Canny vs. Nolt vs. Feature Upvote: simple voting boards compared in 2026
All three of these tools do the same visible thing: a public page where users post feature requests, vote on them, and watch statuses change. The real difference in one sentence: Canny is a feedback platform that happens to have a board at its center, while Nolt and Feature Upvote are deliberately just boards — and the pricing models (per tracked user vs. per board) follow directly from that split.
“export is broken for us”
“any update on SSO?”
“we hit the rate limit again”
Read + clusteredThe short version
| Canny | Nolt | Feature Upvote | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Board plus autopilot capture, revenue tags, roadmap, changelog | A clean board with SSO, widgets, custom fields | A flat-priced board with unlimited users |
| Pricing model | Free tier, then tiers by tracked users | Per board, around $25/month per board | Per board, $49–$99/board/month with unlimited end-users and admins |
| Prioritization | Votes plus revenue weighting from CRM data | Votes | Votes |
| Grooming burden | Highest — biggest surface to keep current | Low | Low |
| Best for | Teams that want the board as a full feedback system | Teams that want the nicest simple board | Teams that want predictable cost at any scale |
Canny
Canny is the establishment choice, and the most tool by a wide margin. Beyond the board itself it offers automated capture from support and call tools, revenue tagging synced from CRMs so a request from a $100k account outranks a louder free-tier one, a public roadmap, a changelog, and voter notifications on status changes — the pieces of a complete board-based feedback system. We've covered the platform end of this spectrum in our Canny vs. Productboard vs. Featurebase comparison.
The costs are the flip side. Pricing is tiered by tracked users, which means the bill grows with your audience rather than your team, and the larger surface means more to configure and more board to groom. If you'll actually use revenue weighting and automated capture, Canny earns its price; if you just want a voting page, you're buying a platform to use one feature of it.
Where it fits: teams that want the board to be their whole feature request system, especially with revenue data attached.
Nolt
Nolt is the design-forward minimalist: a board that looks good out of the box, priced per board rather than per user — about $25 per month per board. Despite the small footprint it covers the practical essentials: SAML-based single sign-on, embeddable widgets, custom fields, internal notes, and an automatic roadmap view, plus anonymous voting if you want lower-friction participation.
What you give up is everything around the board. There's no revenue weighting, no automated capture from support tools, and the feature list is intentionally short. Nolt's bet is that most teams never use the platform features they pay Canny for, and for many small products that bet is correct.
Where it fits: small teams and communities that want the most polished simple board and a bill that doesn't move when the user base grows.
Feature Upvote
Feature Upvote makes the same simplicity bet as Nolt with an even blunter pricing pitch: flat per-board pricing with unlimited end-users and admins — an Indie plan at $49/board/month and a full plan at $99/board with everything included. No tracked-user math, no seat counting.
The product itself is a straightforward voting board: posts, votes, statuses, moderation. It's the least visually distinctive of the three and has the shortest feature list, which is either its weakness or exactly the point depending on what you came for. For a game studio or B2B product with a large user base — where Canny's tracked-user tiers would sting — flat pricing per board is the entire argument.
Where it fits: products with big audiences and simple needs, where predictable cost beats features.
Which one
By team type: a product team that wants the board to be a real prioritization system, with revenue data and capture automation, picks Canny and accepts the tracked-user bill. A small team that cares how the board looks and wants SSO without enterprise pricing picks Nolt. A team with a huge user base and a "just let them vote" philosophy picks Feature Upvote for the flat pricing.
Whichever you choose, budget for the grooming: every voting board needs a person merging duplicate posts and updating statuses, or it decays into a graveyard of "under review" — the single most common way these tools fail.
Where Modem fits in
We build Modem, so read this section with that in mind. Modem is not a voting board and doesn't belong in the comparison above — there's no public page for customers to browse. It solves the problem boards can't: most feedback never becomes a board post, because it happens in Slack threads, Discord servers, support tickets, and sales calls. Modem reads those sources directly, deduplicates and counts requests automatically, and files them as tracked issues — no posting or grooming step. The counts stay honest because the same customer raising the same issue in two places resolves to one person and one topic in Modem's context graph. Teams either run it instead of a board (if a public roadmap doesn't matter to their users) or alongside one, letting the board handle the visible voting while Modem catches everything that never got posted. More on that trade-off at feedback board alternative.
