Product development isn’t always a pretty process—and product managers know this better than anyone. Things can get even messier when teams lack the infrastructure needed for team synergy. The engineering department may look to one source of truth for project information, while design looks to another, and marketing looks to yet another—and that means there is one accurate source of truth.

Great product roadmap tools can empower teams to collaborate on a unified vision for a product and see progress toward goals in real time.

The top 10 product roadmap tools 

  1. Airtable

  2. Jira

  3. Productboard

  4. Aha!

  5. ProductPlan

  6. Roadmunk

  7. Trello

  8. Monday.com

  9. Airfocus

  10. Craft.io

But with so many great options out there, how do you pick what’s right for your team?  We believe Airtable is a great platform for this use-case, but we wanted to provide a clear-eyed evaluation of what else is out there. So we researched and tested each option—here’s a look at the most highly rated solutions for building product roadmaps at scale.

Drive holistic product planning and roadmap prioritization

What features should product roadmap software have?

It’s OK to ask a lot of your product roadmap software. A comprehensive solution can, and should, cut down on costly tool sprawl. Look for the following features to set your team up for success:

  • View flexibility: Not every stakeholder wants to see the same data, nor view data in the same format. You want a solution that empowers teams to cut own extraneous data, and view just the subset of information that matters to them. At minimum, it should accommodate the most common roadmap formats—like calendar, kanban, timeline, and Gantt.

  • Ease of use: Nearly every tool has a learning curve. But if your team struggles with the chosen product roadmap solution after timely configuration and training, you’ve likely invested in the wrong tool. Choose an intuitive platform with an easy-to-navigate interface that makes it easy to set product goals, prioritize and rank features, track progress, and present your roadmap to stakeholders.

  • Collaboration features: Product teams need tools that can accurately assign resources to projects to ensure effective collaboration. A product roadmap tool should offer built-in collaboration features like task assignment and reassignment, teammate tagging, categorized inboxes, a chatting feature, and view sharing.

  • Diverse dataset unification: Product workflows require a large spectrum of differing data types. These data types might involve features, research, customer feedback, OKRs, sprints, and more. Choose a tool that unifies data and relates it to other data types (think of the intrinsic link between a deliverable’s name and its deadline, for instance). 

  • Time-saving tools: Your platform should ideally come with templates or pre-configured apps that fit your needs. And it’s even better if it also has workflow automation features.

1. Airtable

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Airtable is a connected apps platform that lets teams build the individual applications they need. Many different teams contribute to product roadmaps—engineering, design, UX, marketing, and more. Airtable empowers each of them to build their own custom applications, while still enabling visibility into one another’s progress.

Since Airtable apps are connected and data can be easily filtered and shared, they don’t produce silos wherein teams risk developing tunnel vision or missing critical updates from other teams. Data updated in one app updates across all apps. Product teams often use Airtable to manage their roadmap and then connect that to their product OKRs, customer feedback, sprint management, and more. This enables visibility into all areas of product management so that nothing slips through the cracks.

Picture this: A top-level company objective changes and it impacts features on the product roadmap. Product teams are notified in real-time and can immediately see how timelines shift and what resourcing changes are needed.

Here are some of Airtable’s most useful features for product roadmapping:

  • Flexible data model: Airtable doesn’t dictate which data model you use—you do. Airtable’s custom fields let you incorporate research, customer feedback, customer commits, sprint planning, responsible teams, or just about any other use case. Plus, the platform doesn’t limit you to project- and task-level data. You can even add metadata to track details like supplier names, product codes, and more.

  • Data sync: Airtable registers inputs in real time, constantly updating with the latest data. But it also goes a step further, enabling teams to sync external data from CRMs, issue-tracking software, and other critical business systems.

  • Dynamic views: With Airtable, teams can save 1,000 uniquely filtered and sorted views per table (the spreadsheet-like spaces in a base that contain views, fields, and records). That includes popular roadmap views like timeline and kanban, in addition to Gantt, calendar, list view, and more.

  • Drag-and-drop Interface Designer: Airtable’s Interface Designer features lets teams design intuitive and actionable interfaces using drag-and-drop. Teams can completely customize their interfaces, adding custom dashboards, buttons, charts, and more. 

  • Advanced automations for scale: Airtable comes equipped with advanced workflow automations, enabling your team to expedite repetitive processes.

  • Apps by Airtable: Airtable offers preconfigured apps built for a variety of use cases to provide an out-of-the-box starting point to get started with the platform.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.6 stars; ‎2,114 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.7 stars; ‎1,754 reviews

How Product leaders drive operational excellence with Airtable

2. Jira

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Atlassian’s project management tool, Jira, is designed to help agile teams track and manage product issues and tasks. Compared to many other project management apps, its primary audience is relatively narrow: software and mobile app-development teams.

