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Powerful software tools such as product roadmap management software are essential for successful product manufacturing. How else can you manage communication and resources, connect remote teams, and complete projects on time without them? While some business tools appear to be a catch-all solution for everything in your business, selecting the right tools for your needs is important. When comparing different tools, it's important to consider various factors to ensure that you select the one that best fits your team's needs and workflow.
Comparing Software Platforms
In this article, we'll cover the following nine points and why they're important to consider when comparing software platforms:
- Who is the tool built for?
- What do you need from the software?
- What features and capabilities does the software have?
- What is the learning curve?
- Can the software be customized?
- Does the software integrate with other tools?
- Does the platform facilitate collaboration?
- Is the software scalable?
- What is the security and privacy?
Who Is the Tool Built For?
Gocious Focuses on Product Decision Makers and Product Management Teams
Gocious software is a product roadmap management platform designed for product decision-makers. Many contributors are usually involved in helping a product succeed, including product executives, product managers, production managers, and supply chain managers. Other functional areas that can benefit from access to Gocious include quality assurance teams, sales teams, marketing teams, engineering leads, financial leads, and other key stakeholders.
Gocious product roadmap management software focuses on what decision-makers need, providing high-level overviews of entire product portfolios rather than managing the steps necessary for a single project. By zooming out, Gocious reduces the noise for managers and executives, thereby providing a more holistic understanding of where the company’s products and entire portfolio stand. Gocious also offers integrations for other task management software tools to connect all of the pieces needed to facilitate effective product manufacturing.
Monday.com Focuses on Work Management, Sales, and Development Task Management
Monday.com is a robust tool that focuses on simplifying work and task management. The company offers three different software products for work management, sales management, and product development task management. Overall, Monday.com serves a range of users, including teams and professionals from project management, marketing, sales, HR, product development, IT, and beyond. Its customizable nature and wide range of integrations make it adaptable to diverse needs and workflows, including hardware-focused product teams.
Aha! Focuses on Product Development and Task Management
Aha! consists of five main tools focused on helping teams plan their product development work and manage their tasks. The platform is most useful for product managers and teams like marketing or product development. By integrating with popular project management and communication platforms, the platform fluidly connects users in different teams and seamlessly integrates into their respective workflows.
Jira Focuses on Work Management, Sales, and Development Task Management
Jira is geared toward product development teams within organizations offering software products. The Jira Software can assist development, IT, marketing, design, and operations teams with their primary responsibilities through planning and automation. Product teams can benefit from Jira Product Discovery, where users can collaborate on product ideas together, voting for specific ideas to prioritize, and aligning teams with roadmaps. The tool largely serves product development teams by creating a space for planning and collaboration and integrates with Jira’s other tools like Jira Software, Workflow Management, Service Management, Align, and more.
What Do You Need From the Software?
Determining which software is right for your company’s needs begins with assessing what areas of work you could use additional support in. Many SaaS programs are loaded with features that may be helpful for one user type but not for another. If some of your needs aren’t being met, you’ll have to pivot to make up for the lacking feature. The right software will ensure your team always has the right tools for the job.
What Features and Capabilities Does the Software Have?
Gocious Product Roadmap Management Software Features
Product managers can use Gocious to plan, communicate, and organize their product plans. The platform supports cross-functional collaboration and gives all stakeholders portfolio insight. Gocious was made to manage the product roadmaps for any type of product, with many fields for setting qualities, features, and requirements available to accurately reflect each product configuration within your portfolio. This customizability lets you also create dashboards with different views depending on the role of the user.
Executives may opt for high-level overviews, while product managers may want to analyze their products more granularly and drill down to product line, market, component, or status. The tool also helps other stakeholders get updated on the status of any product with just a click and follow along with milestone tracking, making production management easier than ever.
Prioritizing and scoring ideas is easy within the platform. Users can add prioritization decisions to roadmaps within the same tool. Furthermore, timeline management and roadmap visuals let product teams view and organize product initiatives, such as easily shifting production timelines to adapt to changes in the market. Additional integrations with product lifecycle management systems make real-time data transfer and updates possible during planning and production.
At Gocious, we’re committed to releasing new platform features to make product collaboration between decision-makers and other stakeholders. With all of these stakeholders needing different pieces of information, customization makes it easy to avoid overcomplicating the platform dashboards. Gocious gives product managers an easily digestible and tailored experience to derive information that fuels their daily decisions.
Monday.com Software Features
Monday.com offers a platform for teams to facilitate efficient production management across three primary areas. The software comprises three products: Work Management, Sales CRM, and Development.
