We’ve handpicked a list of the best product management tools in 2024 to help you boost efficiency, easily make data-driven product decisions, and ultimately build the right thing for your market.
As a product manager, it's your job to determine what building the “right thing” for your market looks like. In practice, this means that a large part of an entire company’s success or failure can depend on you. (Talk about pressure, right?)
Dedicated product management software can make life easier for PMs by improving efficiency, accessibility, and team coordination. Recently, MRI Software was able to make its product launches 50% more efficient after using software that connects product, marketing, and sales.
But the best product management software does more than that – it ties product management to your revenue opportunities.
Using AI and automation, these product management tools help you easily make and share the right product decisions for your team based on actual data – so you’re always building features and products that people truly want and will pay for.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, here are our 12 hand-picked options for the ultimate product management tech stack in 2024. We’ll also show you 4 product management tools that you can start using today for free.
- 12 Best Product Marketing Software
- Bonus: 3 Best free product management tools
- Product management software evaluation checklist
- Frequently asked questions about product management software
1. Best for connecting product management to marketing and sales: Ignition
It can be easy for product managers to get overly focused on the engineering of their products – historically, that’s been the focus. Successful product management today, however, deals with much more.
Product managers have to understand and explain the why and when behind every product decision they make.
This involves hours of research, lengthy explanations to stakeholders, and complicated handoffs to marketing and sales teams. But a lot can go wrong with this process.
- Research takes too much time, and effort since there’s just too much data to keep track of manually.
- It can be difficult to build business cases for why certain features need to be prioritized over others – and stakeholders may ask for them
- Marketing and sales teams need to be continuously kept in the loop – so they can effectively market and sell your product
Ultimately, product managers can get blamed for these issues (even though they’re notoriously burnt out by loads of tasks and expectations).
But the problem isn’t with PMs. It’s with the fact, that, product management processes aren’t integrated with marketing and sales in most companies.
That’s where Ignition comes in.
You probably already use many (expensive) product management tools — some for research, others for the build process, and even more for launch. But the more tools you use, the misalignment between product, marketing, and sales teams only widens.
Ignition fixes this by bringing your customer research, product development, and launches under one roof – so you can stop bouncing between a bunch of tools and losing things between the cracks.
Then, Ignition’s AI automates the hard stuff by
- Automatically creating sales battlecards
- Instantly identifying deal-blocking feature gaps for your idea backlog
- Enabling sales and marketing teams with upselling opportunities
- Prioritizing roadmap items based on potential revenue impact, user needs, and internal value
- Sending automatic internal updates to team members
- Instantly generating external release comms
And much, much more.
In fact we’ve estimated that Ignition can help you automate about 50% of your product launch checklist.
Here’s a demo to show you how it works:
The best part? You can get started automating and managing your product management tasks today by signing up for a free Ignition account. While a lot of Ignition users like to start out by trying the Sales Battlecard Generator, I’d recommend integrating your CRM and voice of customer tools – our AI works best when it’s powered by your unique company and customer data.
Pros
- Built by product management experts to connect product management to marketing and sales teams – so that your company can make revenue-aligned product decisions from the start
- Much less expensive than using a bunch of tools at once (compared to competitive intel tools alone, Ignition is about 1/10th of the cost).
- AI-powered analysis and automated workflows reduce stress, boost efficiency, and give you a competitive advantage.
Cons
- It comes with a lot of features to learn (Pro tip: Start with one use-case at a time)
- Getting your company to adopt Ignition fully comes with change
- It may not be the best fit for small teams that can get by with project management tools
Features
Product Strategy and Go-To-Market
AI Customer Research - To understand customer feedback at scale
- Gather all of your customer data in one place by integrating with conversational intel tools, CRM data, and support ticketing systems (Gong, Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce)
- Use AI to instantly summarize and analyze large amounts of customer feedback into consistent themes and product insights.
- Translate insights into actionable product and marketing ideas that are aligned with revenue opportunities, and see how an idea may affect your current deal.
Collaboration
- Share roadmaps across teams or generate a public URL to stay aligned with all key stakeholders.
- Automatically enable your sales team with targeted notifications identifying accounts to upsell, when features ship, and more.
- Use roadmaps to generate personalized GTM plans in seconds with embedded recommendations.
- Consolidate your entire launch process using Ignition’s tried and tested templates, or create your very own
- Tailor your launch plan using AI, adjusting dynamically based on launch tier, budget, GTM motion, and more.
- On-brand AI copywriting tools trained by your own customer data, messaging, brand, and personas for your marketing team
Product Discovery and Prioritization
AI Roadmapping - To align roadmap prioritization and revenue opportunity
- Automatically identify and categorize feature gaps blocking deals in your CRM, add them to your idea backlog, and create a roadmap aligned with CRM opportunities & revenue (plus automate release notes for each new feature)
- Use AI user insight analysis to instantly surface critical themes from live customer conversations, common feature requests, areas for improvement, and overall sentiment analysis.
- Easily collect and prioritize new feature ideas (based on the KPIs that matter most to you) on a public feature voting board.
