97+ Best Tools for Product Managers in 2024

Countless product management software solutions are available, so figuring out which is best for you takes a lot of work. You want to streamline your product development lifecycle and enhance collaboration but must figure out which tool best fits. I’ve got you! In this post, I make things simple, leveraging my experience managing big, complex products and using dozens of different tools to bring you this shortlist of the best product management software.

Product Management Software for Accelerated Time-to-Market.

Product management software is the heart of every product manager’s toolkit, offering robust features that streamline workflow, organize tasks, and facilitate collaboration. Here’s a list of popular options that cater to different needs and work styles:

1. Jira Software: Jira is a tech world staple, ideal for digital product dev like apps & SaaS. It provides flexible planning, real-time visibility, and in-depth reporting, adaptable to any project’s complexity.
2. Visor: Specializing in visual roadmap planning, Visor lets you craft stunningly clear visualizations of your project’s path, perfect for communication among cross-functional teams.
3. Craft.io: Best for built-in industry-leading best practices: This comprehensive tool consolidates all product-related information and offers advanced strategic product planning capabilities.
4. Zeda.io: With a focus on AI-driven user feedback and data analysis, Zeda.io helps product managers make informed decisions based on actual user insights.
5. Ignition: Evolving from customer feedback to roadmapping, Ignition supports an insightful and actionable data-driven approach to product development.
6. airfocus: An intuitive product management platform that enhances decision-making with clear prioritization frameworks suited for teams striving for alignment on product strategy.
7. Miro: A collaborative virtual whiteboard platform that empowers cross-functional teams to conceptualize, design, and execute product strategies efficiently.
8. FigJam by Figma: The newest offering by the widely popular Figma, FigJam focuses on team collaboration with a vast palette of visual and interactive tools.
9. ProductPlan: A comprehensive product planning tool that excels in creating and sharing live product roadmaps, allowing for multi-faceted team alignment.
10. Productboard: A product management system that helps understand user needs, prioritize what to build, and set the product strategy for success.

Product Planning Software for Effective Roadmaps

The product planning phase is where great product seeds. Product planning tools aid in organizing ideas, setting objectives, and plotting the development course. Here are some tools you might consider:

1. Craft.io: With its focus on the end-to-end product life cycle, Craft.io is a prime candidate for a centralized approach to product strategy, roadmapping, and requirements management.
2. airfocus: This platform’s strength lies in its clarity and easy-to-navigate prioritization features that help align teams with business goals.
3. Zeda.io: Offering a strategic angle with its user insights-driven approach, Zeda.io is ideal for product managers who want to combine data with human understanding.
4. ProductPlan: With its emphasis on visual roadmaps and story mapping, ProductPlan thrives with a clear and visually appealing direction.
5. Asana: Known for its versatile task and project management features, Asana is a go-to for teams seeking to align and execute their strategies seamlessly.
6. Productboard: Productboard’s raving reviews often attribute its success to its user-centric design and robust customer feedback-capturing capabilities.
7. Aha: Positioned as a strategic planning tool, Aha goes beyond roadmapping, offering features for portfolio management and customer personas building.
8. Confluence: A popular knowledge-sharing platform by Atlassian, Confluence complements planning with detailed documentation and information sharing across teams.
9. Portfoleon: With an emphasis on team collaboration, Portfoleon ensures that every member can easily access and contribute to the high-level plan.
10. Roadmunk: Well-regarded for its diverse roadmap types and seamless team collaboration features, Roadmunk is an excellent choice for highly visual product planning.

