Top 20 Idea Management Software by Category
Ideas can come from anywhere: your customers, your support tickets, your colleagues, your frantic brainstorming sessions. Without really effective idea management, excellent ideas can easily be forgotten.
Enter idea management software. These types of platforms can help you collect and sort ideas and then track their development.
Below, we present the most popular tools across 4 different categories:
Customer idea management software
Company/team idea management software
Idea visualization and sharing tools
Remote collaboration tools
Customer idea management software
In this category, we've got tools that are designed for collecting ideas directly from your customers and users.
1. Frill
Frill is an idea management platform that includes features for public or private customer idea boards with upvoting and comments, product roadmaps, and announcements (also known as changelogs). This tool is popular among SaaS companies, consumer apps, and other digital-first businesses.
Pricing:
Frill's lowest cost plan costs $25 per month and offers up to 50 tracked ideas. Or try the Growth plan, which costs $149 per month, if you unlimited ideas, access to all features, white-labelling, and the option to keep your boards private (to signed in users only). Choose your plan here.
2. HelloNext
With HelloNext, you can manage customer feedback with feedback boards. The platform also offers a product roadmap and changelog.
Pricing:
HelloNext doesn't offer a free plan, but you can try their Runway plan for $19 per month, which can be used for one feedback board and one administrative user.
3. Nolt
Nolt offers feedback boards and product roadmap boards but doesn't include a changelog feature like others in this category. You can integrate Nolt with Jira, Trello, and Slack in order to sync customer ideas with team work.
Pricing:
Nolt has no free plan, and their main plan costs $25 per month.
4. Upvoty
Like the name suggests, Upvoty provides customer feedback boards where customers can upvote each others' ideas. You also get a product roadmap and changelog.
Pricing:
There is no free plan. The Power plan costs $15 per month and the Super Power plan costs $39 per month.
5. Usersnap
Usersnap is designed for SaaS and tech companies and offers a mix of customer idea management and QA management. You can manage feature requests and user testing and measure customer satisfaction.
Pricing:
The Basic plan costs €19 per month , the Startup plan costs €99 per month, and the Company plan costs €189. The price goes up based on your number of team collaborators and in-app widgets.
6. Qualaroo
With Qualaroo, you can collect customer ideas and insights. The platform offers surveys with advanced customer targeting, website exit surveys, NPS score tracking, survey templates and nudges (AKA small pop-ups to encourage users to take your survey).
Pricing:
The Essentials Plan costs $80 per month and the Premium plan costs $160 per month. Pricing depends on the number of admins you need and whether or not you want user targeting for your feedback campaigns.
Company/team idea management software
This category of idea management software is designed to help you track ideas from your internal team.
7. Brightidea
Brightidea is a dedicated idea management platform that lets you collect, share, develop, and track ideas. Top features include a digital whiteboard, an idea box for collecting and sorting ideas, and the innovation lab, a feature for identifying and prioritizing larger projects.
Pricing:
As an enterprise solution, Brightidea doesn't publish their pricing, so you'll need to get in touch with their sales team for a custom quote.
8. HelloIgnite
HelloIgnite offers unique features for idea generation, including innovation challenges and idea collection from your frontline employees (not just your office workers). The platform also includes idea tracking and evaluation and a solution for business case development so you can groups of ideas into clear business cases.
Pricing:
To get pricing for HelloIgnite, you'll need to request a demo.
9. Planbox
Planbox is an innovation management platform with features for trend scouting, partner scouting, continuous product mprovement management, challenge-driven idea generation, hackathon and innovation day management, and strategic review sessions.
Pricing:
Get in touch with the sales team for a demo and custom pricing.
10. Typeform
As a survey platform, Typeform can be used for any kind of survey, including surveys intended for internal employees. You can ask employees for ideas they have surrounding team collaboration, company culture, team building, product innovation, customer experience, and so much more. You can create different surveys for different teams or departments.
Pricing:
The Basic plan costs $25 per month and allows for 1 admin user, and the Plus plan costs $50 per month and gives up to 3 admin users.
Idea visualization and sharing tools
This type of idea software can be used to visualize ideas, collaborate on ideas visually, and share ideas with internal and external stakeholders.
11. Miro
Miro is an excellent tool for digital whiteboards, diagramming, and brainstorming. The platform offers tons of different templates, including for mind maps, service blueprints, flowcharts, daily stand-up meetings, event planning, and meeting agendas.