- Instantly create and share sales battlecards that automatically push to your CRM for easy access
- Automatically gather and analyze crucial competitive data in one place
- Assess competitive deal performance with Win/Loss data,
Pricing
Ignition offers 3 pricing tiers:
- Freemium
- Liftoff - $79/editor/month (billed annually)
- Moonshot - Book a demo for enterprise-grade customization
Customer reviews
Here’s what Jean-Michel Van, a product leader with 15 years of product management experience, has to say about using Ignition:
“Unlike other product apps jumping into the scene, Ignition is filling a real gap. Most PM tools I’ve used usually start with the roadmap, user research, or development sides, but Ignition comes from the market-facing side, which is quite interesting. With this tool, they're all about streamlining the go-to-market/launch process for new products and features. Wearing my PM hat, I'd call it an 'Outside-In' strategy…
…I'm thinking Ignition might be onto something with the trend of having Product Managers wearing the Product Marketing hat, it’s definitely the case in my team.
And I can’t stop thinking about Airbnb CEO Chesky, who recently “got rid of “the traditional product function claiming that PMs must know how to sell their products too – who knows where the PM world is heading, but it's clearly making waves.”
2. Best for product development: Jira
Jira is well-known as a project management and issue tracking tool. But it also works as a popular solution for product development in general.
Jira allows product managers to manage complex product development cycles using:
- Customizable workflows for collaboration across multiple teams
- Project planning capabilities like sprints, milestones, product roadmaps, and backlog tracking
- Scrum boards with custom columns and statuses
- Bug and issues tracking and prioritization
And more.
There are also loads of integrations available, including with Ignition. Ignition’s integration with Jira lets you import and track your engineering team's development progress or export roadmap items to your dev tracker for easier collaboration. An example of a use case would be to pull product roadmaps from Jira and let anyone query your strategic documentation via Slack.
Jira does have certain issues, however—especially when it comes to roadmaps. While Jira’s roadmapping tools can provide overviews for engineering teams at different stages of product development cycles, as standalone software, Jira clearly lacks focus on GTM.
Ultimately, this results in the marketability and sales of a product not being given as much priority as its development. This is because, as standalone software, Jira is built around engineering and the getting-things-done part of product development instead of ongoing GTM strategy.
By adding more software from Atlassian’s suite, such as Jira Align and Jira Product Discovery, PMs can try to partially solve the problem. But even these tools aren’t really focused on data-driven GTM processes — they’re focused on idea management. These ideas are similar to “issues” in Jira and involve mostly manual processes that don’t do a great job of guiding best practices.
Jira Product Discovery may be an option for PMs looking to stay solely within the Atlassian suite. However, its lack of robust AI intelligence, automation, and connections between product marketing and product management may not make it enough as a comprehensive program for the entire product lifecycle.
Pros
- Powerful issue and bug-tracking features
- Designed for agile and scrum management
- It can be integrated with a wide variety of other tools
Cons
- More of a project management tool than a product management tool (even with Jira Product Discovery added on)
- Roadmaps are based on templates and aren’t aligned with revenue and GTM
- Slow loading times
Features
- Issue Management and Bug Tracking – Jira was originally developed as a bug tracker for the software development process. Dedicated templates exist to track, record, and fix bugs and issues that arise during product development.
- Agile Development – Scrum, Kanban, and bug-tracking boards help teams manage sprints and fix issues.
- Roadmaps – High-level visual summaries of a project’s goals, timelines, and priorities are available.
- Reporting – Reports can be created at every stage of development, from planning to tracking issues to final delivery.
- Integrations – More than 3000 integrations are available with other applications
Pricing
Jira offers 4 pricing plans (for teams with 10 users – the pricing changes according to team size).
- Free – for up to 10 users
- Standard – $8.15 per user/month
- Premium – $16 per user/month
- Enterprise – contact sales for pricing
Customer reviews
Here’s what Faz Yasin, Head of Product at Brickflow, has to say about using Jira:
“Pros:
Jira rocks for Brickflow because it keeps things organized with boards and to-do lists but also makes working together a breeze. Everyone can see how projects are coming along and stay on the same page, which is pretty sweet.
Cons:
Jira can be a double-edged sword. While it excels at organization with boards and to-do lists, setting things up can feel like navigating a labyrinth. Collaboration features are limited, so forget chatting with teammates directly within the app. For non-technical teams, Jira's robust features might be overkill compared to simpler tools.
Reasons for Choosing Jira:
Jira worked better with tech teams and we are a tech company primarily.”
3. Best for project management: Monday
Monday.com is a cloud-based platform that started as a work collaboration tool in 2014 and has since expanded to include multiple workflows. While it wasn’t built specifically for product management, it can work well for product teams that need an easy, intuitive, and flexible solution.
Monday dev, in particular, provides product management tools to support agile methodologies and can be considered a Jira alternative. The interface is intuitive and user-friendly and includes the capability to create detailed, interactive roadmaps.
The drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to organize and prioritize tasks, set milestones, and track progress.
The platform excels at project management visualization with its Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and Burndown chart views. It also offers real-time collaboration and communication features, which team members can use to comment on tasks, share updates, and attach relevant files directly within the interface. There are loads of integrations available – including one for Git, and there’s even a simple, no-code automation builder.
