The Best Jira Product Discovery Alternative

As a relatively new kid on the product management tool block,  Jira Product Discovery has a number of more mature and well-established alternatives. But are they better? And which is truly the best Jira Product Discovery alternative?

Whether you’re thinking about adopting Jira Product Discovery and doing your due diligence, or if you know Jira Product Discovery isn’t for you and want to find something better, you’ve come to the right place. 

Before we get into this, know that we aren’t about to tear Jira Product Discovery a new one. That’s not our style. That is a tool built by product people just like we’re a team of product people building a tool for product people. We’re part of the same community and we’re not about to start flinging dirt or throwing shade or whatever phrase is your favorite dis description. We’re good people, and we’re sure the guys over at Jira are too! 

But, we do know ProdPad is a fuller solution thanks to its maturity, it’s foundation in best practice and the expertise and thought-leadership of our origins and continued leadership (namely Janna Bastow, inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap, co-founder of Mind the Product and co-founder and CEO of ProdPad).

So let’s take a look at how ProdPad stacks up as the best Jira Product Discovery alternative. We promise to be candid, honest and fair! You can also learn more about how the two tools stack up here.

Where did Jira Product Discovery come from?

So, as you all know, Jira Software has been around for a long time. It’s been a lynchpin of the Atlassian offering for many years. The original Jira tool was built as a project management tool specifically tailored to tech delivery, sprint planning and dev ops. The tool is for engineering teams, but as product management developed as a discipline, some product managers found themselves trying to bend the tool to their roadmapping and backlog management needs. And, again, as I’m sure you know, that never ends well.

Jira Product Discovery therefore, represents Atlassian’s realization and acknowledgement that Jira Software is not the place to run product discovery and strategy planning. It is a system for delivery and release planning and Product Managers need a space to do their ideation and prioritize what to work on next. 

Product Managers within organizations who used the Atlassian suite would typically either struggle along with Jira Software or they would get themselves a purpose-built product management tool like ProdPad with deep integrations with Jira Software so they could run their strategy and discovery in ProdPad and push things over to the engineering team, via Jira Software, when something was ready to be built.  So the creation of Jira Product Discovery is an attempt to get a piece of that latter pie and give PMs a dedicated space for their product management… 

But does it go far enough? 

Does Jira Product Discovery go far enough in providing a dedicated strategic space for product managers?

In short, no. Jira Product Discovery facilitates a new issue type of Ideas and allows you to prioritize those on a Now-Next-Later roadmap, attaching feedback and creating tickets to pass over to Jira Software… but it’s a very manual tool that does nothing to free up your valuable time or guide best practice. Neither is it the tool to help you establish a product culture outside of your immediate team and foster collaboration across the whole organization. 

ProdPad, on the other hand, is the only complete product management platform focused on saving you time and getting you to impactful product decisions faster. Through advanced AI, deep integrations and best practice workflows and suggestions, ProdPad helps Product Managers not only enjoy their own dedicated space, but actually save time, move faster and deliver more. 

What is Jira Product Discovery missing?

Jira Product Discovery is a tool to help you tack roadmapping and backlog management in front of the sprint planning and release planning the engineering teams might be doing in Jira Software. 

It delivers a smooth and efficient process for moving Ideas from the product backlog into delivery, but discovery, validation and the customer feedback loop appears not to be part of their focus. 

Jira Product Discovery is missing some of the most important features to help you:

• Develop a solid strategy both top down and bottom up
• Easily communicate that strategy with all stakeholders 
• Enjoy the benefits of a single source of truth for all things product
• Successfully facilitate collaboration across the organization

Jira Product Discovery has…

Feedback

• No integrations with CRMs or support systems to automatically (or manually) route feedback from customer-facing teams
• No feedback portal or widget to gather feedback from your users
• No tools to surface the themes in your feedback
• No easy way to distinguish between the feedback you have triaged and the feedback still to look at

Strategy

• No strategy canvas or place to describe your overall strategy or capture your product vision
• No OKR, product objectives or goal management tool

Roadmapping

• No hierarchy or nesting ability to the roadmap items – just one flat issue type
• No external roadmap sharing or embedding
• No portfolio management or view across different roadmaps
• No in-built document creation for specs, PRDs, designs or anything else – all that must sit externally 

Other

• No email notifications to help you drive action from the team and collaboration
• No AI assistance to help lighten the load and unlock more time for the most valuable work

Is ProdPad the best Jira Product Discovery Alternative?