That said, Jira includes some powerful product roadmapping features, like:

  • The product discovery template: Jira offers a template designed to help teams turn ideas into built-out products. The template incorporates pre-configured views to help you visualize, compare, and prioritize ideas as well as track progress toward project completion.

  • Saved views: You can build and save as many custom views as you need with both pre-built and custom fields. For example, you can create a custom field to develop your own formula that calculates feature-prioritization scores, then place that score formula in any of your views.

  • A Chrome extension: The company also offers a Chrome extension that enables you to gather data from external sources and quickly import it into Jira. For example, you can quickly gather a snippet of data from a user interview and pull it into Jira to be incorporated in your product roadmap.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.3 stars; 5,161 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.4 stars; 13,129 reviews

3. Productboard

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Productboard is product management software specifically designed to support product managers and their dev teams. With its shared boards and team activity tracking features, the platform provides at-a-glance visibility into the progress of a project.

The following features make Productboard a solid product roadmap software:

  • Feedback consolidation: Productboard integrates with many platforms, including CRMs and social media channels. You can pull customer feedback from these apps into Productboard, linking them to features and integrating them into your roadmap.

  • Drag-and-drop roadmap interface: You can drag-and-drop items into your roadmap, adjust timelines by clicking and dragging assets from either side, and set milestones with a single click. These intuitive features should limit the learning curve your team faces when adopting the tool.

  • Product portal: Productboard also allows teams to source feedback from customers and other stakeholders on feature ideas, helping to validate or improve those ideas and enhance the roadmap. 

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.3 stars; 215 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.7 stars; 140 reviews

4. Aha!

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Like Productboard, Aha! is a product development software with a specialization in roadmapping. It offers a roadmap interface centered around structured data and a whiteboard interface for ad hoc, free-form data, providing a balanced approach to product brainstorming, design, and execution.

Here are some of its most notable features:

  • Advanced feedback features: Aha! allows teams to collect granular product feedback from customers to add to roadmaps. For example, its “Empathy sessions” can be used to invite customers to virtual focus groups, where they can expand upon their feedback.

  • Collaborative features: The platform’s Notebook tab offers collaborative whiteboards and notes that can be used to discuss product features. It also enables idea voting so teams can prioritize certain features and projects.

  • Analytics: Many product roadmap tools don’t offer analytics and reporting features, but Aha! does. Analyze data using feedback trends and build custom reports and dashboards to visualize it.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.3 stars; 222 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.7 stars; 490 reviews

5. ProductPlan

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Of all the point solutions for product roadmapping above, ProductPlan is perhaps the most squarely devoted to a roadmap format. It offers nearly 30 roadmap templates to choose from, including multiple product and customer-facing options.

  • Customized views: ProductPlan makes it easy to save views that simplify roadmaps. This allows teams to generate roadmap views that only show information pertinent to certain stakeholders and cut out the noise. Teams can then share editing or solely viewing permissions so that stakeholders can access the roadmap.

  • Multi-roadmap management: ProductPlan enables you to create multiple roadmaps. For example, you can create a high-altitude product launch plan with important tasks for upcoming product releases, as well as a granular roadmap that focuses on a specific product or set of features. 

  • Feature prioritization: ProductPlan also makes it easy to prioritize features. Just score each feature by the value you anticipate it generating and the effort it would take to implement to generate a prioritization score. This makes it easy to rank features and create a hierarchy.

6. Roadmunk

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As the name suggests, Roadmunk is another roadmapping tool for all kinds of cross-functional teams, including product dev and launch teams. It boasts a lively drag-and-drop interface that lets users see previews of key item-level details by hovering their cursor over each field. Its Idea Prioritization tab also allows teams to brainstorm and prioritize ideas using both custom and pre-built frameworks (like RICE).

The following features make Roadmunk stand out:

  • 35+ templates: Like ProductPlan, Roadmunk offers a plethora of templates, including nine dedicated to product development functions. These can help teams get started faster with whatever roadmap style they’d like to create.

  • Feedback tools: Roadmunk includes a feedback inbox feature where you can collect feedback from customer-facing teams. With the Roadmunk Chrome extension, you can also capture feedback from external sources like CRMs or email.

Customized views: The platform offers popular roadmap views: Swimlane (kanban), Timeline (traditional), and Master (combined roadmap view). You can build and save custom views that show specific project or feature-level details in each of these formats so stakeholders can see only the most relevant data for them.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.4 stars; 149 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.4 stars; 54 reviews

7. Trello

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Atlassian’s “Trello” is designed specifically for building kanban-style “boards,” which teams can use for roadmapping. The platform offers a wide selection of templates, including a few product-specific options, which can help teams get started quickly. As with Jira (and most of Atlassian’s other tools), Trello is primarily designed for agile teams that work in sprints. 