Overall, Monday dev is a great way for leaner product teams looking for a simple project management tool. But it possibly lacks the capabilities needed to tackle the other parts of product management:
- There’s a focus on getting things done – but not too many tools to inform strategy and connect it with execution.
- Like Jira, Monday’s roadmap items aren’t automatically contextualized and prioritized using a company’s individual data – like competitive intel, customer feedback, and CRM deal data.
- The AI-driven automation and templates are too simple and don’t provide deep product insights.
Pros
- Easy to use, customizable boards for different use cases
- Free plan option
- Gantt chart, Burndown chart, and Kanban board viewing options
Cons
- AI and automations are simplistic and can be difficult to maintain
- The free version is limited
- Lengthy onboarding due to too many customization options available
Features
- Sprint management, including sprint planning, daily standups, and sprint review
- Customizable templates for multiple use cases
- Burndown chart to detect potential problems or bottlenecks
- Git Integration to track progress directly from your Git depository
- Knowledge management capabilities using Docs
- Various big-picture overviews, including timelines, calendars, Kanban boards, and files
- Multiple integrations with other tools such as Google Suite, Dropbox, Zapier, and Slack
- Simple automation of repetitive tasks such as notifications and updates for team members.
Pricing
Monday offers 5 pricing plans:
- Free (for up to 2 seats)
- Basic - $9/seat/month (billed annually)
- Standard - $12/seat/month (billed annually)
- Pro - $19/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise - Contact sales for pricing
Monday dev also offers 5 pricing plans:
- Free (for up to 2 seats)
- Basic - $9/seat/month (billed annually)
- Standard - $12/seat/month (billed annually)
- Pro - $20/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise - Contact sales for pricing
Customer reviews
Here’s what Austin S., an employee at a Mid-Market company, has to say about using Monday dev:
“What do you like best about monday dev?
It's really easy to get your ideas organized on monday and divy up work among teams. The GitHub integration also makes it super easy to integrate with a common developer workflow tool!
What do you dislike about monday dev?
The only thing from my perspective that could be improved is possibly adding a "priority" lock - often times, we use order to denote the priority of tasks to be completed, but sometimes people will move them around, and it messes up the intended order of priority. The other thing that would be nice is having better linking for interdependent tasks, we often break our work up on a quarterly schedule with a lot of interdependent tasks so it would be nice to be able to link them together and then have a tool to monitor critical path, etc.
What problems is monday dev solving and how is that benefiting you?
We were originally using GitHub projects and we decided to swap over to Monday because it's more transparent with what is on our roadmap, being able to order things into seperate groups on the same board for same teams or different types of work and just in general what we're planning on working on instead of only viewing things that are dev ready. We really appreciate the effort on Monday's side for their GitHub integration work!”
4. Best for user research: Dovetail
If you’re looking for a dedicated AI-driven user research tool that turns customer feedback into actionable insights, Dovetail is a great option to consider.
The platform lets you import data from a wide range of other software, including Zoom interviews and recordings, feedback and surveys from SurveyMonkey, CSV files, documents, and usability tests. Dovetail centralizes all of your customer data in one searchable location and then uses AI to highlight themes and cluster large amounts of customer data.
There are also loads of integrations available with communication platforms like Slack, knowledge management platforms like Confluence and Notion, project management software like Jira and Trello, and Zapier. This allows PMs to easily share their insights in the systems that their stakeholders already use.
As a hub used to incorporate more customer-centricity into products, Dovetail does its job well. The only area where PMs may face a challenge is balancing customer-centricity with revenue goals. Dovetail allows you to add KPI tags to insights to prioritize user feedback that aligns with your company’s targets, but this is still a very manual process.
In order to prioritize customer feedback AND revenue, PMs will have to connect Dovetail to other systems, such as competitive research, GTM strategy, and CRM deal data. While this may work for some PMs, others may find that adding additional software to their tech stack can be too expensive or lead to things slipping between the cracks.
Pros
- Uses AI to speed up the process of finding themes within customer feedback
- Connects with loads of other general-purpose software to easily share insights with stakeholders
- Centralizes customer data in one place of truth
Cons
- It can be difficult to balance customer-centricity with revenue goals
- Updating roadmaps with all types of insights is still a manual process on the platform
- Spreading other research (such as competitive intel) over multiple platforms can lead to more opportunities for siloed data
Features
- AI-driven summaries, highlights, and theme identification from customer feedback
- Integrate with multiple sources for customer data – including videos, support tickets, and documents.
- Transcribe conversations in 41 languages
- For paid users:some text
- Search by meaning across data
- Visualize highlights with different chart types
- Segment highlights by fields
- Knowledge management through folders
Pricing
Along with its limited free plan (with only one project and channel available), Dovetail offers two pricing plans:
- Professional – $29 per user/month (billed yearly)
- Enterprise – contact sales for pricing
Customer reviews
Here’s what Kai F., a product designer, has to say about using Dovetail:
“Overall:
Improved efficiency with our user research and customer interview projects
Pros:
It's really easy to import raw user research notes from customer interviews and contextual inquiries. Dovetail lets you synthesis your research and identify themes by highlighting and creating tags. You can then visualise your tags in charts or in the board view. A neat feature is the automatic sentiment analysis that can identify whether comments from your notes are positive or negative. We use this feature to categorise customer feedback we collect our products. Before Dovetail we would use Microsoft Excel to identify themes but this was cumbersome and was hard to share with the team.