Pricing:
The Team plan costs $8 per user per month, and the Business plan costs $16 per user per month. The Business plan offers unlimited guests so you can share your ideas with anyone.
12. Lucidchart
You can use Lucidchart for all sorts of diagrams, including process visualizations, idea brainstorming, and custom org charts. Lucidchart also allows you to pull in data from a variety of sources and visualize that data in order to make informed decisions across the organization.
Pricing:
Lucidchart's free plan is good for up to 3 diagrams at a time. The Team plan costs $9 per user per month and offers unlimited diagrams as well as commenting and revision history (both essential for working on ideas as a team).
13. Canva
Canva is a popular design tool that can be used for just about anything. From an idea management standpoint, you can rely on Canva for visual brainstorming, mind maps, and presentations. There are tons of document templates and graphic templates, including pie charts and other useful visuals.
Pricing:
The free plan will work for most individuals. The Pro plan costs $119.99 per month and can be used for up to 5 people. You can get in touch with sales for a custom quote for larger teams.
Remote collaboration tools
Project management software is our last idea management category. Once your team has approved ideas, you'll need one of these tools.
You could use a Kanban board from any of these platforms for idea management and project management all in one place. Simply create a column for "backlog" or "ideas" in order to keep track of ideas from multiple collaborators related to each board.
14. Confluence
Confluence by Atlassian is an enterprise-ready platform for both knowledge sharing and collaboration tracking. It offers project documentation templates, planning features, and task management for every department.
Pricing:
The Standard plan costs $5.50 per user per month and the Premium plan costs $10.50 per user per month.
15. Notion
Notion is an easy-to-use project management and knowledge sharing platform that makes it easy to tie internal processes, project documentation, tasks, and project progress all in one place. You can sort projects by department and offer access to individual projects to everyone or just certain teams for the right level of transparency.
Pricing:
The free plan is great for individuals and small companies. The Team plan costs $8 per user per month and offers advanced sharing permissions. On a custom enterprise plan, you'll get SSO and version history.
16. ClickUp
Although the UX is very different, ClickUp offers similar features to Notion. You can create and share docs (for project documentation, SOPs, notes, etc.) and project boards. The tasks in project boards can be toggled between different views, including table view, Kanban, and calendar.
Pricing:
Very small teams can get by on the free plan. The Unlimited plan is $5 per user per month and offers unlimited storage, integrations, and dashboards.
17. Asana
Asana is a popular project management software that can easily be used as an idea management tool. Simply create a project board for ideas, and add different columns to track your ideation process. For example, the Kanban columns might be "New Ideas," "Under Discussion," "Approved Ideas," and "Assigned Ideas." Once an idea is assigned, you can move it to a separate board to track the actual task progress.
Pricing:
Asana's free plan is fine for individuals and small teams. The Premium plan costs $10.99 per user per month and the Business plan costs $24.99 per user per month.
18. Monday.com
Monday.com stands out from others on this list because it not only offers task management with Kanban boards and tables, but Gantt charts as well. Gantt charts are great for strategic planning, resource planning, and roadmap planning. That's because Gantt charts let you visualize when different ideas and projects will be developed over a period of time.
Pricing:
The free plan can be used for up to 5 users, but if you want Timeline and Gantt views, then you'll need the Standard plan, which is $10 per user per month.
19. Trello
Trello is a very simple idea and task management platform that now offers different views for the same projects, including Kanban boards, tables, timelines, calendars, maps, and dashboards. To use it for idea management, create different columns or statuses for your idea management process and then add one new card for every idea. Team members can comment on ideas together and the board administrator can approve them.
Pricing:
The free plan offers up to 10 boards and unlimited ideas per board. The Standard plan offers automations and advanced checklists and costs $5 per user per month.
20. Jira
Jira is the most popular software development platform. Product and engineering teams use it to track bugs, ideas, and backlog tasks and to manage feature releases.
Pricing:
The free plan can be used for up to 10 team members. The Standard plan costs $7.50 per user per month.
Key takeaways
Idea management software is super easy to use. Just set up your idea boards, and make sure your team members and/or customers know where to input all of their ideas. This way, you'll have dozens of great ideas all in one place and you can easily communicate on which ones are being developed, and which aren't.
Looking for a beautiful and simple way to manage ideas? Track, sort, and act on customer ideas with Frill.