

The product management software platforms we’re going to concentrate on here today form a solid base from which to undertake everything you have to do to manage a product, or indeed a portfolio of products. But they won’t directly solve every single Product Management problem or need that you have. You’ll want to combine them with a few point solution tools to ensure you have everything covered.

Let us illustrate this with a graphic. Using a complete product management software tool means you can reduce vendor management significantly without flattening your stack too far and leaving yourself with capability holes. Instead of 11 different product management tools, you’re using one of our best product management software tools to reduce that stack down to a far more manageable 7.

The best product management software tool stack

You’ll want a central product management software tool to act as a single source of truth, covering:

OKR management and goal setting
Roadmapping and portfolio management
Idea management
Feedback gathering and analysis
Knowledge management and documentation

Then individual point solutions to help you with:

Prototyping and wireframing
Delivery planning and your development backlog
Testing and experimentation
Product engagement and adoption
Product analytics
Customer comms

You’re better to have one of the best product management software tools surrounded by a few point solutions instead of struggling with a huge mix of endless individual products.

What are the benefits of having the best product management software?

Alignment

When everyone has access to the bigger picture and the plan, teams can truly work in sync. With easy access to the strategy, teammates stay aligned with the broader vision and objectives, minimizing the risk of anyone missing out on what’s most important.

The best product management software provides a straightforward way to be explicit about the objectives you’re focused on, keeping everyone on the same page.

Transparency

Visibility is key to building trust. When everyone can see both the strategy and progress in real-time, they gain insight into your decision-making process. Stakeholders will appreciate seeing your prioritization logic firsthand, and with updates available to them directly, you’ll spend less time fielding questions.

With one of the best product management software platforms handling goal setting, roadmapping, and customer feedback all in one, you’ll be providing everyone in your organization with full transparency into your workflow and decision-making.

The Golden Thread

This is a term our Co-Founder and CEO Janna Bastow likes to use. The best product management software give you the power to connect the dots—linking every decision, objective, and customer need with your product roadmap.

This “golden thread” shows the relationships between each element of your work, allowing you to track how each piece supports the overall strategy and helps you create a cohesive and meaningful product journey.

Simplicity and Ease

Centralizing all your product work in one platform makes life so much simpler. Gone are the days of tracking down different versions of documents, sifting through files, or hunting for updates. With everything in one place, you can save time, avoid miscommunication, and focus on what matters most.

A Bird’s Eye View

Bringing together your roadmap, idea backlog, and customer feedback into one of the best product management software tools allows for a comprehensive overview. Advanced tools, like prioritization frameworks and feedback analysis, enable you to quickly identify the most common customer pain points and spot the highest-potential ideas in your backlog. This kind of high-level analysis is a game-changer, letting you make informed decisions with ease.

Tools Tailored Specifically for Product People

Rather than wrestling with a generic tool and trying to bend it to a Product Management process, the best product management software is designed specifically for your needs. With purpose-built features and an intuitive setup, you can hit the ground running. Plus, you’ll find an array of unique tools and features crafted for the challenges product managers face every day.

You’ll find a whole bunch of tools and features that you won’t find anywhere else. Built for you and your challenges as a Product Manager. Which brings us nicely onto….

What features do the best product management software tools have?

So, you now know why product management software is important, what it can do for you and broadly what it includes, but now’s the time to get more specific. Exactly what features should you expect from one of the best product management software tools.

Typically, these complete PM platforms will include:

Customizable product roadmaps
Idea submission
Backlog management
Prioritization tools
Discussion boards per idea to capture collaboration and decisions
Documentation repository
Workflow management
Integrations with your development tool, your organization’s communication tools and more
Customer feedback capabilities: portals, integrations with internal tools, email, browser extensions and more
Ability to link related feedback to ideas in your backlog

And the very best of the best product management software tools will also have:

Strategy space to declare your vision, value, personas and more
OKR management and goal setting tools
Ability to publish versions of your roadmap publicly
Feedback analysis tools
Reporting
Plus the most robust and extensive integrations to allow you to capture ideas and feedback from more places, and collaborate with the rest of your organization through connection with the tools they are use

Nearly all the best product management software examples included on our list come with features from that first list above, and the truly great ones will also let you enjoy the additional capabilities from the second list.