Cons:
Dovetail could do a better job at storing insights and being a shared knowledgebase or library for research in our team. We've passed on this feedback and the Dovetail tell seem to understand this desire and shared that they have ambitions to move into this area in the future. At the moment Dovetail seems focused on building the best features for research analysis and synthesis.”
5. Best for roadmapping: Aha!
For PMs looking to improve customer-centricity in their roadmaps, Aha! is a great option.
The platform offers a suite of tools for product managers to:
- Create roadmaps (Aha! Roadmaps)
- Capture customer feedback (Aha! Ideas)
- Brainstorm (Aha! Whiteboards)
- Create a knowledge base (Aha! Knowledge),
- Connect product and engineering teams (Aha! Develop)
Aha! Roadmaps is the product with the most potential for product managers with its commitment to strategic product planning. One feature that stands out is the capability to transform customer feedback into a tangible product roadmap.
Aha’s roadmapping tools are highly visual, resulting in beautiful, detailed plans that can be shown to stakeholders. The platform also offers options to develop strategy, prioritize features, and plan releases.
However, while customer feedback forms an important component of Aha!’s roadmaps, there’s a lack of focus on GTM strategy within Aha. Along with customer feedback, PMs also have to keep track of competitive intel, KPIs, launch planning and ultimately connect their product development with product marketing and sales. While Aha excels in customer-centricity, PMs will have to connect to other tools and manually change roadmaps based on these GTM factors.
Pros
- Beautiful, visual roadmap templates
- Customer feedback can be incorporated easily into roadmaps
- Strategy-first approach to roadmapping
Cons
- Roadmaps don’t focus on the marketability of products
- Prioritization of customer feedback doesn’t happen with revenue goals in mind
- Roadmaps have to be manually updated in case of changes to competitive data, KPI prioritization, and other GTM factors.
Features
- Roadmapping tools allow for detailed, strategic, visual plans
- Idea management to collect ideas, organize feedback, and prioritize what to build next using customer feedback
- Strategy development section to help teams define their product vision and strategic goals
- A features prioritization scoring system to decide what to build first based on customer requests
- Release planning features to provide detailed timelines for product releases
- Task management tools to link daily tasks to larger plans
- Analytics and reporting tools to turn product data into actionable insights
- Integration with dev tools like JIRA and Azure DevOps
Pricing
Aha! Roadmaps offers a free trial and 3 different pricing models:
- Premium – $59/user/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – $99/user/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise+ – $149/user/month (billed annually)
Customer reviews
Here’s what Jill S., who works at a small business, has to say about using Aha!:
“What do you like best about Aha!?
Overall, Aha! provides a comprehensive suite of tools and is a powerful ally for product managers looking to deliver streamlined and well-coordinated product strategies. As a configurable platform, Aha! provides a robust environment where users can tailor features to match their specific workflow requirements. Additionally, they have a top-notch customer support team who responds in a timely manner.
What do you dislike about Aha!?
Its potential for impact within organizations could be significantly amplified if the platform could offer more flexibility in alignment across workspaces. Although, the level of configuration, while beneficial, introduces a notable complexity in the initial setup phase, which can be time-consuming. Users may find the process somewhat daunting as they attempt to configure the software to align perfectly with their operational dynamics.
What problems is Aha! solving and how is that benefiting you?
As a prior user, Aha!enhanced our team's efficiency and collaboration by providing a unified operational picture and customizable views. This comprehensive platform allowed every team member, regardless of their role, to access a centralized source of truth, ensuring that everyone was aligned on goals, timelines, and responsibilities.”
6. Best for user surveys: Qualtrics
Qualtrics XM is a powerful solution for product managers looking to get answers to their most important customer and product questions.
As an online survey software, it helps PMs conduct quantitative and qualitative market research easily using AI-powered analytics. Surveys can range from quick message testing to deep foundational market studies. Qualtrics’ AI can also be used to transcribe video feedback and interviews and analyze them for sentiments, trends, and insights. Unmoderated user testing can help PMs gather real-time insights remotely from diverse audiences.
As a wider experience management software, Qualtrics has three solutions available: customer experience, employee experience, and strategy and research. The customer experience suite can be used to gather more online reviews, while the strategy and research suite can be used by PMs to:
- Gather product feedback
- Prioritize product features and
- Build roadmaps
The voice of the user takes precedence in Qualtrics – and there are some great capabilities for PMs focused on creating better UX experiences. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that feature prioritization in Qualtrics focuses solely on customer feedback. There’s a lack of prioritization in the platform on marketability and the effects of product decisions on revenue. So, for PMs who are more concerned about aligning their development with revenue goals, Quatrics may not be enough as a standalone software.
