UserVoice alternative and competitors, compared on price, meter and time to launch

UserVoice has not given a public reason, so anything about motive is inference. What can be observed is the direction of the change, and it is consistent.

The old model was three named tiers with visible monthly rates, which is a self-serve shape. The current model is volume-based, integration-based and quote-only, with a 30-day trial arranged through a demo rather than a signup form, and an onboarding program measured in weeks. Every one of those is an enterprise sales motion.

The practical read for a buyer: UserVoice has moved upmarket, and the entry point moved with it. If you are a team of six looking for a feedback board, you are no longer the customer, which is the real reason so many people arrive at this page. If you are a company where twenty people across three departments need to see and act on the same feedback, the no-seat model becomes genuinely attractive in a way that per-seat competitors cannot match at that headcount.

It splits on how many people need access and how much you are willing to spend before you see value.

If you want a published price and a working board this week, Canny is the closest direct replacement. It costs $0 on Free with 25 tracked users and starts at $79 a month billed yearly on Pro. Watch the meter, though: Canny bills tracked users, and its Autopilot AI, which is included even on Free, counts people whose feedback it found in your Intercom or Zendesk toward that same number. The free AI feature and the paid meter are the same number.

If feedback is one input to a roadmap rather than the whole job, Productboard is the better fit at $19 per maker per month billed annually on Plus. The catch is that Plus caps the feedback repository at 500 items, so it cannot solve a feedback volume problem at any seat count, and Business has a two-seat minimum that puts real entry at $1,416 a year rather than $708.

If what you need is research repository rather than a feedback board, Dovetail is the peer, though it has made the same move UserVoice did and now sells only a Free plan and an Enterprise plan.

And if the problem is that feedback is already arriving faster than anyone can read it, in tickets and reviews and survey text as well as on a board, that is the job UserInsight is built for.

Yes, several, because UserVoice itself has no free plan. Its only no-cost option is a 30-day trial, and that is arranged through a demo rather than a signup form.

Canny's free plan is the most complete of the direct equivalents: 25 tracked users, 5 managers, unlimited contributors, unlimited feedback, unlimited boards, and Autopilot with unlimited sources. Canny's own guidance is that plenty of teams run on it for months.

Productboard's free tier gives one maker, 25 contributors and 50 AI credits for the whole workspace, which at its own published burn rate of 30 to 50 credits per 100 feedback items is roughly 100 to 165 items a month in total.

Dovetail's free plan covers one channel and one project with AI chat and auto-summaries on that project, which is an evaluation tier rather than a working deployment.

On open source, the honest answer is that the searches for a self-hosted UserVoice replacement mostly land on general-purpose issue trackers and forum software rather than a maintained feedback management platform. If the requirement is genuinely self-hosting rather than cost, budget for the integration work, because the collection side is the easy half and the reading side is the half that takes the time.

This is the cost nobody puts in a comparison table, and UserVoice publishes it plainly. Most teams launch in 4 to 6 weeks. Technical setup is about 1 to 2 weeks, and the remaining weeks go on a success plan, fitting UserVoice into your existing product management flow, and training people. A dedicated customer success manager runs it, and professional services are available on top.

Read that as a signal about fit rather than a complaint. A 4-to-6-week guided onboarding is exactly right for a company rolling out a formal feedback program across several departments, and it is a large part of what the contract buys. It is also completely wrong for a product team that wants to know by Friday what customers have been complaining about all quarter.

So run the comparison on your own calendar, not just your budget. If the quarter you are trying to influence ends in ten weeks, a tool with a six-week onboarding gives you four weeks of data to act on.

Migration is handled, at least. UserVoice provides bulk import by CSV and API, and says its technical success team will take on the more complex moves.

These two get compared constantly and they are less similar than the search term suggests.

Canny is self-serve, published, and priced for a product team. You can be running a board this afternoon for nothing, and the first real bill is $79 a month billed yearly. Its meter is tracked users, which grows with how much feedback surface area you connect rather than how many customers you have. Set a spend limit on day one, because without one Canny automatically upgrades your tier and charges a prorated amount when you cross the line.

UserVoice is sales-led, unpublished, and priced for a company. Its advantage is real and specific: because it never bills by seat, giving fifty people in sales and support access costs nothing extra. On a per-seat or per-maker competitor, that same rollout is the entire budget conversation. At twenty-plus people needing access, UserVoice's model is the better one, and reported pricing near $16,000 a year needs to be weighed against what fifty seats would cost elsewhere rather than against $79.

The crossover is roughly where feedback stops being a product team activity and becomes a company process. Below that line Canny wins on cost and speed. Above it, the seat math turns.

No, and this is the single clearest thing on its pricing page. UserVoice states that pricing is based on feedback volume, the tools you use and the integrations you connect, never by seat, and that unlimited team members can have access.

That is worth taking seriously when you compare quotes, because most of this category does the opposite. Productboard bills per maker with a two-seat minimum on Business. Canny bills tracked users and caps managers at 5 on Free and 10 on Pro. Dovetail bills paid seats for managers and contributors, with only viewers free. SurveyMonkey bills per user with a three-user minimum on team plans.

So the comparison to run is not price against price. It is your intended access list against each vendor's meter. Ten product people and nobody else favors the per-seat tools by a wide margin. Forty people across product, support, sales and success favors UserVoice's model, and the gap widens every time someone new asks for a login.