Cost and pricing for product management software

Sounds good right? Fancy some of that action? So how much will one of the best product management software tools set you back?

Looking across all the best product management software tools on our list here, you’re looking at between $100 and $200 dollars per admin/editor user per month for a passable level of capabilities. However, most of the companies on our list put a whole bunch of restrictions and limitations on their self-serve, explicitly priced packages, and instead insist that you ‘get in touch’ with their Sales Team to get a price for everything you’ll need to do things right.

The most common features that are hidden behind the enterprise pricing and sales consultation are OKR management, strategy tools, unlimited feedback portals, integrations, AI assistance, portfolio management, user access controls, SSO and SAML, and even access to your own Customer Success Manager.

However, with ProdPad you can enjoy much more transparency and get all of that and more as part of either our Essentials or Advanced plans. To get the full capabilities of all three modules of ProdPad (Roadmaps, Ideas and Feedback) you’ll pay $116 per admin/editor with unlimited free Reviewers who can both submit and collaborate with both ideas and feedback. You’ll also enjoy the help and support of our Customer Success Team. Because we’re people people and love nothing better than talking to our customers!

Try our quick and easy pricing calculator and see a price for your ideal ProdPad package

What are the best product management software tools in 2024?

It’s time to actually put some products to the features we’ve been discussing.

As mentioned, the best product management software, in our opinion, always compromises roadmapping, idea and backlog management and customer feedback management as a minimum. What we’ve compiled here is a list of the best all-in-one, complete product management software platforms to act as your centralized Product Management hub.

They are all tools that will let you:

Capture and evaluate product ideas
Prioritize them onto product roadmaps
Communicate and share those roadmaps
Manage the execution through workflow processes
Gather and analyze customer feedback to help evidence your existing ideas, guide your prioritization decisions, or spark new thinking.

So without further ado, let’s get to the shortlist.

1. ProdPad

Are you surprised? Of course we’re going to put ourselves at the top of the list, but we promise this isn’t unfounded trumpet blowing.

ProdPad was actually the first complete product management software on the market and has continued to lead the way in terms of innovative problem-solving, providing solutions to more and more PM challenges and pain points over the years.

From inventing the industry best-practice roadmap format, Now-Next-Later, many years ago, to being the first PM tool to use AI technology to automate backlog management, right through to our current day innovations that make our AI assistance the most mature and the most exciting of any other tool.

Who is it for?

ProdPad is best suited to outcome-focused Product Teams that work within an agile environment and want to move quickly to build-measure-learn, support continuous discovery and ensure everything they do is targeting strategically important objectives and aiming to deliver proven outcomes.

Whether you’re a small team managing a single product, or a large organization with a complete portfolio of products, ProdPad has the tools you need to set strategic Objectives and Key Results and capture your overall product strategy and vision. This bigger picture information sits right next to your Now-Next-Later roadmap making sure no one loses sight of the overall goals.

ProdPad is the best product management software built to keep teams strategically aligned and focused on delivering outcomes, rather than merely shipping features and counting outputs.

ProdPad is also particularly well suited when you want to ensure consistency of process across your entire Product organization. ProdPad comes with best practice built in, with tried and tested formats, templates and process workflows already set up by default. This also makes ProdPad a great tool for any teams looking to greatly improve their processes and significantly impact their core business goals.

Assessment of core capabilities

Roadmapping

ProdPad is unique in that it is a tool that grew up from a truly innovative new approach to Product Management that has now become the definitive industry standard – namely the Now-Next-Later roadmap format. ProdPad’s Co-Founders invented this approach to roadmapping as a solution to all the problems they were facing as a result of using a timeline roadmap. As such, you can trust ProdPad to provide you with the right tools and the proper processes to work within this agile, lean approach and truly stay focused on delivering outcomes.

