Comparison
Openbook vs Canny
Canny does one job and does it well: collect customer feedback, let people vote on it, and show them a roadmap and a changelog so they know you listened. If you have ever watched the same feature request arrive through five different support tickets, you already understand why the category exists. Canny turns that noise into a ranked list with the accounts and revenue attached.
Openbook includes a Feedback room that covers the same loop: public boards where customers post and vote, statuses that drive a roadmap, a changelog that notifies everyone who asked for the thing you shipped, and companies and users carrying MRR and ARR so the roadmap can be ranked by revenue rather than by who shouted loudest. The difference is where it lives. In Canny the feedback is a separate product your team logs into; in Openbook it sits beside the Kanban board where the work actually happens, in the same workspace, on the same bill. This page is an honest comparison, including what Canny still does better.
Openbook is completely free right now — any prices below describe the planned paid tiers.
Ready to leave? Read the Canny alternative page →
Credit where due: what Canny does well
Capturing feedback from everywhere automatically
Canny Autopilot reads sales and support conversations in Intercom, Zendesk, Gong and more, extracts the request, deduplicates it and files it under the right product area. If your feedback arrives buried in support threads rather than typed into a portal, that automation is the whole product and Openbook has no equivalent.
A mature, polished portal customers recognise
Canny has spent years on the details of the public portal: single sign-on so customers post as their existing account, granular board privacy, custom domains and branding, and a widget you can embed anywhere. It is a well-worn path with a lot of edge cases already handled.
Deep CRM and revenue integrations
Canny syncs with Salesforce and HubSpot so opportunity value, renewal risk and closed-lost deals flow into the prioritisation automatically. Openbook tracks the same numbers, but you enter or import them yourself rather than having them pulled from your CRM.
A large installed base and ecosystem
More than a hundred thousand companies use Canny, and it integrates with Jira, Linear, ClickUp and Slack out of the box. If you need feedback to push tickets into an existing engineering workflow, those paths are already built.
Where Openbook wins
Feedback next to the work, not in another tab
A Canny request becomes real work somewhere else, usually by copying it into Jira and hoping the two stay in sync. In Openbook the request and the Kanban card live in the same workspace, so the roadmap column a request sits in is the same board your team plans in.
Boards you can shape yourself
An Openbook feedback room can hold as many boards as you want, and each one is typed: a feedback board for requests, a roadmap board with columns you name and reorder yourself, or a changelog board. So a "What people hate" board with its own columns is a thing you can make in about ten seconds, not a workaround.
One bill instead of a second subscription
Canny is priced as a standalone product on top of whatever you already pay for project management, docs and chat. Openbook's feedback room is included in the same plan as the other room types, so collecting feedback does not add a line item.
Internal and external feedback on one surface
Openbook rooms sit inside a workspace your team already uses, so the same board serves the request your own designer raised and the one a customer posted through the portal. Internal requests and internal comments simply never appear on the public side.
Side by side
Openbook vs Canny, feature by feature
| Feature | Openbook | Canny |
|---|---|---|
| Price today | Free — everything included | Per user, per month |
| Public feedback portal, no account needed | Yes | Yes |
| Voting and vote-on-behalf | Yes | Yes |
| Duplicate detection & merging | Yes | Yes |
| Roadmap with custom columns | Yes, name and reorder your own | Status-based |
| Changelog that notifies voters | Yes | Yes |
| Revenue-weighted prioritisation | Yes, MRR and ARR per request | Yes |
| Customer segments | Yes | Yes |
| AI capture from support tickets | No | Yes, Autopilot |
| Salesforce & HubSpot sync | No | Yes |
| Jira / Linear ticket sync | Not needed, boards are built in | Yes |
| Kanban boards, docs, whiteboards, chat | Yes, 18 room types | No |
| Included in the base plan | Yes | Separate subscription |
Choose Openbook if…
- Teams who want customer feedback to sit beside the board where the work gets planned.
- Companies already paying for a project tool who do not want a second subscription just to collect requests.
- Product teams who want to shape their own boards and roadmap columns rather than fit a fixed workflow.
Stick with Canny if…
- Teams whose feedback arrives inside support and sales conversations and needs to be extracted automatically.
- Companies who need feedback tied to Salesforce or HubSpot opportunity data without manual entry.
- Product organisations that must push requests into an existing Jira or Linear workflow.
The verdict
Canny is the more specialised tool, and if your feedback lives inside support tickets and sales calls, Autopilot alone may justify it. What Canny cannot do is put the request next to the work. Openbook covers the same loop — portal, votes, duplicates, roadmap, changelog, revenue-weighted prioritisation — and puts it in the workspace where your boards, docs and chat already are, without a second subscription. If you are buying a feedback tool to sit alongside a project tool, it is worth asking whether you need two products at all.
FAQ
Common questions
Can Openbook replace Canny?+
For the core loop, yes: a public portal where customers post and vote, boards and categories, statuses that drive a roadmap, a changelog that notifies the people who voted, and revenue attached to each request. What it does not replace is Canny Autopilot, which mines your support and sales conversations for feedback automatically, or the CRM sync.
Do customers need an account to post?+
No. The portal has its own link and works signed out. A visitor is remembered by their browser, so their own votes and posts are recognised when they come back, and if they leave an email they get told when the thing they asked for ships.
How does prioritising by revenue work?+
You track companies and users with their ARR and MRR, and votes carry the customer behind them. Each request then shows the monthly revenue it represents, and the list can be sorted by it. You can also define scoring factors of your own and weight them, and save segments such as "paying customers" to re-rank the whole list through that lens.
What happens when we ship something?+
You write a changelog entry, link the requests it ships, and publish. Everyone following those requests is notified, and the entry appears on the public changelog with its type and labels. That last step is the part teams usually skip, which is why the same request keeps coming back.
How does pricing compare?+
Openbook's feedback room is part of the same plan as every other room type: free for teams up to 10, or $15 per user per month on Pro. Canny is a separate product priced on top of whatever you already use for project management.
More comparisons
Give your team one home
Start free with every room type included. No credit card required.