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Which user feedback tools would you recommend?
Hey everyone,
I'm currently getting close to releasing a piece of software and I think that engaging users and collecting their feedback to inform the development of future features is valuable. So, I am currently evaluating different specialized solutions to see which one is best.
Does anybody have a preference for a particular tool, or otherwise know which tools are the best in terms of functionality etc.?
Thanks in advance for your input!
I'll go back to comparing options and I'll check back in here later on. Have a nice one.
Edit: To clarify, I am looking for an end user-facing tool for a (currently closed-source) SaaS (I may eventually open-source it, but I'm a bit on the fence-I would have to weigh the pros and cons).
Depends on the audience, I would say.
Developer libraries can easily make do with GitHub issues + wiki pages.
End user-facing tools however, probably typically not, and I don’t really know any good tools for this purpose, either, unfortunately.
I can point to two very nicely done examples, though, which are facing (mostly) non-technical users: Kagi Feedback and Kagi’s Orion Feedback forums. I believe, however, that they’ve been developed in-house (not sure to what extent, and I might be mistaken). These are excellent – I cannot stress this enough – in times of unreachable megacorps’ online “bug report” forms, having a place for communication with both company & community, even on closed-source software, makes the development process appear very transparent, you actually hear back on your ideas and suggestions, and on top of that the releasing party operating under constrained resources can better gauge which features to prioritize, in this case through a voting system.
So in that regard, thank you for already considering this aspect ahead of time, which is more than can be said for all too many products/services. Hope this was somewhat related to your question and helpful despite my tangent.
Hey thanks for the quick response, I'll check this out! The tangent is fine, it's actually exactly what I'm aiming to do. I agree with you on that.
I find it sometimes frustrating when companies do not listen to their users enough. I've once told a company that I would be more than happy to upgrade to a paid plan if only they would implement certain features in a product of theirs that I'm using every day, but that hasn't happened yet. Maybe my feature requests are not widely requested by the larger userbase, who knows.
I think that it poses interesting questions in terms of "power", with regard to who gets to decide how a product evolves. At the end of the day, a product serves a userbase, so if users ask for a feature, why not implement it? Even if only a few of them ask for it, maybe it's very important to them, so much so that they literally spontaneously tell you that they want to pay. I find it frustrating when companies do not listen, and it may not even be in their best interest because a user may decide to launch their own product and then they have a new competitor. This isn't exactly the scenario I am currently in, but it's somewhat close.
I went on a tangent of my own.
Thank you again for the helpful response, and thanks for the kind words too
Edit: have you ever heard of Canny by any chance? It seems good at first glance.
Google Forms is easy to use.
I haven't done as much research as I would have wanted, because I am a bit of in a time crunch, but I have found Featurebase which seems really good, and has a very competitive pricing structure. I'll probably go with that, it seems great.