16 best roadmapping tools and software for product teams

Here are sixteen of the best free and premium roadmapping tools to build your next product roadmap—you won’t need them all, but they’re grouped into categories to help you pick what you need:

• 4 tools to collect product insights for your roadmap

• 4 freemium roadmap tools

• 5 premium product roadmap tools

• 3 project management tools with roadmapping features

What are product roadmap tools?

In our opinion, product roadmap tools are any software, app, or tool that product owners and managers can use to build a roadmap. The category is broad, and you'll probably need a few tools to cover the entire roadmapping process, from collecting product insight to planning feature rollouts. 

We’ve covered a spectrum of tools in this guide, starting with the foundations: tools to populate your product backlog with user insights. 

 4 tools to collect product insights for your roadmap

Every product roadmap starts with user insights, because it’s your users, not assumptions or HiPPOs, that truly know how your product works—or doesn’t. 

Here are four tools that generate actionable product insights to inform your roadmap.

1. Heatmaps

Hotjar Heatmaps (that’s us, hello! 👋) is a freemium heatmap tool that depicts where users click, scroll, and move around your product. Heatmaps show the combined behavior of all users at once, so they’re a great first step for spotting common issues before taking a closer look with other insight tools.

Use heatmaps to find opportunities for your product roadmap, by:

• Seeing if non-clickable elements confuse users

• Finding the most popular parts of your product

• Spotting if users are missing important content

2. Recordings

Hotjar Recordings is a freemium session recording tool that recreates individual user sessions across multiple product pages. Session recordings give you qualitative insight into parts of your product that cause user frustration. Save time by:

• Filtering recordings by event, visited page, rage click, u-turn, and other parameters to quickly find valuable sessions

• Sharing Highlights with your team to get buy-in and input

• Brainstorming solutions and adding ideas to your backlog

3. Surveys

Hotjar Surveys is a freemium user survey tool for collecting product feedback from existing and potential customers. Surveys go beyond simply asking users “which new feature do you need from our product?”—use insights from surveys to plan the direction of your product roadmap by asking questions that reveal:

• Users’ jobs-to-be-done (JTBD, i.e. what people ‘hire’ your product for)

• Why customers churn

• What’s stopping people from signing up or upgrading

If you’re not sure what to ask, use our free survey templates for expert-approved questions.

4. Feedback

Hotjar Feedback is a freemium feedback widget that lets customers tell you what they love and hate about any part of your product, whenever they want (it’s that red floating Feedback tab on the right side of this page—try it!).

By having a channel for ‘always-on’ user comments, you’ll never miss out on insightful product feedback that could shape your product roadmap.

4 freemium tools to build and share product roadmaps

Now that your backlog is stacked with data-backed ideas, here are four freemium tools you can use to build a simple product roadmap on a budget.

1. Trello

Trello is a freemium product management tool. It works well as the base for a product roadmap because its classic board layout is suited to Kanban-style roadmaps (typically a ‘To-Do, Doing, Done’ 3-column layout).

At Hotjar, we use Trello for our public roadmap: take a look here for ideas. And it’s not just us: Trello’s product roadmap template has been copied over 30,000 times!

2. Notion

Notion is a freemium collaborative workspace software platform. Notion created a free roadmap template that can be viewed as a table, calendar, list, or board. Plus, if you find a public product roadmap you want to copy (and the creator hasn’t disabled the option), you can duplicate it and use it as the base for your own.

3. Airtable

Airtable is a freemium tool for building embeddable spreadsheets and databases. Airtable has a product roadmap template that can be viewed as a board or calendar (additional views—like timeline or Gantt chart—require a premium plan). Roadmaps can be shared via URL and synced with a calendar. There’s also a feature submission form, so anyone on the team can easily add ideas to the backlog. 

4. Google Tables

Google Tables is a collaborative database tool from Google, which offers similar functionality to Airtable. Currently in beta mode and available to Google users in the US, Google Tables has a large templates library, including one for project roadmaps, a basic Kanban board, and an agile scrum tracker.

Once the beta period ends, Google Tables will have a freemium pricing model, with free users limited to fewer tables and rows.

5 premium product roadmapping tools 

If product roadmaps will be the cornerstone of your team’s day-to-day work, you might need a dedicated roadmap tool that provides multiple roadmap layouts, feature prioritization, and integrations with other popular product tools. Here are five to choose from.