Spoiler alert: everything listed above, that is missing in the Jira Product Discovery tool, is available in ProdPad 🙌

But let’s map that out for you feature-by-feature. 

Jira Product Discovery vs ProdPad feature comparison

	Jira Product Discovery	ProdPad
Roadmapping
Now-Next-Later roadmap	✅	✅
Completed and candiate roadmap columns by default	❌	✅
Toggle to view roadmap grouped by Product Objective	❌	✅
AI Roadmap Initiative and Idea generation	❌	✅
Porfolio management and roadmaps	❌	✅
Roadmap publishing and external sharing	❌	✅
Initiative > Ideas hierarchy	❌	✅
Strategy
Product Strategy Canvas to map out Vision, value and more	❌	✅
Central documentation repository	❌	✅
Full OKR management with goal setting	❌	✅
Personas	❌	✅
AI Product Coach	❌	✅
Idea Management
Idea management	✅	✅
Jira Software integration with 2 way sync	✅	✅
Impact vs Effort prioritization chart	✅	✅
Customizable prioritization scales	❌	✅
Confidence rating mapped to prioritization chart	❌	✅
Unsorted and backlog lists for refinement and triaging	❌	✅
Idea Canvas to guide your ideation and discovery	❌	✅
AI Assistant to automate backlog refinement	❌	✅
Bulit-in product specs and document creation	❌	✅
AI Assistant to automate backlog refinement	❌	✅
Generative AI for idea descriptions, etc	❌	✅
Workflow management for pre-delivery planning – discovery & validation	❌	✅
Feedback Management
Chrome extension for feedback capture	✅	✅
Slack and Teams integration	✅	✅
Customer feedback portal & widgets	❌	✅
Integrations with support systems and CRMs to pull in feedback	❌	✅
AI feedback theme analysis	❌	✅
AI feedback summarizer	❌	✅
Collaboration
Free, unlimited contributors	✅	✅
Email notifications	❌	✅
Comment discussion board integration with Slack, Teams & email	❌	✅
And there’s more!
Customizable automation rules	❌	✅
Comprehensive API access	❌	✅

Let’s dig into some of ProdPad’s key differentiators – the headline benefits if you will. 

Only with ProdPad will you get: 

• Effortless feedback gathering and deep AI analysis
• A home for your vision, strategy and OKRs – guiding your roadmap and prioritization
• All the tools to easily communicate a clear roadmap and keep everyone informed
• A central hub and single source of truth for organization-wide collaboration 
• An AI-powered assistant and coach to help you automate the grunt work and deliver more value

Gather feedback from more places and more people

ProdPad has the most advanced feedback gathering capabilities of any all-in-one product management tool. There are more ways to submit or automatically route feedback into ProdPad than in Jira Product Discovery. 

We’ve already suggested that feedback analysis isn’t a big focus for Jira Product Discovery, but the team here at ProdPad have prioritized the development of our feedback management tool precisely because they recognize the fundamental importance that user feedback plays in informing and shaping the product strategy and your prioritization decisions. In fact, it’s through these feedback tools that we were able to identify that effective feedback management is a primary need and problem to solve for y’all! 

In short, ProdPad’s feedback management tool is designed to ensure as many people in your organization as possible can submit feedback to the product team without having to log into ProdPad itself. Our powerful integrations, extensions and widgets mean your customer-facing colleagues can manually, or automatically fire feedback from wherever they work, directly into your feedback repository.  

With ProdPad you can gather feedback in the following ways: 

• Customer feedback portals and widgets (add your own branding) 
• Push feedback directly from Slack or MS Teams
• Integrate your CRM (like Salesforce) to easily get feedback from sales teams
• Connect your support system (like Zendesk) to automatically route feedback from your customer teams
• Email feedback directly into ProdPad
• Fast-add feedback from your browser with our Chrome extension

With Jira Product Discovery, aside from manually adding feedback directly into the tool, you can pull in feedback through:

• Slack and Teams integrations (but only from a dedicated #product-feedback channel)
• Chrome extension
• Jira Service Management integration

Jira Product Discovery has:

• No customer feedback portals
• No CRM integrations
• No support system integrations (aside from Jira Service Management)
• No email dropbox

Analyze your feedback to help fuel your thinking  

Of course, it’s not enough to just collect feedback – you need to understand what you have and use that insight in your decision making. Where Jira Product Discovery offers no feedback analysis tools at all, ProdPad has multiple ways to extract insight from your feedback faster. From the frequency charts that help you spot trends, to the AI Signals tool to surface the common themes. 

