Canny alternatives: what people on Reddit are actually asking for

“Canny alternatives” is a search that spikes on Reddit whenever someone opens an invoice. The threads follow a pattern: a team adopted Canny when it was cheap, their product got more popular, and the bill went up in a way they did not predict. Then twenty replies naming other products, with no explanation of why any of them would be different.

Here is the useful version. We make one of the alternatives, so treat the recommendation accordingly and note that this page says clearly where Canny is the better choice.

Why the bill grew

Canny meters on tracked users. A tracked user is anyone who submits, votes or comments, which means the meter is engagement. Free covers 25 tracked users. Core starts at $19 a month and Pro at $79 billed annually ($99 monthly). Reported figures put 1,000 tracked users at roughly $275 a month on Core and $579 on Pro.

That is not a trick, it is a choice, and it has a logic: more participants means more value from the board. It fails in one specific way, which is that a good launch raises your cost without raising your revenue. If that is what happened to you, the fix is a tool that meters on something else.

The alternatives, by what they meter on

• Featurebase — per seat. $29, $59 and $99 per seat per month billed yearly, plus $0.29 per AI resolution, with a permanent free plan at one seat. Boards, roadmap, changelog, surveys, help centre and a support inbox in one product. A real like-for-like swap if you want the board, and it has a large discount programme for companies under two years old. Compared in detail.
• Voicebox — per piece of feedback. Free for 50 a month, $19 for 3,000, $49 for 15,000 with unlimited seats, AI analysis on every plan. No public board and no voting, so this is a swap only if the board was never the point. Compared in detail.
• Hotjar — per session. Different question entirely: behaviour rather than requests. Worth naming because a surprising number of “we left Canny” threads end with someone realising they wanted to see where users struggled.
• Roll your own. A form posting to a database and a weekly look through it. Genuinely correct under maybe fifty pieces a month, and the honest recommendation if that is where you are.

The question worth asking first

Do you actually want customers to see each other's requests?

A public board buys you transparency, and it is genuinely reassuring for a customer to find their complaint already posted with forty votes. It also costs you moderation, gives loud users disproportionate weight, and publishes a queue of things you have not built, which some teams find harder to live with than they expected.

Plenty of teams adopt a board because that is what feedback tools looked like, discover they only ever wanted to know what to fix, and are then surprised to be paying for participation in a forum they did not want to run. If that is the story, the switch is out of the category rather than across it.

Before you migrate

• Export first. Whatever you move to, your existing feedback is the asset and you want it in a file before you cancel anything.
• Check what breaks for customers. If people have bookmarked your public board, moving to a private inbox is a visible change and worth announcing rather than discovering.
• Count the thing the new tool meters. Whatever it charges for, you want a rough figure before you commit, not after.

Common questions