Pros
- Gives PMs the opportunity to conduct remote user tests over diverse audiences
- AI-driven analysis helps to reduce time spent summarizing and parsing customer feedback.
- Customer experience software can be used to gather more reviews
Cons
- Lack of focus on GTM processes and revenue impacts of product decisions
- More of a user experience tool than an overall product management tool
- Some users have faced difficulties with collaboration within the platform
Features
- Use a drag-and-drop interface and pre-built templates to customize the look and feel of your survey.
- Manage your survey participants by sending out invites, tracking responses, and segmenting participants.
- Use AI to analyze, summarize, and gain insights from survey responses and customer feedback, real-time reporting, cross-tabulation, and text analysis.
- Integrations with CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and product analytics tools are available.
Pricing
Qualtrics has free and paid plans available. You’ll need to request a demo to learn more about pricing.
Customer reviews
Here’s what Corinne Gibson, Product Marketing Specialist at The ROHO Group, has to say about using Qualtrics:
“Pros
- Qualtrics is great for designing complex surveys. For example, if you want your customers to register for a survey, you can automatically send them the survey link after they register or you can set an exact number of days to wait before sending the survey.
- Qualtrics is ideal for individuals who want to manage their consumer insights data in one location. You can manage the survey from start to finish on the same platform.
- The data analysis features in Qualtrics is incomparable to other software programs on the market. You can export your data, but you rarely need to because the reporting feature gives you 90% of what you need with the click of a few buttons.
Cons
- Qualtrics has been working to add more programs to its product line, but I am not sure yet how helpful the new lines are. It seems like they are trying to make it to where the entire company will use different platforms based on the type of feedback they need.
- The Qualtrics insights summit is a really great way to network with all different types of researchers. I just wish they would focus more on research and less on having big-name celebrities speak.
- Qualtrics support could use some work. It can be difficult to find help in the community. I almost always have to reach out to someone on the online chat or via email to get help.”
7. Best for knowledge management: Confluence
Another software powered by Atlassian, Confluence, is a well-known knowledge management platform that provides many features for project collaboration.
As a product management tool, Confluence can help you keep track of everything related to your products all in one place by creating a knowledge base that can be used across multiple teams.
Confluence also has certain features that may be specifically useful to PMs:
- There are hundreds of product management-specific templates, such as a product requirements checklist, project kickoff document, and daily standup template.
- Users have the ability to easily embed Jira roadmaps on Confluence pages.
- Confluence whiteboards can be used to brainstorm and can easily be turned into Jira issues.
- Automated tools can help you create decision reports that summarize decisions across various pages in your workspace.
- Notifications can be used to notify leadership and stakeholders of progress.
Confluence does a great job of creating a single point of truth for products, which can help eliminate common product management issues such as misalignment between teams and siloed data.
But a point to keep in mind is that as a generalized knowledge management tool, Confluence wasn’t built particularly with product management in mind. Some of the product management templates may be enough for leaner teams. However, setting up the workspace and manually continuously updating data like competitive research and customer feedback may become a point of contention for busier PMs. In this case, PMs will possibly have to integrate Confluence with their other research tools – though this may be an expensive option.
Pros
- As one place of truth for products, the platform reduces inefficiencies and misalignment between teams arising from siloed data.
- Automation can help summarize decision-making and present it to stakeholders.
- Confluence easily integrates with Jira.
Cons
- The product management templates may be too simplistic for those looking to make more data-driven decisions.
- PMs have to manually update large amounts of customer feedback, competitive data, and other research.
- Confluence doesn’t automate any of the strategic aspects of product management and isn’t focused on GTM.
Features
- Use hundreds of product management templates to create and track product roadmaps.
- Organize your research using structure page trees and labeling.
- Use notifications to keep stakeholders aware of progress and launch dates.
- Automated reminders help you keep track of open tasks on your product launch checklist.
- Easily integrate with Jira to create issues directly from Confluence or embed Jira roadmaps on Confluence pages.
- Collaborate on documents through in-line comments, @ mentions, and likes
Pricing
Confluence is free for up to 10 users (with 2 GB file storage) and offers 3 pricing plans for paid users:
- Standard – $4.89/user/month
- Premium – $8.97/user/month
- Enterprise – Contact sales for pricing
Customer reviews
Here’s what Naaz V., who works at a mid-market company, had to say about using Confluence:
“What do you like best about Confluence?
Useful product management software- as a new onboarding employee I used confluence to navigate my way around the company policies and departmental training. Its easy for large documentation to be stored and organized due to its UI/UX design. Overall, my experience has been very positive with confluence
What do you dislike about Confluence?
Importing files into Confluence is quite a frustrating process. While I know its for security reasons- its a pain to only upload documents in pdf format rather than word. It adds an additional step to the process and increases anxiety of user
What problems is Confluence solving and how is that benefiting you?
Helps me navigate and find my way through piles and piles of documents- thus saving my time”
8. Best for analytics: Amplitude
While leaner teams might get away with Google Analytics, there’s a case to be made for dedicated product analytics platforms. These specialized tools can help you gain a deeper perspective into user insights, automatically create reports, and also protect your data privacy.