ProdPad’s AI Assistant will help you:

• Generate succinct summaries of any long pieces of feedback
• Automatically link feedback to relevant Ideas in your backlog
• Analyze your entire feedback repository and surface the themes in moments

ProdPad helps you go from a list of feedback, to strategic insights in half the time. ProdPad is the best tool to unearth insight from your feedback and feed your bottom-up strategic planning.

Where’s the why? Keep your strategy close by 

Another difference between Jira Product Discovery and ProdPad is the emphasis put on the bigger picture. ProdPad comes with a unique Product Canvas area which allows you to keep your roadmap next to a description and articulation of your wider product strategy. This is designed to ensure alignment, remind the team of the bigger picture and make sure everyone understands the context in which you are working and making decisions.

ProdPad’s unique Product Canvas provides a space to map out your Vision, value, strategy and more, capturing that all important, overarching reason for being. It’s proximity to your roadmap (the very next tab!) means you’re never more than a click away from that north star, helping to keep you – and everyone who visits the roadmap – aligned to the ultimate goals. 

ProdPad can even provide coaching to help you better align your product Ideas with this strategy and Vision. Whenever an Idea is added to ProdPad, our AI Product Coach can compare that Idea to the Product Vision and give you considered, constructive guidance on how to improve alignment and focus on your core objectives. This can be a game changer when it comes to Idea submissions from different teams and other colleagues. Rather than you having to devise appropriate feedback to give to the Idea submitter, you can let the AI Coach handle that for you. You get a backlog of better aligned Ideas and you’ve saved a bunch of time feeding back on that Idea. 

Know exactly how you’ll measure success with OKR management

To stay truly outcome-focused you need to be clear on the exact needles you want to move and the results you need to see. ProdPad’s full OKR management system goes deeper, allowing you to set specific, measurable Key Results under each of your product objectives. Our AI can even generate key results for you, getting you from broad goals to exact targets in moments. 

In Jira Product Discovery you can only list objectives and attach them to Ideas, but you cannot set and measure specific goals or Key Results, nor can you flag progress against goals or targets. 

The home of the Now-Next-Later roadmap

Jira Product Discovery is a roadmapping tool built around the Now-Next-Later roadmap – a roadmap format and practice that we invented here at ProdPad. Our Co-Founders Janna Bastow and Simon Cast invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap as a direct solution to the problems they were facing as PMs using a timeline roadmap. 

So, ProdPad is the home of the Now-Next-Later and the right place to come for the best guidance and structure to properly work within the principles of lean roadmapping and the outcome-based Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

For example, while Jira Product Discovery provides an infinitely flexible roadmap structure that you can configure however you like, ProdPad actively helps you instill good habits and best practice, driving consistency across the team by providing some unique areas of the roadmap, by default. Those include a Completed area where you move those roadmap Initiatives that have been shipped and measured – helping you demonstrate what you’ve achieved and tell the story of your product evolution. And a Candidate area for you to store those potential Initiatives that may make it onto the roadmap in time. 

In ProdPad, you can also toggle to view your entire Now-Next-Later organized by Objective, giving you a color coded view of what you’re doing to impact each of your core product objectives. 

Each of these built-in, by default, settings helps you easily tell the story of your product strategy in different ways, ensuring you have ready-made views for demonstrating what you’re working on and why. 

The Initiative > Idea hierarchy 

As we’ve mentioned already, with Jira Product Discovery you get one new issue type, not already seen in Jira Software. By default that issue type is labeled Idea, but you have the flexibility to call that whatever you want. Which is great. But…. that issue type is flat. You do not have the ability to nest a secondary issue type within it. And that causes a problem if you truly want to work in an agile way.

You see, without a hierarchy within each roadmap item, you’re doing nothing more than moving a series of feature ideas around a board. That sounds like project management, nor product management. 

