Why Most "Best PM Tools" Lists Are Useless
They list 30 tools alphabetically with marketing copy pulled from each tool's website. They slap "Best for enterprise" labels on half of them and "Best for startups" on the other half. They do not mention pricing honestly. They do not tell you which tools are actively improving and which are coasting on brand.
This is not that list.
These are 15 tools I have used, evaluated, or watched closely. Each one is here because it does something genuinely well for a specific type of team. I am opinionated about every pick. If you want the full comparison matrix with scoring across 40 tools, the PM Software Directory covers that. If you want a quick recommendation based on your team's profile, try the PM Tool Picker. This article is for the PM who wants context behind the recommendation.
Roadmapping and Planning
1. Linear
Best for: Engineering-heavy teams that want speed over features.
Linear is the anti-Jira. It is fast, keyboard-driven, and designed for teams that think in cycles rather than sprints. The triage system is excellent: incoming issues land in a triage queue, and the PM processes them without interrupting the team's focus.
Honest take: Linear assumes a specific workflow. If your process matches Linear's opinions (cycles, projects, triage), it is exceptional. If you want to customize everything, you will fight the tool. It is also weak on external stakeholder communication. There is no client-facing portal, no public roadmap view without workarounds.
Pricing: Free for small teams. $8/user/month for the standard plan. Reasonable for the quality.
Team size: 5-80 engineers. Below 5, it is overkill. Above 80, the limited customization starts to hurt.
2. Productboard
Best for: Customer-driven teams that prioritize based on user feedback.
Productboard's strength is its insight-to-feature pipeline. Customer feedback flows in from Intercom, Salesforce, and support tools. The PM tags insights to features. Over time, the feature backlog reflects actual user demand, not PM intuition.
Honest take: Productboard is powerful but complex. Onboarding takes 2-4 weeks before the team is productive. The roadmap views are adequate but not exceptional. Where Productboard earns its price is the feedback aggregation. If you get 50+ feature requests per month, Productboard turns noise into signal. If you get 10, a spreadsheet works fine.
Pricing: Starts at $20/maker/month. Gets expensive fast with larger teams. The pricing model (maker vs. contributor seats) is confusing.
Team size: 3-10 PMs. Best for teams with dedicated PM roles and a high volume of customer input.
3. Aha!
Best for: Enterprise teams that need formal roadmap presentations and executive reporting.
Aha! is the most feature-complete roadmapping tool on the market. Custom fields, workflow automations, Gantt charts, capacity planning, portfolio views. If your VP of Product needs a polished roadmap slide for the board meeting, Aha! produces it.
Honest take: Aha! is heavy. It is the enterprise ERP of product management: powerful but slow to configure and maintain. The UI feels dated compared to Linear or Productboard. Setup takes weeks, not hours. But for enterprise teams that need governance, approvals, and cross-portfolio visibility, nothing else comes close.
Pricing: $59/user/month and up. Enterprise pricing.
Team size: 10+ PMs across multiple product lines.
4. Notion
Best for: Early-stage teams that want one tool for everything (docs, wiki, roadmap, tasks).
Notion is not a product management tool. It is a workspace that teams bend into a PM tool. The flexibility is its strength: you can build a roadmap database, a PRD template system, a sprint board, and a team wiki in the same workspace. Notion databases with relations and rollups can approximate 80% of what dedicated PM tools do.
Honest take: Notion's flexibility is also its weakness. Every team's Notion workspace is different, which means new hires need onboarding on the team's specific setup, not just the tool. Performance degrades with large databases (1000+ items). And the lack of built-in prioritization frameworks means you are building your own. For the alternatives and trade-offs, see the full Notion alternatives analysis.
Pricing: Free for personal use. $10/user/month for teams. Excellent value.
Team size: 2-30 people. Beyond that, the lack of structure becomes a liability.
Analytics and Experimentation
5. Amplitude
Best for: Growth teams that need deep behavioral analytics and cohort analysis.
Amplitude is the standard for product analytics. Funnel analysis, retention charts, cohort comparisons, behavioral segmentation. The event-based data model is flexible enough to answer most product questions without involving a data engineer.
