We tested the best roadmap software to keep your teams focused and project goals on track to deliver the finished product.
Read on to learn more about:
Best Roadmap Software
1. Monday.com
Monday.com is invaluable for aiding product teams to take control of their tasks and workflows. It has a user-friendly interface, lots of customization, and endless integrations to fit smoothly into your online business stack. Its roadmap builder mobile apps are the icing on the cake!
• Web and mobile dashboards
• ree plan for individuals
• Lots of integrations
Formerly known as dapulse, Monday.com has many years under its belt as a formidable online roadmap tool. In fact, to box it into such a category does it a disservice, as the software functions as comprehensive team management and workflow suite.
All team members can have access and see the progress of tasks in real-time in relation to staff availability. This makes dividing work easy, as managers can quickly reassign work, and anyone can jump in and pick up the slack.
The web-based dashboard is easy to use, but you can access your account via iOS and Android apps if you prefer. It gives you multiple options to visualize projects, and the built-in time tracking ensures everyone knows what’s expected.
Monday.com is not an inherently free product roadmap tool, but it does provide a 14-day free trial to test the service thoroughly. Individuals can use it free forever, though its utility is limited in this regard, as it was always intended for teams.
It calls users or team members ‘seats’ for pricing purposes. It’s $8/mo/seat for the Basic plan, limiting you to 5GB of storage. Standard is $10/mo, with:
- a calendar
- timeline & Gantt views
- guest access
- 250 automation and integration actions
- dashboard support for five boards.
For $16/mo, Pro boosts automation and integration actions to 250,000 actions, 10 boards, a chart view, and time tracking. While Enterprise users can contact the team for a quote.
If you want to create a roadmap online, you’ll also want it to integrate with your other web software. Monday.com connects with over 50 tools, including:
- Gmail
- Slack
- Shopify
- Dropbox
- Zoom
- Todoist
- Google Calendar.
Overall, it’s a feature-packed and high-end solution, but the way it splits features between plans will confuse some.
2. Roadmap Planner
KeepSolid’s Roadmap Planner helps your business achieve clear and concise goals via Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and its proprietary strategic and objectives-based roadmaps. Goals lets you manage your team, their tasks, and objectives on the fly while displaying stunning progress reports.
• Great visualization tools
• Budget calculator
• Easy to use
KeepSolid’s Goals, previously known as Roadmap Planner, is a feature-packed product roadmapping tool that helps businesses of all sizes.
It’s perfect for defining the core milestones and tasks as the team progresses. Performance indicators let everyone know whether they’re on track to success. Meanwhile, it makes it easy to spot roadblocks that might derail your plans before it’s too late.
Features include the ability to fully manage your teams; adding, removing members, and assigning and tweaking tasks as you go. Monitoring is easy, so you can see the workload and prioritize as needed.
Your team can easily visualize timelines, create Kanban boards with sprints, and get notifications as they go. The downside is its integrations are not native, rather Zapier is the only option.
Progress reports can be generated daily, weekly, or monthly, and you can easily see progress in relation to the schedule. Moreover, Gantt charts give you even more control over organizing and breaking up projects into more manageable chunks. We were particularly impressed by the budget calculator.
The roadmap creation tool has two distinct types of roadmaps – strategic and objectives-based.
Strategic roadmaps let you manage all team tasks. It includes all the objectives and goals, and you can modify every aspect of the plan to ensure goals are met, even if they’ve changed on the fly.
The Objectives roadmap focuses more on the goals at hand, with a map for the team to follow. This includes the current state of the project, your expectations, and the ability to find new solutions without changing the main objective.
The user interface is extremely intuitive. Creating a new objective is as easy as giving it a name, description, and due date. Unfortunately, it does not have a mobile app.
KeepSolid’s roadmap maker falls under its broader Goals suite and is charged at a $7.99 per user/mo rate when billed annually. This jumps to $9.99 if you don’t want to commit to a year. You get a 14-day free trial and a seven-day money-back guarantee once the first payment is taken.
3. ClickUp
Streamline project management and map out your goals with ClickUp’s powerful product planning software. It delivers exceptional roadmapping, prioritization features, and team collaboration tools, so everyone’s on track to success.
• Generous free forever plan
• Lots of different views
• Sprints and scrums
ClickUp is our pick for the best free product roadmap tool as it provides a forever free plan with all features included. The only limitation is the storage space of 100MB. To that end, it is better suited to individuals managing their own singular tasks or startups that need something free that they can upgrade later.
ClickUp lets you build versatile product roadmaps, give prioritization to the features and tasks that matter, and collaborate effectively and efficiently with your team.
It has a whopping 10+ roadmap views, so you are sure to find one that suits everyone involved. Moreover, you can build on a standard timeline or a Gantt chart. There are also lists and table views.