To be truly outcome-focused and customer-centric requires a hierarchy that enables you to prioritize and communicate a problem to be solved and not one single idea. Then you’re free to group multiple ideas beneath that higher problem, leaving you open to explore and test each one to find the best way to solve that problem. 

ProdPad works differently. With a Now-Next-Later roadmap in ProdPad each item on your roadmap is an Initiative, within which you can add and link any number of Ideas. With the Initiative you are declaring the problem you want to solve, and with each Idea you’re putting forward a different ‘experiment’ or possible way it could be solved. 

WIth the Initiative and Idea hierarchy you are therefore free to experiment, learn and iterate to find the best solution to the problem. This hierarchy ensures you are not nailing your flag to a certain Idea or feature too soon, cutting out the opportunity to discover the best path.  

This also provides you with a roadmap format far more suitable for customer communications. With Jira’s single issue type you have no choice but to show everyone a roadmap with details of specific Ideas – that or you’ll need to build an entirely new roadmap in which you present the roadmap items as the broader problems. But now you have two different roadmaps to maintain at all times 😩 For more on the best ways to present a public roadmap, check out our guide on the topic.

With ProdPad you can keep one central version of your roadmap and simply click to publish a customer-facing version where you toggle off the Ideas and just show your top-level Initiatives. That published roadmap will dynamically update as you manage and amend your roadmap.

Which brings us onto another key way in which ProdPad is the best Jira Product Discovery alternative, solving more of your product management problems.

Effortless stakeholder comms

As the custodian of the product strategy, communicating the plan is a decent chunk of your job. But it’s also a part of the job that can get in the way of doing what you probably would rather be doing – namely, discovery, testing and making product decisions! 

It’s important that you have a roadmapping tool that prevents you needing to update documents all the time, field endless questions from people around the organization and explain your progress and decisions all the livelong day.

So how does ProdPad stack up as the best Jira Product Discovery alternative in terms of ease of communication and helping you solve this problem?

I’ll start with the bad news…. Jira Product Discovery has no ability for external sharing of your roadmap. Everyone you want to share your dynamic roadmap with will need to have a Jira Product Discovery login.

Clearly that’s no good if you need to share with leadership executives, colleagues outside of your every-day teams or even the whole company. Nor does it help you communicate your roadmap externally – to your customers, investors or even publicly on your website. So, if you have your roadmap in Jira Product Discovery, you’re going to have to continue the pain of creating slides and answering all those ‘is this on the roadmap?’ questions. No thanks.

Now onto the good news…ProdPad provides dynamic roadmap publishing, allowing you to create unlimited customized views and share externally or even embed on your website. Phew. 

Now you can manage one central roadmap safe in the knowledge that your published versions will stay up-to-date and show each group of stakeholders exactly what they need to know. Our deep and detailed filters allow you to build views that are as detailed or as top-level as you want. 

So you can quickly throw up a roadmap view for, say, your Sales Lead and not have to think about it again. That Sales Lead now has a link to their own, customized view whenever they need it. Now if anyone wants to know if something is on the roadmap, they can see for themselves. 

With ProdPad it’s super simple to publish a customer-facing version of your roadmap that is an Initiative-only, broad overview – communicating the problems you’ll solve, not the details of the Ideas. Check out our own external roadmap to see how that looks in action. 

Power a product culture with a true collaboration hub 

To recap a few of the things we’ve discovered already about Jira Product Discovery… 

• No integrations with CRMs
• No integrations with systems the Customer and Support Teams use
• No ability to email in Ideas or Feedback
• No sharing of roadmaps with people without a login

This makes it very hard for people outside of the product team to interact with what you’re doing – to contribute and collaborate. Because, let’s be honest, no one is going to bother logging into a new and different system, one that isn’t primarily their tool, to help you do your job. With the best will in the world, that ain’t happening.

But you do need contributions from other teams! Of course you do. You need feedback to be shared with you, you need input and suggestions from other teams, you need to create transparency and help everyone feel invested and involved with access to the strategy and the roadmap.  And, to get the richest backlog you can, you should be encouraging anyone in the organization to submit Ideas if they think of something good! 

If you want to foster a true product culture across the organization, you need to have a product management tool focused on providing easy access and removing all barriers to engagement by your stakeholders. So, with this in mind is ProdPad the best Jira Product Discovery alternative when it comes to getting the whole company on-board?