Honest take: Amplitude's learning curve is steep. Your first week will be frustrating. The query language is powerful but not intuitive. And the pricing cliff is real: the free tier is generous (up to 50M events/month), but the Growth plan jumps significantly. Plan your event taxonomy carefully or you will burn through your event budget on noise.
Pricing: Free tier is generous. Growth plan pricing is custom and not cheap.
Team size: Any team with a product generating significant user events.
6. PostHog
Best for: Technical teams that want analytics, feature flags, and session replay in one tool.
PostHog is the open-source alternative that has matured into a legitimate competitor. Session recordings, feature flags, A/B testing, and analytics in a single platform. The self-hosted option appeals to teams with data residency requirements.
Honest take: PostHog is excellent if your team has engineering capacity to set it up and maintain it. The cloud version reduces that burden, but you still need someone who understands event instrumentation. The analytics depth does not match Amplitude for complex behavioral queries, but for 80% of PM use cases, PostHog is more than sufficient. And the all-in-one approach eliminates the integration headaches of running separate analytics, feature flag, and session replay tools.
Pricing: Generous free tier. Usage-based pricing above that. Very startup-friendly.
Team size: 3-50 engineers. Best when at least one engineer is comfortable with data infrastructure.
7. Mixpanel
Best for: PMs who want powerful analytics with less engineering overhead than Amplitude.
Mixpanel occupies the middle ground. Easier to set up than Amplitude, more powerful than Google Analytics. The report builder is intuitive enough that PMs can self-serve most analyses without writing SQL.
Honest take: Mixpanel has had a rough few years. Leadership changes, pricing model shifts, and a pivot from "analytics for everyone" to "analytics for product teams" created confusion. The product is solid today, but the company's direction feels less certain than Amplitude's or PostHog's. If you are choosing between the three, I would pick PostHog for flexibility or Amplitude for depth. Mixpanel sits in between without a clear differentiator.
Pricing: Free up to 20M events/month. Growth plan is competitive with Amplitude.
Team size: Any.
Customer Feedback and Research
8. Canny
Best for: SaaS teams that want a public feedback board integrated into their product.
Canny does one thing well: it lets users submit, vote on, and track feature requests. The public roadmap view shows users what is planned, in progress, and shipped. For teams that want transparent product development, it is the cleanest option.
Honest take: Canny is narrow by design. It handles feature requests and public roadmaps. It does not do user research, analytics, or sprint planning. That narrowness is a feature if you already have tools for everything else and just need a clean feedback channel. It is a limitation if you want feedback connected directly to your planning workflow.
Pricing: Free tier available. Paid plans from $79/month.
Team size: B2B SaaS teams with an active user base that wants to participate in product direction.
9. Dovetail
Best for: UX research teams that need a repository for qualitative research.
Dovetail turns user interviews, surveys, and support tickets into tagged, searchable insights. The pattern recognition features help PMs spot themes across hundreds of data points. If your team does regular user research, Dovetail prevents the common problem of research living in individual Google Docs that nobody ever reads again.
Honest take: Dovetail requires discipline. The tool is only as useful as the data you put into it. If your team does not systematically tag and categorize insights, Dovetail becomes another place where data goes to die. Also, it is a research tool, not a PM tool. You still need something else for roadmapping, planning, and tracking.
Pricing: Free tier for individuals. Team plans from $29/user/month.
Team size: Teams with at least one dedicated researcher or a PM who does regular customer interviews.
Documentation and Knowledge Management
10. Confluence
Best for: Teams already in the Atlassian ecosystem (Jira, Bitbucket).
Confluence is the default documentation tool for Atlassian shops. Its deep integration with Jira (linked pages, embedded issue lists, project-level spaces) is genuinely useful for teams that standardize on the Atlassian stack. For Jira alternatives analysis, including when Confluence stops making sense, see the dedicated comparison.
Honest take: Confluence's editor has improved significantly, but it still feels slower than Notion or Google Docs. Search is mediocre. Page organization relies heavily on page trees that become unmaintainable over time. The main reason to choose Confluence is Jira integration. If you are not using Jira, there is no compelling reason to choose Confluence over alternatives.
Pricing: Free for up to 10 users. $6.05/user/month standard plan.