Trello doesn’t allow you to create and save custom views of your roadmap like many other options. For this reason, it’s a popular choice for small teams that don’t need to share roadmaps with many cross-functional stakeholders.

Here are some areas where Trello stands out:

  • Templatization options: Whether you use cards on Trello boards to represent features, ideas, or projects, you can save those cards as templates to later reuse and adjust as needed.

  • Intuitive automations: Trello offers many ways to automate your product roadmap, including programmed buttons that execute complex actions with a click and time-bound automations like schedule- and deadline-based triggers.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.4 stars; 13,097 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.5 stars; 22,366 reviews

Drive holistic product planning and roadmap prioritization

8. Monday.com

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Monday.com is a project-management platform that is well-suited for building and managing product roadmaps. While it's mostly oriented around tasks, Monday.com is flexible enough to let teams to adapt their boards to represent anything (not just projects and tasks).

As its record limit maxes out at 20,000, Monday.com is better fit for smaller organizations that aren’t balancing tens to hundreds of projects at once. Enterprise organizations balancing more than a few projects are better off with a solution like Airtable, which can scale to 250,000 records. 

Here are a couple notable features that make Monday.com a solid product roadmap tool:

  • Automations: Monday.com offers a wide selection of categorized pre-built automations to free up your product team’s time. It also lets users create custom automations. For example, your team can set up an automation to update the status of a feature’s dependency to “in progress” when the original feature is marked “complete.”

  • Visualization options: The platform’s view types are more robust than many other roadmapping tools. It includes a Gantt-style board to help product managers and dev teams track milestones and dependencies, dashboards where you can easily visualize progress with chart widgets, and a Workload view for tracking team bandwidth.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.6 stars; 2,111 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.7 stars; 1,750 reviews

9. Airfocus

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Airfocus is an innovative product management software that comes equipped with some unique functionalities. It enables teams to create as many “workspaces” as they’d like, each designed with a different purpose—feedback management, idea or feature prioritization (using popular models like RICE and WSFJ), roadmapping, and more.

These features help Airfocus stand out for product teams:

  • Feedback tools: Airfocus’ Feedback & Insights tab functions similar to customer support software. Customer feedback flows into an inbox, which can then be assigned to a team member. That team member can then reply to the customer, consider adding that feature to the roadmap, or both.

  • Prioritization features: Airfocus offers a “Priority Poker” app that enables stakeholders to collaborate on setting priorities by assigning numbered cards to features, ideas, milestones, or whatever else their roadmap or task list includes. With the app’s Priority chart, teams can view items mapped out on a value vs. effort grid.

  • Private views: With Airfocus, you can create custom private views so you don’t clutter other teammates’ view menu with your own favorite ways to view a product roadmap.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.4 stars; ‎112 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.5 stars; ‎114 reviews

10. Craft.io

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Craft.io is another product management software with product roadmapping features such as prioritization, custom views, and progress tracking. It provides a wide selection of templates to minimize the learning curve and help teams get started building.

Here are some of Craft.io’s notable features:

  • Custom (and Guru) fields: The platform allows teams to create their own custom fields which can hold data in any format. It also offers pre-made fields built to set product teams up for success, such as popular prioritization formulas like WSJF.

  • Feedback to backlog: With Craft.io, you can create a customized portal where you can interact with customers, manage their feedback, and easily create backlog items based on their feature ideas. These items can then be pulled into your product roadmap whenever you’re ready to start working on them.

Reviews:

  • G2: 4.5 stars; ‎43 reviews

  • Capterra: 4.4 stars; ‎30 reviews

Product roadmapping tools FAQ

Want to learn more? Here are answers to a common questions about product roadmaps and the software used to create them.

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a shared visual resource that product teams use to visualize product progress and coordinate on its direction. Product roadmap software enables teams to collaborate on these roadmaps, working together to brainstorm feature ideas, then prioritize those features, and make them a reality. 

Why do product teams need a product roadmap tool?

Product roadmap tools make the lives of product managers and their teams much easier. Not only do they help teams coordinate feature prioritization and resource allocation, but they also help teams visualize how those features fit into the product development process.

The question isn’t if you need a product roadmap tool, but rather which.

Don’t waste your money on a product roadmap tool that keeps your teams siloed. Choose an option that meets your product team’s unique needs while enabling cross-team visibility and cohesion.

How Product leaders drive operational excellence with Airtable


About the author

Airtable's Product Teamis committed to building world-class products, and empowering world-class product builders on our platform.

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