There’s perhaps no better way to enhance your product than hearing directly from customers and then incorporating their feedback. It’s no wonder customer feedback programs are quickly becoming a cornerstone of product development. But dealing with this feedback is often easier said than done. That’s because in order to make the most of it, customer feedback needs to first be gathered, organized, and analyzed.
If only there was an all-in-one solution that streamlined this crucial process—well, that’s where Canny comes in. Canny is focused on helping businesses leverage feedback from their customers to help build great products. But does it live up to the hype? Let’s look under the hood to see where Canny shines and where it might fall short.
Canny: The Good and the Bad
Canny has carved out a niche for itself in the customer feedback and product management space. Its main appeal is the promise of a seamless loop between customer feedback collection to feature prioritization and roadmapping. In other words, Canny aims to be a one-stop-shop where you can not only collect and analyze feedback, but also prioritize those product and feature requests into the roadmap for your next product build.
What Canny Is Good At
Collecting Actionable Feedback: Canny excels at capturing insights from both customers and team members. Its intuitive interface makes collecting feedback from different sources easy, whether you want to do so manually or through its many integrations. Consolidating all your feedback in this way can highlight customer pain points and preferences that repeatedly come up.
With Canny, you can collect this customer feedback from a ton of different channels, including customer interviews, sales calls, review sites, and social media platforms. Collecting feedback from multiple sources helps create a more holistic view of the average user’s experience using your product.
Aside from collecting this data, Canny is also good at keeping it organized for you. Product feature voting boards, for example, allow you to:
- Group similar requests automatically
- Attach priority updates at the top of any post
- Enable discussion and group chats
Data-Driven Decision Making: Beyond just gathering feedback, Canny helps you put it into context with its analytics tools.
You can sort feedback by MRR impact, and craft customer segments that reflect your business’s structure and current goals. This allows you to focus on analyzing feedback from specific, valuable customer segments, ensuring that you’re not just chasing volume but value.
Plus, Canny lets you filter popular customer request posts by segment. This reveals where your most impactful votes are coming from, providing a clearer picture of where to focus your efforts.
Lastly, not only does Canny track who requests what feature, but it also allows you to initiate conversations with users directly from the platform. By requesting more context or info, you can fine-tune your decision making while gaining further clarity from your customers.
Streamlined Prioritization and Roadmapping: Canny’s roadmapping tools help ensure your next move is the right one. How? By scoring and ranking features based on real user feedback and key business metrics. This ensures the most impactful ideas trickle to the top of your to-do list.
Canny’s roadmaps aren’t just internal, though. They also serve as a promise to users by showing a clear path from feedback to feature, building trust and excitement among your customers as they see their requests become incorporated in realtime. And with status updates that sync with your project management tools, your team stays focused on priorities without the noise. This is how Canny turns your roadmaps from a simple list of updates into a strategic tool for growth and customer engagement.
Engagement Through Changelogs: Canny’s changelog features acts as a customer engagement tool, drawing users into the evolution of your product. This can boost feature adoption and user investment.
By publishing detailed release notes, you can also demystify each new feature for users. This means instead of running from change, users will be more excited to explore and use the new features you provide.
And it can all be done with your brand’s unique voice. Customizable with markdown support and various labels, Canny’s changelog tool ensures that every update feels less like a bulletin and more like a story unfolding—a narrative of your product’s growth and your commitment to your users.
Canny’s Potential Drawbacks
Integration Overload: While Canny prides itself on integrating with a multitude of other tools, this can be a double-edged sword. Some businesses may find the extensive list of Canny’s integrations daunting, especially if you’re not using many of the tools that Canny pairs with. For some, a simpler, more streamlined tool might be preferable.
Perhaps more importantly, glancing at the list of Canny’s integrations alone doesn’t give you the full picture, as not all integrations are available with all price tiers. For example, Zapier and Chrome are only available on the Growth pricing tier, while Microsoft Azure is only available on the Business pricing tier.
Intrusive Branding: A top-voted feature on Canny’s own public roadmap is the removal of its “Powered by Canny” branding, which some users find excessive or intrusive.
Canny did finally allow this branding to be removed in 2021, however it’s only available on its Business tier plan.
Canny Plans and Pricing
The good news is that with Canny, certain features are available across all plans. This includes all core features like status updates, user profiles, single sign-on, admin reports, user reports, vote-on-behalf, tags, customization, admin badges, subdomain, widget, categories, and ETAs.
Admin roles, API & Webhooks, Roadmap Prioritization, and the Changelog are also all included across all price tiers.
However, there are also important differences between each plan. Let’s take a closer look at these now.
Free
With Canny’s free plan, you get three managers or admins on your account, as well as two boards and one roadmap. For being free, this is a generous plan that can serve solopreneurs, small operations, and even larger companies. It’s also a great choice if you’re just looking to get a feel for the software before committing further.
Note that integrations are limited on the Free tier.
Here’s what Canny will integrate with for free:
- Intercom
- GitHub
- Slack
- Discord
- Microsoft Teams
- Zendesk
- Jira
- Asana
- Linear
- ClickUp
- G Suite
- Segment
CCPA and GDPR compliance are included on this tier.
Growth
The Growth tier, priced at $360 per month billed yearly or $400 per month billed monthly, unlocks Zapier and Chrome Extension integrations.
You’ll also unlock further features, including:
- Private boards
- User segmentation
- Custom domain
- Internal comments
- Private comments
- Custom statuses
- Moderation Tools
- Block new posts
- Automations
- Priority Support
Lastly, you’ll get access to unlimited Boards and Roadmaps. You’re now limited to five admins or managers on the account, instead of three with the free plan.
In addition to CCPA and GDPR compliance, SOC 2 reporting is also included on this tier.
Business
As mentioned earlier, Business tier pricing is not disclosed publicly. You’ll have to request a demo or chat with Canny to get the full details for your organization. The amount of admins or managers on the account can be customized, and you’ll also be able to remove the “Powered by Canny” branding and unlock email whitelabeling.
Additionally, you unlock several key integrations with the Business tier:
- Azure Active Directory
- Azure DevOps
- Okta
- OneLogin
- OpenID Connect (OIDC)
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
This tier includes CCPA and GDPR compliance, SOC 2 reporting, pay by invoice optionality, and a security review.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Canny offers robust tools to capture, analyze, and prioritize customer feedback directly into actionable product developments for your business. The platform’s standout features like actionable feedback collection, data-driven decision-making, and interactive roadmapping position it as a great solution in this space. If you need an all-in-one customer feedback and product roadmapping software solution, Canny is definitely a winner.
That said, it does have a few minor challenges. In the grand scheme of things, though, these seem like small prices to pay for an otherwise great solution that can help you streamline the otherwise messy or manual customer feedback and roadmapping process.