Team size: Teams using Jira. Everyone else should look elsewhere.
11. Notion
Notion appears twice because it genuinely serves two categories. As a documentation tool, it competes with Confluence. As a lightweight PM tool, it competes with Linear and Productboard. Most teams under 30 people should seriously consider Notion as their primary documentation platform. The wiki, docs, and knowledge base features are excellent.
12. Slite
Best for: Small teams that want a simple, fast knowledge base without Notion's complexity.
Slite positions itself as "Notion without the learning curve." The editor is clean, search is fast, and the Q&A feature (powered by AI) lets team members ask questions and get answers from the knowledge base. No database relations, no rollups, no custom properties.
Honest take: Slite is deliberately limited. That limitation is refreshing if you just want a place to write and find documents. But if you need structured data (product specs with custom fields, roadmap databases, sprint boards), Slite cannot do it. It is a documentation tool, not a work management tool. For teams with Asana or Linear handling work management, Slite fills the docs gap cleanly.
Pricing: Free for up to 50 docs. $8/user/month for standard.
Team size: 3-25 people.
Design Collaboration
13. Figma
Best for: Every product team. There is no close second.
Figma has won the design tool market. Real-time collaboration, dev mode for engineering handoff, FigJam for brainstorming, and a plugin ecosystem that covers everything from accessibility checks to design system management. If your team is not using Figma, you are using something worse.
Honest take: Figma's dominance creates a monoculture risk. The company knows it has no real competition, and the pricing reflects that (the price increase after the failed Adobe acquisition was not subtle). Dev mode, which was free, is now a paid add-on. Expect further price increases. Still, there is nothing else in this category worth recommending.
Pricing: Free for individuals. $15/editor/month for professional teams. $45/editor/month for organization.
Team size: Any team that has designers.
AI-Powered Tools
14. Cursor
Best for: Technical PMs who prototype features or write scripts.
Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built on VS Code. For PMs who dabble in code (writing SQL queries, building prototypes, creating data analysis scripts), Cursor's AI capabilities are a major productivity boost. Describe what you want in natural language and it generates working code. It is not a PM tool, but it makes technical PMs significantly more productive.
Honest take: Cursor is for PMs who already know some code. If you cannot read the code it generates, you cannot validate whether it is correct. It is also evolving rapidly: the feature set changes monthly. Worth the $20/month if you spend more than 2 hours per week in a code editor.
Pricing: Free tier available. Pro at $20/month.
Team size: Individual tool for technical PMs.
15. v0 by Vercel
Best for: PMs who want to create high-fidelity prototypes from text descriptions.
v0 generates React components from natural language prompts. Describe a pricing page, a dashboard layout, or a settings panel, and v0 produces a working component with real styling. For PMs who want to communicate product ideas visually without waiting for design resources, it is remarkably effective.
Honest take: v0 produces good-looking components, but they are isolated components, not integrated products. You still need engineering to connect them to data, handle state, and integrate with your existing codebase. It is best used for communicating direction, not for production code.
Pricing: Free tier with limited generations. Pro at $20/month.
Team size: Individual tool for PMs who want to prototype.
How to Choose: The Decision Framework
The PM tool stack guide goes deeper on assembling a complete stack. Here is the quick version:
| Team size | Recommended stack |
|---|---|
| 1-5 people | Notion + PostHog + Figma |
| 5-20 people | Linear + Amplitude or PostHog + Notion + Figma |
| 20-50 people | Linear or Productboard + Amplitude + Confluence or Notion + Figma + Canny |
| 50+ people | Aha! or Productboard + Amplitude + Confluence + Figma + Dovetail + Canny |
The common mistake: buying too many tools too early. A 10-person startup does not need Amplitude, Productboard, Dovetail, and Canny. You need one analytics tool and one workspace. Add specialized tools when the pain of not having them is greater than the cost of adoption.
Integration matters more than features. A mediocre tool that integrates well with your existing stack is more useful than a great tool that lives in isolation. Before buying anything, check: does it integrate with Slack? With your ticketing system? With your analytics? The Product Operations Handbook covers how to build and maintain a PM tool ecosystem without drowning in tool fatigue.