The product roadmap management tool utilizes sprints to ensure everyone is on track. This includes real-time reports and native integration with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. There is also a useful bug backlog feature, so can track and complete bug fixes in a timely manner.
You can connect even more of your favorite development and communication tools via Zapier. Zendesk and Intercom are perfect for feedback loops.
The free forever plan gives you 100MB of storage, unlimited tasks, and a surprising number of key features. Paid plans are charged on a per member, per month basis.
- Unlimited: $5/mo/user (billed annually) or $9 – Unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, Gantt charts, custom fields, and much more.
- Business: $12/mo/user (billed annually) or $19 – Google SSO, advanced sharing, custom exporting, time tracking, and much more.
- Business Plus: $19/mo/user (billed annually) or $29 – Admin training, priority support, custom permissions and roles, API access, and more.
Overall, the cloud-based platform has everything you need for a product management roadmap. It does, however, have a learning curve and some more tutorials would go a long way. Priority support for higher paying customers is also a bit of a turn off.
4. Wrike
Wrike is trusted by the likes of Lyft, Siemens, and Nickelodeon – for good reason. This powerful product plan software lets you plan, collaborate, and monitor progress from one dashboard.
• Over 400 integrations
• Free for individuals
• Gantt, Kanban and more
Wrike is a solution designed for use in a variety of sectors, including SaaS. Because of this, it’s a product that initially feels a bit too much for beginners.
Wrike is a wonderful tool for synchronising your product team and keeping track of who is on which task. After you customise it to fit your workflow, there’s no going back.
Your roadmap visualization tool displays as a Gantt chart. However, list or Kanban views are also available. It’s comparable to other project management software like Monday in this regard.
The ability of Wrike’s projects and tasks appearing simultaneously in various parts of the dashboard is one of its key selling points. No matter the permission level of your team member, they get detailed access to the info they need.
This function is particularly helpful. For instance, if your marketing department begins creating a landing page, your product team can be developing another feature. Both can see how the other is progressing. Wrike is an excellent solution for collaboration.
However, in terms of client access, it is lacking. You are also limited in the amount of additional detail you can add once you’ve filled out the basic roadmap planning tool fields.
Single users can use the software for free, while teams are charged $9.80 per user/mo. Multiple teams across an organization need the Business plan at $24.80 per user, while an Enterprise plan can be tailored for large complex businesses.
5. Airfocus
Create clean and strategic roadmaps ready for development and sharing with all your stakeholders. Its strong point is the ability to tailor your maps to specific audiences so everyone can understand and contribute to the product vision.
• Share tailored roadmaps
• Excellent collaboration tools
• Effective native integrations
Airfocus is a roadmap planner software that does a great job of streamlining the process, so you can create your plan as fast as possible. However, that doesn’t mean it lacks function.
It easily integrates with services like Github, JIRA, Trello, and many others you might already be using in your stack.
You can get started in minutes and the process is made easy with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that beginners will appreciate.
It has all the best roadmap displays, including standard tables, calendars, and Kanban boards. Moreover, priority and multidimensional charts help you pinpoint important areas of focus.
We like that it supports unlimited viewers out of the box. Another standout feature is the ability to create weighted scoring for ideas and team suggestions, helping you decide exactly what makes the roadmap and what to leave behind.
Airfocus is one of the more affordable ways to access a premium roadmap creator online, when you factor in its unlimited user model. The only time you face a limit is for the starter Essential plan, which is $15 a month (billed annually) or $19 as monthly pay-as-you-go. This gives you five contributors.
Advanced is a flat $49 or $59, while Pro is $89 or $109. Some extra features are added to the higher tiers, so it is important to double check exactly what you need.
Its most notable feature is Priority Poker, which invites any and all stakeholders to give their independent feature recommendations. You can then take their input and make an informed decision for the roadmap.
Another excellent feature that supports your next digital product roadmap is the feedback management tool. This centralizes feedback from all your channels, such as social media, email, chat support, and more.
Our only qualm is it doesn’t have a free plan, but you can try any paid plan for 14 days before committing.
6. Zoho Sprints
With a low learning curve and handy mobile apps, Zoho sprints is one of the easiest technology roadmap tools. It takes a strong collaborative approach and gives you valuable insights to refine your strategy as you go.
• Mobile apps
• User stories
• Record billable hours
Zoho Sprints is affordable and feature-rich roadmap planning software, ideal for agile developers working on software. It has everything you need to plan and produce functional features and elements for each ‘scrum’, without getting hyper-focused on the end goal.
The web-based dashboard has a scrum board, showing what’s still to start, tasks in progress, and completed tasks. A ‘Backlog’ view displays all the tasks, bugs that must be fixed, and ‘stories’.
