Comparison
Openbook vs Frill
Frill is what a lot of teams actually want when they go looking at Canny and flinch at the price: a clean widget, a public board where customers post and vote, a simple roadmap and a changelog, for a fraction of the cost. It is deliberately small, it looks good, and it does not ask you to model anything before you can use it.
Openbook covers the same ground with a Feedback room — public portal, voting, categories and boards, statuses that drive a roadmap, a changelog that notifies everyone who asked — and adds the thing a standalone tool structurally cannot: the board where the work gets planned is in the same workspace, on the same bill. Frill is a genuinely good product and this comparison does not pretend otherwise; the question is whether you want a well-made single-purpose tool or the same loop inside the place your team already works.
Openbook is completely free right now — any prices below describe the planned paid tiers.
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Credit where due: what Frill does well
Being cheap and immediately understandable
Frill's pricing is a fraction of the enterprise feedback tools and its interface can be understood in a minute. For a small company that wants a public roadmap this week, that combination is hard to argue with.
A polished embeddable widget
The Frill widget drops into your product and looks like it belongs there, with theming that lets it match your brand closely. It is one of the better-executed parts of the product.
Announcements as a first-class surface
Frill treats changelog announcements seriously, with a widget that shows unread updates in-product. Telling customers what shipped is the step teams skip most, and Frill makes it hard to skip.
Custom domains and branding on modest plans
Running the portal on your own domain, with your own look, does not require an expensive tier. For a customer-facing surface, that matters more than it sounds.
Where Openbook wins
The request and the work live together
Frill is a separate product, so an accepted request becomes a ticket somewhere else and the two records drift. In Openbook the roadmap column is a board your team plans in, so there is nothing to copy across.
Boards you can shape, not one fixed board
An Openbook feedback room holds as many typed boards as you want — feedback, roadmap with columns you name and reorder, changelog — so a board for a specific launch or a "what people hate" board is a ten-second decision.
Revenue-weighted prioritisation built in
Openbook tracks companies and users with MRR and ARR, so a request shows the revenue behind it and the list can be sorted by it, with custom weighted scoring factors and saved segments. Frill's prioritisation is lighter.
Everything else your team needs is already there
Frill does feedback; you still pay separately for project management, docs, whiteboards and chat. Openbook's feedback room sits alongside 18 room types in one workspace and one bill.
Side by side
Openbook vs Frill, feature by feature
| Feature | Openbook | Frill |
|---|---|---|
| Price today | Free — everything included | Per user, per month |
| Public feedback portal, no account needed | Yes | Yes |
| Embeddable widget | Yes | Yes, polished |
| Voting and vote-on-behalf | Yes | Voting yes |
| Duplicate detection & merging | Yes | Yes |
| Roadmap with custom columns | Yes, name and reorder your own | Fixed roadmap |
| Changelog / announcements | Yes, notifies voters | Yes, in-product widget |
| Revenue-weighted prioritisation | Yes, MRR and ARR per request | Limited |
| Custom scoring factors & segments | Yes | No |
| Custom domain & branding | Yes | Yes |
| Kanban boards, docs, whiteboards, chat | Yes, 18 room types | No |
| Entry price | Free — everything included right now | Low monthly fee |
| Included in the base plan | Yes | Separate subscription |
Choose Openbook if…
- Teams who want the feedback board beside the Kanban board rather than in another tab.
- Companies who would rather not add a third or fourth subscription to collect requests.
- Product teams who want revenue-weighted prioritisation without paying enterprise prices for it.
Stick with Frill if…
- Companies who only need a public roadmap and changelog and already like their other tools.
- Teams who want the most polished embeddable widget for the lowest monthly cost.
- Anyone who wants a single-purpose tool and considers a broader workspace a downside.
The verdict
Frill is a good product at a fair price, and if a public roadmap is genuinely the only thing you need, it will do the job without fuss. The catch is that it is another subscription and another tab, and the request it captures still has to become work somewhere else. Openbook covers the same loop, adds revenue-weighted prioritisation and roadmap columns you define yourself, and puts it next to the board, docs and chat your team already uses. If you are choosing your first feedback tool, the question worth asking is not which is cheaper this month but how many products you want to be paying for in a year.
FAQ
Common questions
Is Openbook more expensive than Frill?+
Compared feature for feature on feedback alone, Frill is cheaper. The comparison that usually matters is total cost: Frill plus a project tool plus docs plus chat, against one Openbook subscription that includes all of them. If you are only ever going to buy a feedback tool, Frill is the cheaper line item.
Can Openbook replace Frill?+
Yes. The public portal, voting, duplicate merging, roadmap and changelog are all there, and Openbook adds revenue-weighted prioritisation and custom roadmap columns that Frill does not have. The one place Frill is ahead is the in-product announcements widget.
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 votes and posts are recognised when they return, and if they leave an email they are told when their request ships.
Can we run the portal on our own domain?+
Yes. The portal has its own link and can carry your branding, so it reads as part of your product rather than a third-party page.
What if we outgrow the simple version?+
That is the usual reason teams leave a lightweight tool: they start needing segments, weighted scoring and revenue on each request. Those are already in Openbook, so growing into them does not mean another migration.
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