For PMs looking for a dedicated, scalable product analytics tool, Amplitude is a great option. The platform combines web and product analytics, allows you to use data points that Google Analytics 4 has rendered redundant on its platform, and has more secure data privacy options.
Amplitude can be particularly useful to product teams for its focus on user behavior and can help you answer questions like:
- What feature on my mobile app is most popular?
- What percentage of users are doing X activity within their first 7 days of downloading the app?
- What steps are free trial users taking before becoming paying customers?
- What sort of traits does this type of customer have?
Amplitude works primarily on the “server” side and focuses more deeply on individual users. Google Analytics, on the other hand works more on the “front-end” to analyze higher-level stats. Product teams may find Amplitude more useful in studying the customer experience and improving retention.
Amplitude is currently attempting to bridge the gap between its product analytics and marketing analytics by adding the most requested marketing features to its product. However, for PMs looking for a more marketing-focused analytics tool, Amplitude may not be the best fit in its current iteration.
Pros
- Deeper insights into customer behavior and product usage
- Robust 3rd party integrations with business applications, TikTok, and Facebook
- Presents advanced reports and charts that can be easily shared with stakeholders
Cons
- It isn’t as intuitive as other analytics platforms and has a long learning curve.
- Transferring data in and out of the platform is a difficult process.
- Setting up events to track can take a lot of time due to a high level of customizability.
Features
- Customer journey visualization – Analyze user journeys at different levels and look at different paths customers take.
- Dynamic audience segmentation – Group customers and make predictions about which segments to target next.
- Event segmentation – Analyze user behavior based on specific events and examine the most commonly performed events.
- Retention analysis – Understand the frequency of users returning to your product after completing a specific action.
- Behavioral cohort analysis – Segment users based on specific behaviors and analyze patterns and trends in their behavior.
Pricing
Amplitude has a free plan as well as two pricing plans for paid users:
- Plus – From $49/month
- Growth – Contact sales for pricing
Customer reviews
Here’s what Adam B., a product manager at a mid-market company, has to say about using Amplitude:
“What do you like best about Amplitude Analytics?
Measure anything. I work for a medium-sized org with a broad range of intersecting products and teams. I like that any team can implement whatever they need to answer their question, and that anyone in the company can use that data to glean insights.
What do you dislike about Amplitude Analytics?
It can be hard to get started with Amplitude. It's very flexible,but that also means there aren't many standardization controls across events and projects. It would be nice if there were some stock templates to start from that could be customized once you know what you want.
We have apps on multiple platforms that have similar, but not identical, interfaces. The "same" event in multiple projects must be named exactly the same (case sensitive), or else it won't collate correctly in cross-project views.
What problems is Amplitude Analytics solving and how is that benefiting you?
It helps us understand the most used tools in our product.”
9. Best for data collection: PostHog
Another analytics tool built specifically for developers, PostHog is a good option for collecting data from a wide range of sources.
Post Hog can be used to analyze and optimize your product, study the behavior of your users, visualize data, test and manage the deployment of new features, and much more. Ultimately, PostHog helps developers use these tools to analyze, track, observe, and deploy new features, which will lead to more user adoption.
One issue that PMs might run into with PostHog is misalignment between development and product marketing functions. While PostHog can help developers create new features that users will more readily adopt, it doesn’t focus on how building these new features may affect revenue or other KPIs. For PMs looking to better align product development with revenue, PostHog may not be the best fit as a standalone platform.
Pros
- Since PostHog is open source, it’s highly customizable depending on organizational needs.
- Extensive feature set, including event tracking, session recording, heatmaps, user cohorts, and feature flags
- There is an active community that helps with ongoing support, updates, and the development of new features.
Cons
- New users may get overwhelmed by the sheer number of features and customization options available.
- Running PostHog as a self-hosted solution may be too resource-intensive for certain organizations
- There’s a steep learning curve for the more advanced features
Features
- Product analytics – Collect data regarding funnels, user paths, product lifecycle, SQL, stickiness, retention, and trends
- Session replay – Record and playback user sessions to identify usability issues
- Feature flags – Roll out new features to subsets of your users for controlled testing and deployment.
- A/B testing – Test different product variations
- Surveys – Collect in-app feedback
Pricing
PostHog offers usage-based pricing for all of its features. Their monthly free tier allows:
- 1,000,000 free events for Product Analytics
- 5,000 free Session replay recordings
- 1,000,000 free requests for Feature flags
- 250 free Survey responses
The charges for additional usage of these features are:
- $0.00005/event for Product analytics
- $0.04/recording for Session replay
- $0.0001/request for Feature flags
- $0.2/response for Surveys
Customer reviews
Here’s what Tristan M., the founder and CEO of a small business, has to say about using PostHog:
“What do you like best about PostHog?
My favorite thing about Posthog is how simple it is to get everything set up on the platform. Some other competitors made it difficult to set up for my Webflow website, but not Posthog!
I've been using session replays and tracking my session time grow over time after making little tweaks on my website, and now the average session duration is close to 4 minutes! Super excited about that, check it out at https://www.invisretail.com
What do you dislike about PostHog?