Yes, yes it is. You see, ProdPad is integrated with more of the tools your wider organization use. You can invite and capture discussion, ask for feedback and give people an easy outlet for their product ideas – all without needing to log in to ProdPad. This is the key to truly fostering a product culture and collaborating cross-functionally. This is the tool leadership will thank you for.

Jira Product Discovery also fails to offer a place for your documentation. Your working documents – your specs, PRDs, notes – all that decision tracking and discussion has to happen elsewhere. 

ProdPad, on the other hand, offers a central document repository per product, and built-in specification documents, design tool integrations and more, against each and every Idea. So you can enjoy a single source of truth for everything you’re working on. 

The most advanced AI capabilities of any product management tool

This one is a biggy. For many people, it’s the main reason why ProdPad is the best Jira Product Discovery alternative. I’ll cut straight to the chase… ProdPad has the most advanced AI capabilities of any product management platform. But we’re not here to compare ProdPad to all other tools, you’re looking for the best Jira Product Discovery alternative. So what are Jira Product Discovery’s AI capabilities like?

They are nonexistent. With Jira Product Discovery there is no AI assistance to help you work faster or better. You are very much on your own.

ProdPad, on the other hand, is not just a complete platform to manage your product process, it’s a team member and coach – a tool to help you and your whole organization work smarter and faster – getting to the most impactful product decisions in half the time. 

The AI tools in ProdPad come in a number of different flavors, helping you do different jobs in half the time. They include:

• AI tools to automate the grunt work and free up your time
• AI tools to do the writing for you – generate descriptions, user stories, feedback summaries and more 
• AI tools to kick-start your ideation – generating Roadmap Initiatives, Ideas and even suggesting Key Results to focus your efforts
• AI tools to coach you to do your best work – offering constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement whenever you need it
• AI tools to run analysis and suggest what to prioritize

Portfolio management

This one is pretty cut and dry. Jira Product Discovery does not easily allow for portfolio management and is ill-equipped to handle the needs of multiple product companies who need both individual roadmap views that automatically roll up to a portfolio level view. 

With ProdPad you can manage everything from a product, product line or product portfolio level. You can set OKRs and outline a strategy and Vision at portfolio level as well as at the individual product level.

Maintaining a portfolio roadmap is effortless as each product roadmap automatically feeds its Initiatives up to the higher level. 

The same also applies for product lines. Within your portfolio you can group individual products together across different product lines and easily view product line roadmaps and assign OKRs and vision statements unique to that product line. 

In short, Jira Product Discovery only facilitates the creation of single roadmap only. Any product line or portfolio roadmap would have to be manually built up in a horrible big cut and paste job. Not ideal if you’re trying to drive efficiencies and maintain a consistent picture of what’s happening across your product organization. 

But what if you need a tight sync with Jira Software?

After all, if you’re evaluating Jira Product Discovery, the chances are it’s because you’re already using Jira Software for your delivery planning and you want a smooth handover from one to the other. 

Well Jira Product Discovery aren’t the only product management tool who can provide that. ProdPad has a powerful integration, complete with two-way sync, with Jira Software. And that’s both for the Jira Software Cloud solution and the Jira Server & Data Center on-premise solutions. So it really is proving to be the best Jira Product Discovery alternative.

This tight integration means you can not only easily import your existing Jira issues when you first start out with ProdPad, but you can enjoy a two-way content and status sync from the moment you decide to push an Idea over to Jira Software to be picked up by the development team. 

In fact, if you’re currently struggling with a product backlog in Jira Software and think Jira Product Discovery would provide the easiest transition, take a look at our very own CEO and Co-Founder Janna Bastow explaining how quick and easy it is to import that backlog into ProdPad and have our AI tools clean it up! 

The final verdict

I know I set out saying we wouldn’t be bad mouthing Jira Product Discovery all over town, and I hope you think I’ve stuck to that promise, but also, the more I write out this comparison, the more I realize that there’s really no comparison. 

So the final verdict from me is ProdPad is the best Jira Product Discovery alternative.

Yeah, I know, I would say that. So if you’re not happy to take my word for it, why not take a look at what people are saying about ProdPad on G2. 

But probably the best way to decide for yourself is to start a free trial and see what all the fuss is about. Either that or book yourself a demo with one of our product management experts and get all your questions answered.