1. Aha! Roadmaps

Aha! Roadmaps is a premium roadmap tool that can be used on its own or alongside the rest of Aha!’s product development suite, Aha! Ideas (for collecting and managing product feedback) and Aha! Develop (for managing agile product development). 

Aha! Roadmaps have a product strategy tool to create a shareable, visual overview of key objectives and product positioning. Aha! also offers templates for common and custom layouts, all of which come with sample data. Potential features can be prioritized using Aha!’s built-in scorecard.

All roadmaps built in Aha! can be shared via URL, downloaded as images or PDFs, added to a presentation, or embedded in a dashboard. Aha! also integrates with Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps and many other popular product tools. 

2. Productboard

Productboard is premium product roadmap software for building custom roadmaps with different layouts (agile, release plan, Kanban, or timeline-based), from simple top-level roadmaps to detailed release plans.

Productboard has a centralized feedback area to bring together product feedback from customers and team members. Feature ideas can then be prioritized based on estimated effort and value scores.

If you collect product insights with Hotjar’s tools, Zapier will connect Hotjar with Productboard and generate new notes from Recordings, Feedback, and Survey responses so you can manage feature ideas in one place.

3. ProductPlan

ProductPlan is premium product roadmapping software with a drag-and-drop editor and remote team collaboration features. Roadmaps built in ProductPlan can be viewed in timeline, list, table, or portfolio layouts, and there’s a built-in ‘Prioritization Board’ so features can be ranked and prioritized according to your favorite framework. 

Integrations let you add functionality to your roadmap, for example syncing it with GitHub, embedding a live roadmap into Confluence, or importing or creating Jira epics directly from ProductPlan.

4. Roadmunk

Roadmunk is a premium product roadmap tool. Roadmunk comes with product roadmap templates that can be viewed as a timeline or grouped by theme (known as ‘swimlane’ in the tool).

Roadmunk has a centralized user feedback dashboard for team members to add feature requests, which can be added to the product backlog and prioritized using two popular product prioritization frameworks: value vs. effort, and R.I.C.E. (reach, impact, confidence, effort). 

Roadmunk integrates with Jira and Azure DevOps, which means any changes you make in either tool will automatically sync.

5. ProdPad Roadmaps

ProdPad Roadmaps is the roadmap tool from ProdPad’s product management software suite. 

ProdPlan’s co-founders, Janna Bastow and Simon Cast, are known for creating the Now/Next/Later lean product roadmap for product managers. ProdPlan, therefore, is designed to help you build a lean Kanban-style roadmap (no timeline view available) using its drag-and-drop interface and color-coded tagging. 

ProdPlan integrates with many favorite product tools, including Azure DevOps, GitHub, and Jira. Zapier connects ProdPlan with Hotjar to automatically add feedback and ideas to the backlog when they are collected via Hotjar Recordings, Surveys, or Feedback. 

ProdPlan’s pricing is based on modules and add-ons: you can subscribe to the Roadmaps module, but you’ll need to pay extra if you need other tools and features, including portfolio roadmaps (useful for multi-product companies), the OKRs (objectives and key results) panel, and sharing roadmaps via URL.

3 project management tools with roadmapping features

Already using a project management tool to organize your team? It probably has built-in product roadmap features, so you won’t need to expand your tech stack. Here are three popular management tools that come with roadmapping features at no extra cost. 

1. Asana

Asana is a freemium project management platform for teams. Asana users can build and view product roadmaps as lists, boards, or calendars.

2. Airfocus

Airfocus is a premium project management platform with a built-in roadmap tool. Roadmaps can be viewed as boards or timelines, and shared via URLs or exported as PDFs or CSV files.

Multiple roadmaps can also be combined into a portfolio view for cross-functional collaboration.

3. OpenProject

OpenProject is open-source project management software that can be self-hosted for free or accessed using a paid cloud subscription. 

OpenProject’s roadmaps can be created with a project timeline layout or as a Kanban board. You can export roadmaps as PDFs or Excel files, and publicly or privately share them with stakeholders. OpenProject also integrates with GitHub so you can directly pull in features and bugs and see the status of actions inside your roadmap.

Putting your product roadmap tools to work

Now you’ve (hopefully) picked the right tools and software to plan, build, and iterate your next product roadmap, it’s time to actually put them to work! We recommend you start building your roadmap on solid, user-centric foundations by collecting product insights with our Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback tools. 

And, hey, if you give us feedback the next time you use Hotjar, your comments might end up shaping part of our product roadmap in the future! 🤩