Every tool in this category will show you a public board, a roadmap and a changelog, and on a feature table they all look the same. They are not. The differences that matter are structural, and they only show up months later: where feedback is allowed to arrive from, who or what decides the order, how much of it your customers see, what the bill does when the team grows, and how hard it is to leave.
This is a guide to those five questions rather than a ranking. We are not going to tell you which tool is best, because that depends entirely on which of the five you are actually stuck on, and because we sell one of them. Where a competitor is the better answer, this page says so and links to the page that argues it in detail.
The first question is not about features, it is about doors. Feedback comes in through a public board people bookmark, a widget inside your product, an API that pipes it from somewhere else, or a support conversation somebody has to copy across by hand.
Tools take different sides of this. Sleekplan is built widget first: one snippet puts the board, the roadmap, the changelog, surveys and a help centre inside your app. Featurebase spreads wider still, with a support inbox and a knowledge base alongside the feedback board. If most of your feedback is already arriving in support tickets and you want the tool to read them where they land, that is the shape to look at, and it is not the shape of this one.
Upvoted starts from the hosted board and works outwards. The widget carries that board into your app in three shapes (the whole board, the changelog, or a plain feedback form), and it can be opened from a button, a link or a menu item you already have rather than a floating bubble in the corner. Requests also arrive through the REST API, on both plans, and leave again through Zapier, signed webhooks or an MCP server on Max. What no part of it does is go and read your helpdesk for you.
Two things then happen on the way in. New requests can be held for approval before they appear at all, and on Max they can be tagged automatically from the tags the board already uses. Tagging stays off until you switch it on, and it is never allowed to invent a tag of its own. What came in over the week is summarised for the board’s admins in a digest, so a quiet board does not need checking daily.
Choose on this if: your feedback is mostly trapped in support conversations today, or the board has to live inside your product rather than beside it.
Every tool counts votes. What differs is what else is allowed into the decision, and that is the question worth arguing about, because it decides what you can defend in a roadmap meeting.
UserVoice weights by revenue and segments the customers behind the request, which is what you want when the hard part is arbitrating between accounts of very different sizes. Productboard scores insights against company objectives, which is what you want when the hard part is agreeing a sequence across several teams. UserJot leads with a model doing the work in the middle: duplicates spotted as people post, tags applied, release posts drafted.
Upvoted sits between the bare vote count and the framework. A collaborator’s vote is tallied apart from the public’s, so enthusiasm inside the building never quietly passes itself off as demand outside it. On Max an admin scores a request for impact and effort from 1 to 5, and the priority that comes out is votes × impact ÷ effort, plotted on a four-quadrant matrix: quick wins, big bets, fill-ins and money pits. Those scores are the team’s. The public board, the API, the widget and Zapier never show them. What Upvoted does not do is know what an account pays you, or roll several frameworks up into a plan.
The machinery around the score matters as much as the score. Duplicates are found by searching the whole board and merged by a person, which carries the votes across and counts anyone who voted on both only once. Requests that have sat untouched too long, and statuses that have grown too crowded, say so before a quarter goes by. And the argument itself happens in internal notes and @mentions on the request, where the next person to open it can still read why the decision went the way it did.
Choose on this if: you can already hear your customers clearly and the difficulty is justifying the order. If nothing collects the requests in one place yet, a scoring framework has nothing to score, and this is the wrong question to shop on.
A feedback tool is half an internal tool and half a public page, and tools disagree about which half is the product. Productboard roadmaps are mostly read inside the company and shared outward selectively. Nolt and Frill put the board and the announcements in front of users, and Canny has been doing both for longer than most.
Upvoted is public by default. The roadmap is a page anyone can open, the statuses on it are the ones your team already uses, and the release note that closes a request emails exactly the people who voted for it. A roadmap item can carry an estimate as a month or a quarter, shown to the public only if you say so, and readers can react to one with an emoji rather than having to write a comment.
How much of it looks like you is a plan question. On Max the board wears your logo, your favicon and your theme with no Upvoted branding, both the board and the widget take your own CSS through documented class hooks and theme variables, and your own users can be signed in with a JWT. Boards still live at upvoted.io/boards/your-board: there is no custom domain yet, and UserJot has one today.
Some companies cannot publish a roadmap at all, for perfectly good reasons. If yours is one of them, an internally-focused tool is not a compromise, it is the correct answer.
Choose on this if: the roadmap is meant to answer customers rather than stakeholders, or if it is definitely not meant to be seen by customers.
Pricing models are more revealing than prices, and unlike prices they stay true long enough to be worth writing down. There are five shapes in this category, and each one quietly discourages something.
Upvoted prices the account. Pro is one board and two seats; Max lifts both limits and adds the integrations, priority scoring, private boards, custom CSS and the rest. Neither plan caps requests, votes or public users. The trial is Max for seven days with no credit card, so what you evaluate is the whole product rather than a tier of it. UserJot is worth naming here too: it puts no limit on how many people you add on any plan, which Upvoted only matches on Max.
Choose on this if: you know roughly how many boards, seats and readers you will want in a year. Work that number out first, then read the pricing pages, in that order.
The unglamorous question, and the one people only ask twice: once when they are leaving the tool they are on, and once when they are leaving yours.
Upvoted reads a Canny post export and a CSV directly (titles, descriptions, statuses, tags and vote counts), and takes any other tool’s export once its columns are renamed to match; send us the file and we will map it. One limitation worth stating plainly, because it is in the exports rather than in the importer: a vote count is a number, not the people behind it, so imported voters cannot be notified when a request ships, and nobody is invented to fill the gap. Anyone who votes after the move is a real contributor again.
Going the other way, Max has CSV export, board stats, signed webhooks and an MCP server, and the REST API is on both plans. Before you sign anywhere, find the export button and check what it contains. Most of these tools have one; what differs is whether it hands back the voters or only the votes.
Choose on this if: you are already carrying a board you spent months accumulating, and the ranking is the thing you cannot afford to reset.
Each of these goes through the same questions against one tool, including the cases where that tool is the better answer:
Five questions in, here is the honest summary of where this tool runs out. None of these is on a roadmap we can promise you:
If two or more of those are requirements rather than nice-to-haves, one of the comparisons above will point you somewhere better, and that is a perfectly good outcome for this page.
If you have read this far, you probably know which of the five questions is yours. Take it to the tool that answers it best: the full list of comparisons is the place to start, and what Upvoted does is the place to check whether this one clears your bar.
If it does, start a free trial. It is Max for seven days, no credit card, so you can test the parts you would be paying for before deciding anything.
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