The work management side of the tool includes robust project management features such as assigning, approving, or rejecting tasks, along with resource management features. Users can assign tasks to others and track progress with built-in communication options, including comments, tagging, attachments, and additional features.
The sales CRM has features for managing a database of contacts, sales pipeline, and email tracking. Users can also save time by automating repetitive actions like sales pipelines. The development side of the tool includes tracking features for timeline, resource, and production management. The tool is also a great all-in-one option for those willing to explore platform customizations through the open API.
Aha! Software Features
Aha! offers a platform for product development teams to plan their work, collaborate, and organize their ideas. Aha’s suite of tools comprises five products:
- Product Roadmaps
- Ideas
- Whiteboards
- Knowledge
- Develop
These tools are meant to provide end-to-end support for the product development process, beginning with developing a vision and goal for the product and ending with analyzing the success of the product post-launch.
The work management side of the tool includes product portfolio management features such as roadmapping and visual spaces for product design. Product planning features include allowing teams to crowdsource customer feedback, gather customer insights, create an AI-powered product information hub, and use an Agile planning tool.
Development teams will benefit from the features available for each stage of the product development process. Highlights include the ability to create internal knowledge repositories, wireframing capabilities, and performance metric analysis.
Jira Software Features
Jira gives product development teams a dedicated area for their work. The tool integrates with Jira’s other tools to guarantee that cross-functional collaboration is never disjointed.
Good product teams listen to their users. Jira helps facilitate this mantra by allowing users to capture ideas by collecting product opportunities, user feedback, and feature requests on the platform.
Support for feature prioritization includes graphs for comparing different values and fields, such as how much impact one feature will have over another. These graphs become important decision support tools for teams looking to make data-fueled decisions.
Roadmaps and production schedules can be created and shared with stakeholders and discussed with comments or votes. Goals and impact scores for product initiatives can be defined, helping those viewing the roadmap understand the state of the portfolio easily.
Is the Software Easy to Use?
The learning curve that comes with new software tools is important to consider. Your professionals are busy. They require software that's intuitive to use and comes with easy-to-access tutorials or direct support from the developers to train your teams to use the software.
Platforms that exist to support your teams with their complex responsibilities need to be intuitive. New software takes time to learn and should be designed with new users in mind. Tutorials, onboarding processes, and other training materials need to be easily understood and accessible. With the right software, manufacturers can streamline workflows and decision-making processes.
The Gocious User Experience
The Gocious platform is thoughtfully structured for executives, product decision-makers, production teams, and other manufacturing teams. Each new feature added provides users with an intuitive and visually clear user experience. Users will also find customization options to suit their product management purposes.
Our onboarding process, including a dedicated 1-on-1 training session for all plan types, helps new users learn to use the platform effectively and efficiently. Users looking for more support can access resources like tutorials, webinars, and other documentation. As a service under continuous development, Gocious also prioritizes user feedback, with each iteration improving its ability to address user needs. Between the product platforms' thoughtful design, customizability, and user support options, Gocious is intuitive and easy to get your team started with.
The Monday.com User Experience
The Monday.com platform also has an intuitive and visually appealing interface that emphasizes simplicity. Managers have access to customizable features, including automation processes that save time through user-made workflows. Customer support is also well-documented on the website, including help articles, video tutorials, and a support team.
Tours and tutorials help users learn to navigate the platform's functionality, allowing them to get up to speed at their own pace. Real-time communication options like comments and notifications make collaborating easier within the platform. While project managers will benefit from the platform's features, the open-ended workflows can require additional learning.
The Aha! User Experience
The Aha! platform also has an intuitive and clean interface that is easy to navigate. Customizability is also a prominent feature within the platform, allowing users to customize the tool to align with their needs.
Customer support is thorough and well-documented, including guided tours, help articles, and tutorials to help users get started with the platform and learn to navigate it effectively. Support is also available for users with questions, including a community forum and Aha! support staff for more specific questions.
Jira User Experience
Jira Product Discovery is easy to use and follows a simple design theme so that important information is emphasized. Fields can be customized for users to format the platform as needed.
Users have access to tutorials, guides, and documentation to help them get started on Jira. Guides for configuring boards are available, as well as online support, live chat, and phone support from Atlassian. Community forums are also open for users to discuss usage. Jira training courses and certifications are also offered for those looking for additional designations.
Are There Customization Options?
Workplace productivity tools require customization options because work varies across roles and companies. Editing fields, features, processes, and reporting visuals are all important features that a good tool needs to have, especially for manufacturers looking to streamline workflow management. We will be examining the customization options offered by each product.