I wish Posthog would make surveys easier to customize. Watching session replays, I've been noticing that the first interaction users do is often close the survey in the corner. If I could implement a delay so it doesn't appear until halfway down the page, (in an easy to do way like how easy it is to set up your other features) that would be ideal and allow me to get further insights about what my customers like, in open response format.
What problems is PostHog solving and how is that benefiting you?
PostHog is solving the problem of not being able to understand why visitors on your page aren't converting or requesting to learn more. Noticing bottlenecks or bugs on the website has been a huge benefit I've seen using PostHog”
10. Best for A/B testing and experimenting: Optimizely
Optimizely is a digital experience platform that helps product teams improve their visitors’ experience using tools to experiment, optimize, and rollout new features.
The platform is a great tool for product managers to experiment with different versions of their products to ensure that their users receive the most value.
Optimizely also easily integrates with other analytics apps like Amplitude so that product teams can easily track the results of their feature testing in the systems that they’re already using.
Pros
- Testing is easy to set up for new users.
- The platform allows for multiple types of A/B and multivariate testing.
- Little coding knowledge is required to get started.
Cons
- There have been cases where users have faced a lack of customer support and bugs on the platform.
- The full range of features may be overwhelming for new users.
- Coding knowledge is required for advanced A/B testing.
Features
- A/B Testing – Compare two versions of a page or app screen to figure out which performs better
- Feature Testing – Use feature variables and assign metrics to features such as click-through rates, purchases, and revenue
- Feature Flags/Rollout – Build conditional feature branches to roll out certain features to predetermined segments of users
- Multi-Armed Bandit – Allocation traffic to variations that are performing well and less traffic to variations that are underperforming.
Pricing
Optimizely offers customized pricing for its different features. You’ll have to contact sales for more details.
Customer reviews
Here’s what Dhruvin Vora, a Product Manager at Estee Lauder, has to say about using Optimizely:
“Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Optimizely Web Experimentation is integral to our organization, enabling A/B experiments for user interaction personalization. With features like A/B testing, multivariate testing, and UX/UI testing, we can quickly identify the most effective website elements. It helps us with data-driven decision making, improving user experience, conversion rate optimization and improving our product recommendations algorithms to drive user value and business metrics
Pros
- Ease of experiment setup and tracking
- Metrics and Monitoring with in-depth event tracking
- Performance Optimization
Cons
- Integration with Third-Party Tools: Braze, Fullstory
- Predictive analytics: Provide an estimate of impact based on historical experiment data
- Experiment Management: experiment scheduling and prioritisation”
11. Best for design visualization: Figma
Product managers need to visualize design for multiple reasons – from product design to data visualization to presenting reports and roadmaps. For design visualization, Figma, an industry leader and household name, can definitely come in handy.
Product managers can use Figma to communicate their product vision and milestones visually, source ideas and collaborate in FigJam, create wireframes and prototypes, and gather contextual feedback from stakeholders. As more than a design tool, Figma can help product managers, product teams, and any other collaborators easily see how customers will experience products before launching.
Pros
- High-fidelity wireframes created in Figma can help with buy-in.
- Collaboration tools can help get specific feedback from stakeholders.
- Figma integrates easily with tools like Asana, JIRA, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.
Cons
- There is a steep learning curve for non-designers.
- Pricing plans may be too expensive for leaner teams.
- The roadmap templates may be too simplistic for strategy-driven PMs
Features
- AI-generated templates for product management-specific designs such as product reviews, retros, and roadmap brainstorms.
- Audio chat and commenting features can help team members collaboratively edit designs and get contextual feedback.
- Integrations with popular communication and product management tools are available.
Pricing
Along with Figma’s limited free version, they offer three pricing plans:
- Professional Team: $15/full seat/month (billed annually)
- Organization: $45/full seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $75/full seat/month (billed annually)
Customer reviews
Here’s what Naufil S., a product designer at a small business, has to say about using Figma:
“What do you like best about Figma?
Figma shines in collaboration with real-time editing and commenting. Plus, it builds prototypes directly in the design file, streamlining user testing. Libraries and components save time and ensure consistency. Figma's friendly interface makes it great for beginners and pros alike.
What do you dislike about Figma?
Complex projects can slow it down, and true offline work remains limited. The free plan restricts features, while paid plans can be costly for smaller teams. Finally, the extensive plugin library, while powerful, can be overwhelming to navigate and manage.
What problems is Figma solving and how is that benefiting you?
Figma streamlines design with real-time collaboration, eliminating email ping-pong. Built-in prototyping lets me iterate on user flows quickly. Libraries and components ensure design consistency across projects, saving time. Plus, Figma's intuitive interface is beginner-friendly, making it easy for new designers to jump in.”
12. Best for communication: Slack
Everyone’s heard of Slack – and with good reason. As a dedicated communication platform, Slack makes organized collaboration across multiple teams easy, which is a common requirement for PMs.
But as a product management tool, Slack also comes in handy in multiple other ways. For starters, Slack integrates with loads of other tools, including Ignition and Jira. This lets project managers easily automate routine processes such as internal release comms updates, creating new Jira tickets for bug reporting, onboarding new team members, and more.