Top UX Design Tools to Boost Design Efficiency

User experience (UX) design is pivotal to creating a successful product. These tools aid in wireframing, prototyping, and testing, ensuring that the final product is both intuitive and engaging:

1. Figma: Loved for its collaboration features and cloud-based nature, Figma is a favourite among distributed teams that prioritize real-time designing and prototyping.
2. UXCam: Focused on app analytics, UXCam provides valuable insights into user behaviour to drive design and feature decisions.
3. Marvel: With its amalgamation of design and prototype capabilities, Marvel is a cherished tool for creating interactive app and web prototypes.
4. UXPin: Known for its advanced interaction design features and ability to create responsive prototypes, UXPin is ideal for designers seeking high-fidelity models.
5. Justinmind: Offering robust simulation and interaction, Justinmind is the tool for designers who want to create lifelike, high-fidelity prototypes.
6. Treejack: Tree testing software specializing in information architecture validation is ideal for ensuring your designs are structured to ensure optimum user understanding.
7. Freehand by Invision: An online whiteboarding tool that allows for seamless collaboration in the cloud, making creativity and feedback gathering a breeze.
8. Sketch: A dominant force in the world of UX design, Sketch offers a vast library of plugins, a robust community, and features catered to UX and UI design.
9. Wondershare Mockitt: A newbie in the UI/UX space but one with fast-growing popularity, Wondershare Mockitt offers an intuitive design experience and quick prototyping.
10. Framer: Positioned at the intersection of design and code, Framer is for designers with a coding background who want to create complex prototypes.

Top Recommendations for Product Development Software

Product development software is crucial in product creation, aiding collaboration, version control, and project management. Here are a few tools that excel in this arena:

1. Monday.com: With its customizable workflows, monday.com fits the bill for project management with a creative twist, making it suitable for design-heavy projects.
2. Craft.io: Adaptable collaboration tools and prioritization are Craft.io’s strong suits, alongside its robust user-story mapping and backlog grooming features.
3. Miro: Thanks to its collaborative nature and many templates, Miro is an excellent fit for cross-functional team collaboration and brainstorming.
4. Amplitude: Focused on product intelligence, Amplitude’s analytics and behaviour tracking help understand user engagement and feature adoption.
5. Unleash: An AI-powered platform that democratizes product analytics, helping whole teams to make informed decisions based on customer feedback and data.
6. Pendo: An all-in-one platform that combines product intelligence and user guidance to improve digital product adoption, retention, and growth.
7. Planview Clarizen: A project management and work collaboration software that manages the entire life cycle of your product development process.
8. Businessmap: A Norway-based product management software that provides a unique approach to product development, combining elements from business and customer maps.
9. Planview Enterprise One: A comprehensive tool that covers strategic and business projects, integrated with financials and resource management for complete product development control.
10. Pie: Pie is software specifically targeting product development teams. It focuses on version control and task management to keep creative projects on track.

Product Analytics Tools for Uncovering Usage Trends

Data is the backbone of informed decision-making. Product analytics tools to track and analyze user behaviour, providing the insights necessary to refine products:

1. Quantum Metric: An all-encompassing platform for tech and product teams, Quantum Metric offers a unique combination of real-time user behaviour analysis and session replay.
2. Google Analytics: The most widely-used analytics platform, Google Analytics provides a free and powerful way to track and report on website traffic and user behaviour.
3. UXCam: To improve app experiences, UXCam goes beyond the screen and event tracking, offering deep insights into user engagement and retention.
4. Mixpanel: A leader in mobile and web analytics, Mixpanel specializes in event-based analytics, A/B testing, and user survey functionalities.
5. Pendo: Besides its product intelligence features, Pendo’s analytics and in-app user surveys provide robust metrics for understanding user behaviour and needs.
6. Heap: Renowned for its automated event tracking and retroactive analysis, Heap takes the data collection burden off the development team and provides them with a treasure trove of insights.
7. Dragonboat: A feature tracking software designed to help small teams understand how users interact with their product, execute a clear feature delivery strategy and measure the impacts.
8. LogRocket: A frontend monitoring platform that records user sessions on your site, allowing you to solve issues more quickly and understand what features your users most value.
9. InnerTrends: An analytics tool specifically focused on SaaS companies, InnerTrends uses AI to identify and prioritize actions to improve your product’s retention and growth.
10. Zoho Analytics: Offering much more than traditional analytics, Zoho Analytics allows for deep visualization and reporting, combining data across different sources for a comprehensive understanding.