Gocious: Customizing Product Roadmaps
Reducing complexity and helping decision-makers zoom into important data is what the Gocious product roadmap management software excels at. Unnecessary information creates visual clutter and increases the amount of time needed to review an update. The dashboard can be customized to only include the KPIs and high-risk initiatives most important to an executive. Product managers are left with an accurate understanding of the state of product lines and portfolios with a simple glance. Executives are presented with a different view that only includes the information that is most important to them.
Within products, Gocious also allows feature, attribute, and dependency customizations to perfectly reflect your product configuration. The user can set custom attributes to meet their organization's unique requirements. Jira work management integrations are also available, enabling collaboration with other stakeholders like technical development teams or engineers. The customization options offered by Gocious let users work the way they want, with an interface that makes work simple.
Monday.com: Customizing Workflows and Processes
Users can customize the dashboards on Monday.com to shuffle the configuration of tasks, projects, and workflows to meet an organization's specific requirements. Columns and fields within dashboards can be reconfigured with users selecting from field options like text, checkboxes, drop downs, and more.
External tool integrations also exist, including communication tools, CRM systems, and more. For those looking for a pre-built base to start with, Monday.com also provides a library of templates for different use cases. The highly adaptable interface lets project managers organize their projects with a tailored platform for their task management and communications needs.
Aha!: Customizing Workflows and Processes
Aha! offers comprehensive product management customization options for users to change the platform for their needs. Users can create custom workflows to manage ideas, features, and releases. This ensures users can track their product lifecycle from ideation to delivery.
Custom roadmaps, fields, reports, and integrations are also available. Notably, Aha! gives administrators control over managing user permissions by assigning user roles. These customization options give users the ability to manage product development and collaboration effectively.
Jira: Customizing Workflows and Processes
Fields and formulas in Jira Product Discovery can both be customized, allowing users to derive custom insights similarly to how they would within a spreadsheet. Users can edit their avatars and names to differentiate between each other as well.
Jira excels in its integration options, as one of the most used product development platforms. The Jira tools integrate, as well with popular communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, letting users share ideas off the platform too. The open Jira Cloud API opens the doors for many other tools to connect to the software, including tested examples using external tools to update ideas in Jira Product Discovery.
Does the Software Integrate with Other Tools?
Most businesses have an existing tech stack which they expect new tools to integrate with seamlessly. Having these integrations makes work easier and allows for changes in one platform to be automatically reflected in the other or additional automation possibilities.
Gocious Integrations
As a platform for executives and product decision-makers, Gocious’ integrations with Jira, the most popular tool for agile project managers, clearly demonstrate their commitment to their target users. Allowing updates in one platform to be shown in the other in real-time means that product teams do not need to update two platforms separately and executives do not need to check two platforms to stay up-to-date on the status of the business’s product portfolio.
This integration allows for immediate access to information and improves the user experience for all stakeholders. The Gocious team is also always looking for suggestions from customers to develop new connectivity features with popular applications.
Monday.com Integrations
Monday.com is a highly customizable project management platform with over 200 integrations with external tools. These integrative tools include communication platforms like Slack, Teams, and Outlook, as well as collaboration platforms such as Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Zoom.
Marketing, CRM, finance, and development are other types of tools that can connect to Monday.com. Teams that cannot find existing integrations with their favorite tools can use the open API to create their custom integration.
Aha! Integrations
Aha! integrates easily into most tech stacks, offering over 30 different integrations with other tools. These include communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, tracking platforms like Salesforce and Zendesk, and technical platforms like Azure DevOps and GitHub.
Project management, calendars, and task trackers are other types of tools that can connect to Aha! Users can usually integrate Aha! into their tech stack easily.
Does the Platform Have Collaboration Features?
The ability to collaborate with other stakeholders is essential for any platform. Gocious, Monday.com, Aha!, and Jira offer collaborative features, including assigning ownership, making comments, and generating reports, with some differences.
Collaborating with Gocious
Collaboration within Gocious is simple. Our product portfolio platform improves collaboration within product management teams and between stakeholders. Task assignments and real-time updates allow everyone to see the same data and facilitate better teamwork. Additionally, reports are easily generated by exporting different product views to present to stakeholders who may need them.
Another important collaboration feature of Gocious product roadmap management software is the ability to score ideas and prioritize the next best features using formulas and prioritization charts directly in the platform. This capability makes product decision meetings much simpler to facilitate, present to executives, and follow up with action.
Collaborating with Monday.com
Teams that use Monday.com can collaborate on various boards by inviting relevant collaborators to share access. Project managers can assign various levels of access, depending on the level of administration each user requires. Task management is an important feature of Monday.com, and users can assign tasks to others, set deadlines, track progress, and communicate through comments. Notifications inform users of their upcoming and overdue tasks, allowing for better goal-setting, productivity, and communication.
