9 Best Roadmap Tools & Software for Project Planning and Management in 2023

It provides a new and simple way to create roadmaps and organize tasks. Although Airfocus features a limited amount of customization and integration features, the tool offers a fresh take on roadmap creation.

Key Features

• Priority poker is one of the striking features that lets stakeholders share their opinion and interact with the team.
• The prioritization chart is a visual presentation of the items that are scored by Airfocus’s algorithm based on the input given to it. It helps you to gain insights and identify the ideas that can make an impact.
• Airfocus features a centralized feedback system that helps the team with actionable insights. It gives you the ability to link random feedback to the project backlog and organize the inputs for a better understanding of customer needs.

Pros

• Best for a RICE scoring roadmap.  
• Features like Priority poker is a huge time savers.
• Easy to create custom weights to gain a high-impact overview of the activities.
• Customer support and security features are commendable.

Cons

• The user interface needs improvement.
• Users can’t set filters while sharing roadmap links.
• The ability to add custom fields to track data points are limited.
• Difficult to share or collaborate with members outside of your product team.

Ratings

G2: 4.3/5

Trust Radius: 8.8/10

Capterra: 4.5/5

Pricing

Airfocus offers a 14-day free trial, after which you need to sign up for a plan. The paid plans start at $15 per user per month.

A number of task management tools have been made to tackle DevOps challenges that offer flexibility and structure to product development. However, they fall short when it comes to organizing the development process around customer feedback.

Productboad, therefore, presents a unique road mapping platform where enterprises can create repositories around customers’ insights and prioritize the next steps in the product development stage.

Productboard incorporates an ML algorithm that works on the collective user feedback from emails, CRMs, and social media and drives auto-suggestion based on the data.

Once you have ideas at your disposal, Productboard lets you create a roadmap. You can look for several options to customize your roadmap and easily share them with your stakeholders and customers.

However, without a guest feature, you can only share the roadmap as a PDF file. And this could be difficult to manage every time you update the roadmap. But overall, Productboard’s roadmap makes a unique app for aggregating customer insights and creating a successful product on top of it.

Key Features

• By gathering a large amount of feedback, ideas, and requests from various sources, Productboard lets you categorize them easily. Once data is categorized, this helps the product team to rate them on a scale of 0 to 3 based on their importance.
• The product portal is one of the unique features that lets the product managers highlight the features that are planned or in use. It can also be used in internal brainstorming sessions or to update the customers with the top-requested features. With such a feature, Productboard tries to bridge the gap between the development team and the customer community.
• Productboard’s other key feature is the Priority score. With the help of an interactive prioritization matrix, you can generate scores based on how each feature could meet the requirements of customers. And then, you can publish the ideas on the public portal to gain customers’ insights or ratings.

Pros

• Features objective-based timelines within roadmaps.
• It helps you rank features according to priority.
• Flexibility to define different views.
• Easy to gather insights from different sources and ship them to the roadmap.

Cons

• Lacks ideation and needs external tools (Google Docs) to create feature specifications.
• Well-tailored workspace, but customizability is strict.
• Inability to share roadmaps with non-users.
• High charges per person are a trade-off.

Ratings

G2: 4.3/5

Trust Radius: 8.9/10

Capterra: 4.7/5

Pricing

Productboard offers a 15-day free trial with paid plans starting at $20 per user per month.

With the help of product roadmaps and customization features, Aha! strives to help businesses launch their products with ease.

Aha! features six roadmap templates with easy drag-and-drop functions to set your goals and initiatives within a few clicks.

The roadmap mainly focuses on why, when, and what for both development and marketing goals. And to create a product roadmap, Aha! uses “ideas portal”. This helps the team to receive ratings and feedback for their product ideas and prioritize them as per the votes.

Aha! also lets the product team cross-channel with the marketing team to avoid any confusion in the campaigns. And both departments can make use of the integration tools to communicate and track the campaign.