ProdPad also has the most mature publishing capabilities when it comes to roadmaps, meaning you can not only save multiple filtered views, but also publish those views externally. In this way you can work from a single roadmap and dynamically update the multiple stakeholder views that you’ve shared both internally and externally.

But most importantly of all, ProdPad is the only tool that is structured, by default, around a two tier hierarchy, allowing you to prioritize at the problem level with Initiatives, and then nest different Ideas under each. This structure leaves you open to experiment, test and iterate on the feature you plan to build, without needing to fundamentally rework your entire roadmap should your intended solution change.

Idea Management

ProdPad excels at being a centralized repository for contributions from across your organization. So, with ProdPad it is super easy for anyone (whether they have a ProdPad user account or not) to submit Ideas for your consideration.

You can then enjoy automatic backlog refinement, with powerful AI de-duping ideas and linking related feedback. Once you’ve triaged your unsorted list of ideas, you move them into your backlog and track them through your workflow using the built-in workflow tool. This means you have the ability to manage your ideas through pre-development stages like defining, discovery and design, before pushing them into your preferred development tool and syncing the status updates (and content) to track the delivery progress from within ProdPad.

ProdPad also provides customizable prioritization tools meaning you can set your prioritization scales and then visualize your entire backlog in a unique chart to quickly and easily see the idea worth developing further.

Feedback Management

Alongside having the strongest set of feedback-gathering integrations of any of the best product management software tools on this list, ProdPad provides you with the powerful Signals tool to automatically analyze all that feedback and surface the themes to feed your product decisions.

ProdPad AI will also suggest which feedback should be linked with which ideas, so you never miss relevant insight to help inform your thinking or support your ideas.

Closing the loop is also made super simple with ProdPad. Every time a feature ships, you’ll find a list of everyone who gave feedback around that problem, and all you need do is click to let them know their feedback was listening to and a solution has been released.

Strengths

AI capabilities: ProdPad truly was the first of the best product management software tools to offer unique ways of boosting efficiency and improving results with AI-powered features. From generating your written work, to suggesting roadmap initiatives, product goals and even ideas based on your feedback, right the way through to coaching you on Product Management best practice and offering suggested improvements to things like your product vision and more. ProdPad AI has been proven to dramatically increase the velocity of Product Teams the world over.
Collaboration: Of the many advanced integrations ProdPad offers, the connections to both Slack and Microsoft Teams are often the most loved by customers. As well as pushing notifications from ProdPad to these important organization-wide communication tools, the ProdPad apps goes further and sync discussion threads between these tools and ProdPad – meaning you can capture entire conversations with the Product Manager in ProdPad and everyone else over in Slack.

You can also select any comment or line of text in Slack or MS Teams and add it to ProdPad as either an Idea or a piece of Feedback – all without needing to log into ProdPad.
Workflow management: As mentioned above, ProdPad, unlike other tools, as a workflow tool as part of its product management software which enables a Product Manager to progress Ideas through their pre-development process and then sync with the delivery tool to track progress to launch, all from a single place.
Strategy & alignment: With ProdPad’s unique strategy canvas and a full OKR management tool, you can ensure that everyone you and the team are working on is explicitly linked to the strategic imperatives of the company and aligned to your product vision. With this bigger picture information sitting right next to your day-to-day workflow and roadmap, no one will lose sight of why you’re working on what you’re working on.

Limitations

No gantt charts: If you are absolutely determined to use a timeline as your product roadmap you might be better suited to another of the best product management software tools on this list. Although you absolutely can add specific dates to each Initiative on ProdPad’s Now-Next-Later roadmap, you won’t be able to lay out all your initiatives on a linear timeline ahead of them hitting delivery.

Pricing

ProdPad has a modular pricing structure meaning you only need pay for what you actually need. This means, depending on your needs, you pick and chose the levels and combinations of modules to suit your particular team.

One key difference with ProdPad’s cost over some of the other best product management software tools is the inclusion of unlimited reviewer users. While some other software options appear to offer the same, reviewers in ProdPad can do a lot more than in other tools. ProdPad reviewers can add and edit their own Ideas and Feedback, and view and comment on those added by others.

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