Collaborating with Aha!
Collaboration is a key element of Aha! with many features helping users engage in communication and teamwork. The platform itself is a centralized platform that allows product managers, engineers, designers, and marketers to work on product planning and development together. Communication options include commenting, mentioning, and discussing work items like features and requirements. Teams can also create and share roadmaps, capture ideas, and use the integrations offered with other platforms to do it all fluidly.
Collaborating with Jira
Jira Product Discovery users can collaboratively share insight contributions in the product development tool. Users invited to the project on Jira can create shareable roadmaps together and gather their product design insights in one place. This bridges the gap between business and production teams, letting both types of users share their ideas and opinions.
Product ideas can be created as a work item within the platform that users can write a comment or insight on. Insights are used to support the idea, taking the form of support tickets, customer feedback, or other pieces of supplemental data. Users can rate the impact level of each insight, shaping the prioritization of insights and ideas.
Is the Software Scalable?
Growing companies need platforms that can scale with their growth. A scalable software will tackle increasing complexities and workloads with ease.
The Scalability of Gocious
Created to oversee expanding product portfolios, Gocious product roadmap management software has high scalability and accommodates a range of users and additional products. Dynamic views ensure users can zoom into a granular view or zoom out for high-level overviews. The platform seamlessly manages growing portfolios while still producing decision-support insights that product and production managers need. Teams looking for a tool that evolves with their growing portfolio and increasing production volume can rely on Gocious.
The Scalability of Monday.com
By diversifying its offerings and offering project management, sales CRM, and product development, Monday.com is scalable for growing companies looking to house this data in one platform. As an open software, the tool is designed for people to create the work functions that they need. Thus, the only limitation is the user's ability to visualize processes and integrations.
The Scalability of Aha!
Aha! can be used by small and large companies, accommodating the needs of businesses of all sizes. The platform is robust and offers scalable pricing plans to meet growing companies' needs. The five primary products within Aha! are paid for separately and on a user-to-user basis. Its performance, customizations, and integrations are well-built, and companies can determine which products to use and how much to use them.
The Scalability of Jira
Jira accommodates teams of varying sizes and supports the management of multiple concurrent projects. Whether managing a single product or multiple products simultaneously, Jira can help product development stakeholders meet their ideation and information organization needs. The platform is great for handling large quantities of data and users.
What Is the Security and Privacy?
The safety of your company data should never be in question. However, security breaches and data leaks occur with companies using services that have not properly implemented secure data practices. Ensure your tech stack follows industry security standards to protect your product designs, production plans, and customer info.
Security and Privacy with Gocious
A product roadmap contains a company's product strategy, upcoming plans for product features, and production schedules. This information is highly sensitive and requires the highest security measures. In 2023, Gocious received ISO/IEC 27001:2013 designation, one of the strictest international security standards.
Security and Privacy with Monday.com
Monday.com handles customer data, business plans, and highly sensitive information. The platform conforms to industry standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27018, and OWASP Top 10.
Security and Privacy with Aha!
Aha! Customers store important product plans and data on the platform. The company stores cloud data in Amazon Web Services data centers which are highly protected. Aha! is also ISO 27001 certified.
Security and Privacy with Jira
Jira has extensive data security processes in place, including encryption and its own ZeroTrust security architecture which requires user verification before access to data. Jira has ISO27001, SOC2, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP certifications.
Product Comparison Summary
Gocious is the product roadmap management software that makes collaboration easier than ever for manufacturers. It ensures decision-makers, product teams, and technical teams always have a view of the overall product portfolio. With customizable, easy-to-understand dashboards, executives can access the most important details without all the noise.
Monday.com gives project managers, and those looking for an all-in-one solution for their CRM, development, and task management needs a highly flexible and open-ended tool. The platform is made to support team coordination and project management.
Aha! offers those involved in product development key features for their work. Those looking for support throughout each stage of the product life cycle may benefit from learning about their roadmapping, idea planning, whiteboarding, knowledge, and development of products.
Jira is primarily for project managers, software development teams, and Agile teams working on software development. The platform is not specifically designed for hardware project management but its customizability, integrations with other tools, and collaboration features still make it useful for product managers and technical users. This is especially true for the Jira Product Discovery product, which includes road mapping, idea organization, and decision analysis.
Each platform is a powerful business tool. Where the services differ is in their intended user. Selecting the right software for your business needs will ensure you have the tools to succeed in your objectives.
Gocious: The Product Roadmap Software for Decision-Makers & Product Managers
Looking for a software platform built for product executives and product managers? Schedule a free demo today to learn more about how your organization can use Gocious' product roadmap management software to improve transparency and keep teams aligned across initiatives.