These are problems that need to be solved, written from the end user’s perspective. It’s a great way to frame the project in your mind, focussing on the laymen that will use your product and what they want, not technical experts and jargon.
The visual product roadmap doesn’t lack detail. You can see timeframes, weighted effort needed to complete the task, and a description. Those with the right permissions can also add comments, attachments, and threaded subtasks if something needs more guidance.
Zoho Sprints also lets you record billable hours via timesheets that can also be integrated with accounting software. Zoho itself has a large suite of web tools, from Books to CRM, so it’s better suited to existing Zoho users rather than those that want to integrate with another stack.
Another area Zoho stands out is its analytics. There are endless reports shown in large visual graphs and you can export the data for further use.
Zoho product roadmapping software has a straightforward user billing model. It’s $5 per user a month if billed annually. Or, $6 if you prefer a true monthly pay-as-you-go method. You get unlimited projects, 100GB of space, 24-hour support (minus weekends), and 15 of its native integrations.
There is also a free roadmap tool online that supports three total projects, three users, and 500MB of space. This is a great way to test the service, though there is also a 15-day free trial for a fully paid plan.
The mobile apps make things even easier when on the go.
7. Roadmunk
This comprehensive roadmap maker is perfect for tailored presentations. Whether you’re in the boardroom or emailing a client, it exports in endless views and file formats. Now you can unify your entire business with client-driven roadmaps.
• Interactive roadmaps
• Combine roadmaps into one
• Export in PNG
Roadmunk is our pick for most versatile product roadmap software, letting you create maps for any need and display them in your own customized way.
There are three base designs. Firstly, the ‘Timeline’ takes a more traditional route, showcasing projects, initiatives, and associated objectives.
Secondly, is its modified Kanban board view, called a ‘Swimlane’, which has all the features you need for sprints and agile development.
The third customizable view brings everything together under one graphic, aptly called the ‘Master’. This is a great choice when you want to re-establish the end goal of your project and check overall progress. You can dig in deeper by clicking the various roadmaps and navigating from there.
Multiple teams can create their own interactive roadmap, and then add them to the master display, which is not something found in the other software we’ve reviewed.
You can also customize your roadmap for different stakeholders. For example, you might export in PNG images and email it to one person but share it as a web URL for another.
The ‘customer roadmap’ feature also lets you tailor the information on display specially for customers rather than collaborators or technical stakeholders.
Overall, Roadmunk focuses solely on project roadmap tools, so it lacks some of the extras found with other software. It also has a steeper learning curve than some. However, in terms of customization, nothing is better.
It has a 14-day free trial but no free plan. It’s four paid plans and their key features are as follows:
- Starter: $19/mo (billed annually) – Unlimited roadmaps and read-only viewers, and three reviewers (stakeholders that can leave feedback).
- Business: $49/mo (billed annually) or $65/mo – API access, weighted prioritization, five reviewers.
- Professional: $99/mo (billed annually) or $129/mo – Single sign-on, training and customization support, 10 reviewers, Two-way Jira + Azure DevOps sync.
What Is Roadmap Software?
Product roadmap software is a tool that helps product managers and teams in planning for a product’s development. This could be a physical product, software, or service.
It typically includes:
- goals and milestones
- calendars and timelines
- the prospective launch date
- everything else that is needed for a well-planned project.
A roadmap builder must be able to serve different purposes, as different businesses have their own unique products and even ways of using roadmaps. Some need to be very detailed with step-by-step guidelines. Others are vaguer, looking ahead to future goals.
The best roadmap software allows for multiple displays, easy collaboration, and the ability to share with stakeholders.
If a business plan defines your business idea and strategy, a roadmap does the same for an individual product.
How To Pick the Right App
Picking the best product roadmap software for your project depends on the type of product being developed, the team you’re working with, and stakeholder expectations. In general, here’s what most product managers should look out for:
1. Billing Model
If you’re looking for an online roadmap tool free of charge, many of the premium providers have a free tier. However, most businesses will require a paid plan for scalability and necessary features.
Pay close attention to the billing model as the apparent monthly cost is often per user. If you have a lot of team members that need full access, this can vastly increase the price. As is common with cloud-based solutions, a yearly commitment should result in a discount off the comparative monthly price.
2. Dedicated Tool or Feature?
A lot of business software will implement some form of roadmapping as part of a broader toolset including CRM, marketing etc. However, bar a few exceptions, we believe the best product roadmap software is the core feature with other tools as extras or integrations.
3. Variety of Layouts
The more choice of layouts for your roadmap the better. For example, a Gantt chart is great for overviewing a timeline, but a Kanban board is better for organizing work. The roadmap you show a stakeholder might also be different from the one you show an engineer.