Management Software To Centralize Stakeholder Input

The right management software can help foster innovation within your team. From idea generation to implementation, these platforms encourage and refine creative thought:

1. Zeda.io: Powered by AI, Zeda.io’s brainstorming and innovation tools provide a data-driven approach to idea management, ensuring only top ideas.
2. Yambla: Branded as an “idea management software for the modern mind,” Yambla focuses on enhancing idea flow within teams through digital tools and processes.
3. Miro: With its extensive toolkit for collaboration and brainstorming, Miro excels in capturing and refining ideas from team members dispersed across the globe.
4. FigJam by Figma: In an innovative twist to idea management, Figma’s FigJam provides an online whiteboard environment with rich digital collaboration features.
5. Brightidea: A long-standing platform for crowdsourcing and idea management, BrightIdea has proven processes to take ideas from anywhere and make them a reality.
6. Ideawake: Focused solely on idea generation and management, Ideawake is a great way to engage employees at all levels to contribute to the innovation process.
7. Reveall: Employing the power of collective intelligence, Reveall combines AI with human analysis to ensure the best ideas are found and acted upon.
8. Idea Drop: A modern take on idea management, Idea Drop specializes in spreading the creative culture within an organization, making it easy for every voice to.
9. Mural: A digital workspace for visual collaboration, Mural provides a canvas to begin with an idea and end with a big picture.
10. Coda: Part document, part app; Coda allows teams to create documents as powerful as apps, enabling the amalgamation of idea management with task execution and tracking.

Heatmap Software for Improved User Experience

Heatmap software is a crucial component of user experience analysis. These tools provide visual representations of user interaction with your product, web page, or app:

1. Mouseflow: Known for its comprehensive session recordings and heatmap tool, Mouseflow helps you see how users use your site or app.
2. Smartlook: With a focus on behavioural analytics, Smartlook’s session recordings and funnel analysis tools make it a breeze to identify user struggles and areas for improvement.
3. FullStory: Renowned for its pixel-perfect session playback and console logs of user activity, FullStory offers a comprehensive view of user behaviour.
4. Hotjar: A popular choice for user feedback and behaviour analytics, Hotjar’s heatmaps, recordings, and surveys provide an all-in-one solution.
5. Looker: A data exploration and business intelligence platform, Looker enables custom heatmap creations based on complex user behaviour queries.
6. LiveSession: An all-in-one platform for session replays, heatmaps, funnels, and form analytics, LiveSession provides comprehensive and easy-to-understand insights.
7. Lucky Orange: Combining dynamic heatmaps with live chat and session recordings, Lucky Orange allows for deeper understanding and engagement with site visitors.
8. MapBusinessOnline: Though a tool more centred on mapping and business analysis, MapBusinessOnline’s heat map capabilities are excellent for spatial analysis of user behaviour.
9. Contentsquare: A behavioural analytics solution focusing on experience optimization, Contentsquare offers AI-powered insights and predictive heat mapping.
10. Matomo: An open-source web analytics platform, Matomo allows you to self-host your analytics data, giving you complete control and privacy over your heatmap analysis.

Software for User Onboarding to Enhance User Retention

User onboarding tools to guide new users through the initial stages of using your product or service to increase product adoption and customer retention:

1. UserGuiding: A user onboarding and self-serve knowledge base that helps product teams bring better user experiences to life without coding.
2. Absorb LMS: Absorb LMS trains external customers and internal staff. Absorb LMS provides user onboarding modules for various learning and information dissemination scenarios.
3. Product Fruits: Combining user onboarding with feature adoption, Product Fruits helps SaaS companies create user experiences that users love and return to.
4. Apty: Apty’s onboarding experience extends beyond the product to include software integrations and enterprise applications.
5. Userpilot: Known for its no-code user onboarding and product adoption platform, Userpilot helps product managers engage with new users and guide them successfully.
6. Appcues: A tool for in-app user engagement and onboarding, Appcues enables you to create personalized in-app experiences at scale without engineering resources.
7. GuideCX: A client onboarding and project management platform, GuideCX is perfect for managing customer onboarding in complex industries and for regulated entities.
8. WalkMe: With a focus on digital adoption, WalkMe offers a cloud-based service that guides users through the onboarding and adoption process in their environment.
9. Intercom: Best known for its live chat and customer support features, Intercom’s user onboarding tool helps companies connect with new users and provide personalized onboarding experiences.
10. Pendo: Pendo’s onboarding tool works seamlessly with the rest of its product intelligence suite and helps product teams guide users through the product effectively.

Tools for User Research to Boost Retention Rates

User research tools are indispensable when understanding your user base’s needs, preferences, and pain points. Here are some of the most popular and effective:

1. SurveyLegend: With its engaging and responsive survey tools, SurveyLegend helps product managers collect valuable insights from their user base.
2. UserTesting: The go-to platform for user research, UserTesting allows you to watch and listen to real people as they interact with your product or service.
3. Hotjar: Beyond heatmaps and session recordings, Hotjar offers tools for collecting user feedback through on-site polls and surveys.
4. WEVO: A unique platform that uses AI to predict how target audiences react to your marketing and site experiences before launching.
5. Discus: Focused on community feedback, Discus helps build engaged communities around your products and gather insights through discussion forums.
6. UsabilityHub: A remote user testing platform where you can test everything from wireframes to live websites, UsabilityHub is quickly becoming a staple for designers and PMs.
7. Userback: A visual feedback solution that collects and manages customer feedback directly from your product or website, Userback makes it easy to understand where your users struggle or what they love most.
8. Maze: A platform for testing products in the design stage, Maze allows testing prototypes and concept models with users around the globe.
9. Wynter: Specializing in copy testing, Wynter focuses on qualitative insights from user testing to help optimize your product messaging.
10. Feedback Loop: Its integrated customer discovery platform allows product teams to validate market opportunities and iterate on product concepts through user feedback.

Product Marketing Tools

Creating a great product is only half the battle; the other half is letting the world know about it. Product marketing tools to automate and streamline marketing efforts:

1. UserGuiding: A platform combining user onboarding, a self-serve knowledge base, and user guides to enhance the product marketing experience.
2. Product Fruits: Tailored towards SaaS companies, Product Fruits provides insights to improve feature adoption, customer engagement, and overall product marketing strategy.
3. UserTesting: By testing customer interactions and gathering data, UserTesting helps product teams understand how their marketing materials resonate with the intended audience.
4. Segment: A customer data platform that allows for better targeting of marketing efforts through the aggregation and analysis of user data across all touchpoints.
5. BuzzSumo: A tool that helps identify content trends and key influencers, BuzzSumo is invaluable for optimizing content marketing strategies.
6. Amplitude: With its strong focus on customer behaviour analysis, to craft data-driven marketing campaigns and product messaging.
7. HubSpot: An all-in-one inbound marketing platform that provides tools for social media, content management, SEO, and email marketing, all under one roof.
8. Hotjar: Besides its heat map and user behaviour tools, Hotjar’s feedback polls and surveys gather user data crucial for targeted product marketing. 
9. Intercom: Not just a customer support platform, Intercom’s in-app messages and chatbots are pivotal in engaging users and guiding them to value.
10. Drift: A conversational marketing platform powered by AI, Drift’s chatbots and live chat support help nurture leads and convert users through personalized conversation journeys.

Conclusion

The product management and design world is rich with tools that empower you to make decisions and create and market products with insights and efficiency. By leveraging the appropriate toolkit, you can ensure that every phase of the product life cycle, from inception to adoption, is supported by the technology that best suits your vision and execution style. Remember, the best tools are the ones that seamlessly integrate into your workflow, provide tangible value, and scale with the growth of your product.