Slack also recently released a new lists feature for their paid subscribers, which can be used for project tracking, task management, goal planning, and more. This feature is currently rolling out gradually. But at first glance, the range of templates, views, and sorting options, and integration with Slack’s native automation tool – Workflow Builder, seems to hold potential for a basic project management tool within Slack itself.
Pros
- Slack Connect allows teams to communicate with external stakeholders
- Over 2,600 available integrations allow for real-time alerts, updates, and automated workflows
- Features like setting reminders, scheduling messages, saving items to refer to later, threads and dedicated channels make it easy for distributed workspaces to collaborate across teams (and different time zones)
Cons
- The default setting for notifications can be overwhelming for new users.
- Custom workflows are only available to paid teams.
- The free version only stores messages from the past 90 days, leaving leaner teams vulnerable to losing valuable information.
Features
- Dedicated channels and threads keep specific conversations about different processes in product management organized.
- Slack Connect allows teams to communicate with external stakeholders easily.
- Workflow Builder uses no code to automate routine processes within Slack.
- Reaction Emoji makes approval processes and tracking efficient.
- Use huddles for quick audio or video chats in place of a scheduled meeting.
- Lists can be used for project management and goal-setting.
Pricing
Besides Slack’s very limited free plan, they offer 3 pricing plans:
- Pro - $7.25/person/month (billed annually)
- Business+ - $12.50/person/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise Grid - Contact sales for pricing
Customer reviews
Here’s what Richard P., a product manager at an enterprise, has to say about using Slack:
“What do you like best about Slack?
By shipping quick video messages and audio messages with built in transcription and with huddles slack has made me update and give them a 10/10 they're the only one I've done this for.
This helps to lead to the future of work. Instead of long detailed text or quick terse text you can make a quick vid and show your face to share context and tone and show on screen what you're thinking.
Slack is very simple, searchable and convenient. If you didnt know slack is an aronym.
Standard
Log of
All
Communication and
Knowledge
SLACK.
When a teammate left and I needed a comment I remembered him sharing all I had to do was search for the right channel that he made it, or even DM, where his email inbox becomes completely lost unless I was on CC.
What do you dislike about Slack?
Notifications and interruptions are a real risk. Establish boundaries, recognize the cost of task switching. Turn off as many notifications as possible and set intentional times to task switch to and away from slack.
The proliferation of direct messages and private channels can be challenging but countered with a culture of openness.
Cost can be a challenge, but a ton of value is being delivered for it.
Recommendations to others considering Slack:
As above, manage your notifications carefully. Recognize the cost of task switching.
Try to use the a-synch features as much as possible!
Try to reduce slack use during calls as much as able.
What problems is Slack solving and how is that benefiting you?
A mix of synchronous and aa-synchronous and transparent and confidential communication. Often with images and links, threading to narrow in various channels. With videos and audio messages that are automatically transcribed slack has become an incredibly useful a-synch work communication tool. I prefer it to email so much its scary.”
Best free product management tools
- Free AI Release Notes Generator - Give us a tiny bit of context about the latest features you shipped – and let AI automatically write the release notes for you.
- Free AI Jira issue writer - Instantly get an Issue title, user story, and acceptance criteria.
- Free AI Product Requirements Document Generator - Generate a product requirement doc in seconds using only a few essential details.
- Free AI Transcript Summarizer - Summarize key insights from your customer or product research calls using this free product management tool.
Product management software evaluation checklist
- Does it integrate with your development/ticketing, sales, and marketing software?
- Does it connect to your CRM so your product planning can be tied to revenue?
- Is it easy for non-product managers to access and use?
- Is it easy to collaborate in?
- Does it match your needs for project and workflow management?
- Does it meet your standards for security and compliance?
- Is it capable of scaling with your team as it grows?
- Is the customer support reputable?
- Does its pricing structure match your budget?
Frequently asked questions about product management software
What capabilities do you need in product management software?
Product managers are increasingly realizing the importance of connecting their work with product marketing. The best product management software should reflect this by setting PMs up with opportunities to align their engineering with their revenue. It’s important to make sure that your product management software is enabling you to make data-driven decisions that ultimately help you hit KPIs for your product. Since AI and automation-driven tools are also booming currently, your product management tools should ideally be automating a large chunk of work that you were previously doing manually. Otherwise, since everyone is implementing AI within their processes these days, this lack of automation will put you at a competitive disadvantage.
What integrations should I care about with my product management software?
You’ll need your product management software to integrate well with your research tools (competitive intel, analytics), your CRM (so that you can tie your decisions to revenue), as well as the systems your stakeholders are already using (communication software, file management systems). Ultimately, the goal should be to try and create one place of truth so that valuable data isn’t scattered all over the place and inaccessible to the team members who need it.
How hard is it to switch product management tools?
This depends on the tool being considered. Tools that are more focused on templates and don’t have enough integrations may take a long time to set up. Product management software that have direct integration with tools you already use, on the other hand, can speed up the switch considerably. Ignition helps make the transfer more seamless by letting you easily take out your roadmaps from software like Productboard (without having to manually type out everything) and integrating with popular competitive intel, customer feedback, and knowledge management tools.
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