If you can customize everything to your liking, you’ve found a winner.
4. Progress and Monitoring
Using the best product roadmap tools isn’t just a static process for spitting out a chart. They’re a full-blown cloud-based platform that lets you monitor progress, update tasks, and interact with the team.
5. Collaboration and Sharing
This leads to collaboration and sharing tools. Your team needs their own accounts to view their tasks and update their progress autonomously. You also need to be able to share various aspects of the roadmap with other participants.
6. Integrations
Chances are, if you’re looking for an online roadmap tool, you already use a range of business tools. Are there native or other methods to integrate these and streamline your workflow?
7. Analytics
Data and statistics are important in every area of modern business. In roadmapping you also need productivity reports, ideas and opinions as percentages, and other insights to refine your development strategy.
8. Mobile Support
Do you need access to roadmaps on the go? Yes, most modern solutions are accessible via the web rather than downloaded software. However, dedicated apps make for an even better mobile user experience.
9. Learning Curve
As a product manager, you should be able to grasp most of the best roadmapping software, but what about the rest of the team or other stakeholders? Ease of use is just as important as features. In fact, too many features can prove to be a bigger headache if you require complex onboarding and training.
How To Create a Product Roadmap
Picking the best roadmap software is one thing, but how do you actually begin to create one? Here are the key steps:
1. The Vision
No product can be successful without a solid vision to work from. If you can’t define your product and what it means for your target audience, every step that follows is blind. Of course, there needs to be input from many different sources. However, the product manager at the roadmap needs an overarching vision for the product and the approach to making it.
2. Define the Strategy
The vision is closely related to the strategy. This forms the basis for how you will achieve the end goal and why your approach is different from other products on the market.
Stakeholders need to understand the target audience – how the product caters to them, its unique selling points, and how this will translate to business.
The vision and strategy align for the creation of a visual product roadmap.
3. What You Need
It’s now time to start collaborating and gathering all the information you need from the other departments in the organization. For example, sales and customer support know what worked and didn’t work previously. You should already have a trove of customer feedback to help formulate new and improved features, whether that applies to a product upgrade or a brand-new product within the same market sector.
4. Time Management
While you need to leave room for unexpected hurdles and creative changes, use your product roadmap tool to set a broad time frame early. This lets you map out sprints and milestones for individual elements, so the whole project can stay on track.
5. Collaborate
Your product’s success depends on input from the entire company, so they should be brought in early for collaboration and feedback. Your immediate development team should have accounts and access to the full roadmap and their associated tasks. A tailored approach is needed for marketing, sales, investors, etc.
6. Presentation and Sharing
A lot of data might go into a roadmap, but the best roadmap tools simplify key information visually with charts and graphs. An even better approach is to create different versions for different parties. Or if the software allows, let users choose how they view the roadmap.
Wrap Up
Choosing the best roadmap software lays the foundation for your product’s success.
Our seven leading picks should have something to suit any business, while our guides will help you make the right choice.
So, what are you waiting for?
Define your goal, outline the steps to reach it, and work with your team and stakeholders to develop the next big product!
Can I create a roadmap in Excel?
Yes, you can create a product roadmap in Excel and this has been used historically. However, the best roadmap tools are now designed specifically for purpose and far exceed what can be accomplished with spreadsheets.
Does Google have a roadmap tool?
No, Google does not have a dedicated roadmap tool. However, it has several tools that can help create a roadmap. For example, Google Sheets, which is much like Excel, can help you create a more traditional roadmap.
There are also third-party extensions for Chrome and apps in the Google Marketplace for designing roadmaps, yet we do not recommend these for serious product managers.What should be included in a roadmap?
What to include depends on the project at hand. A simple product roadmap should, at the very least, include:
Who owns the product roadmap?
Depending on how your company is structured, different people can ‘own’ the roadmap. However, in most cases, it is the product manager that owns and oversees it. Executives, developers, marketers, and stakeholders may all have input, but it is not their role to take control.
Why is the product roadmap important?
Product roadmap visualization clearly outlines the strategy, goals, and development requirements. This applies both to the development teams and stakeholders. It helps you prioritize and divide out tasks, meet milestones, and brainstorm improvements. That way, you can complete the project by meeting all expectations and keeping everyone in the loop.
The best roadmap software also allows for easy collaboration and multiple styles of roadmap, often depending on the intended audience. Moreover, integrations with your other business tools are important for saving time and money.
Jacquelyn Bulao, specializing in HR and networking, was a TechJury team member from June 2020 to October 2022. As the bridge between contributors and the website, Jacquelyn plays a vital role in ensuring smooth communication and collaboration. With her quick learning abilities, she delved into optimizing business processes for the TechJury team, streamlining operations, and enhancing efficiency.