Key Features

• Aha’s ideas portal brings the team members, customers, and stakeholders to a single platform where they can share their ideas, feedback, or potential missing features for the roadmap.
• There’s an option to customize Aha’s lingo, which is quite a unique feature. In case you don’t like the name, you can rename its labels for various features with anything that is easy for you to call.
• Real-time collaborative editing is an effective feature that maintains transparency and lets everyone observe the notes, timelines, and participants’ names as flags.
• Aha! features a point-based system where you can rank the tasks, subtasks, and team members based on the workflow.
• Activity log in Aha! is useful when it comes to auditing. This helps managers to keep an account of the team and their progress toward product development.

Pros

• Creating schedules and reports is flexible.
• The idea portal and the voting system add an advantage.
• Easy to link dependencies and features to help understand future releases.
• Ability to determine valuable features using Rank features and Prioritization metrics.
• Customer support and interaction are productive.

Cons

• The user interface does not feel like it’s enterprise-ready.
• Steep learning curve and is complex in nature.
• Reporting access for business users is limited.
• Lacks a real-time time tracker.
• Higher cost per license.

Ratings

G2: 4.2/5

Trust Radius: 8.4/10

Capterra: 4.8/5

Pricing

Aha! offers a 30-day free trial. The paid plans start at $59 per user per month.

Roadmunk is a web-based road mapping tool designed to cater to the needs of businesses of all sizes.

The platform allows you to build templates using ready-to-use designs and create roadmaps for products, marketing, sales, and technology. And you can choose from Timeline View, Swim lane View, or ListView to visualize the details.

With the feedback portal and Chrome extension, Roadmunk makes it easier to gather user feedback and share it with the team.

You’ll also find prioritization boards with in-build frameworks. It can help you create your own weighted scores using backlog items in order to surface impactful ideas.

Moreover, Roadmunk gives you the advantage of native Jira integration that lets you sync backlogs, epics, and stories and turn them into a beautiful roadmap.

With a host of features and ease of managing everything on the cloud, Roadmap is a go-to software for large enterprises.

Key Features

• Roadmunk’s Reviewer Mode lets you share your roadmaps with the stakeholders and keep them updated on the platform. You can collaborate by adding members to your team via permission dialogue, where you can assign them as an editor or owners of the roadmap.
• With the Export engine, you can have all the roadmaps in one place to convert them into presentation files such as PowerPoint or PDF.
• You can also find a brainstorming space where your team can evaluate the ideas using the RICE or Value vs Effort prioritization framework. Or else, you can use custom weights to promote high-impact ideas to your roadmap.
• Now, if multiple teams are involved in product development, they can build their own roadmap and eventually bring them to the Master View. This feature is quite unique to Roadmunk and offers new ways to collaborate on a project.

Pros

• Easy to visualize details with complex timelines and dependencies.
• Creating different views from the same list of items saves time.
• Easy to collaborate and edit within a team structure.
• Good support and frequent release updates from the product team.

Cons

• Product navigation is confusing and inefficient.
• Lacks integration with broader sets of CRM tools.
• Difficult to read the roadmap when multiple milestones and projects overlap.
• Lacks broader support for the integration tools.

Ratings

G2: 4/5

Trust Radius: 8.5/10

Capterra: 4.4/5

Pricing

Roadmunk offers a 14-day free trial, after which you can sign up for a paid plan starting at $19 if you are an alone user or $49 per user per month for more than one user.

Final thoughts

What does it feel like to have a roadmap that makes work plans as easy as planning a trip?

Although the idea of using a roadmap looks promising, however, you should note that it is subject to change. Depending on the new market circumstances, you should come up with flexible plans so that you won’t need to redraw your roadmap frequently.

But it’s also important to mind the tons of features it offers and prevents you from falling down the rabbit hole. Always come up with the best practices to take feature-specific measures to craft your roadmap.

Without a road mapping tool, it would be a tricky tightrope to walk for businesses, with a risk of being left behind.