Why Shorter Loop is better than ProductPlan: A comprehensive analysis

Introduction

If you are looking for a tool to help you create and manage your product roadmap, you might have come across two popular options: Shorter Loop and ProductPlan. Both of these tools offer an easy and intuitive way to plan, prioritize, and communicate your product strategy. But which one is better for your needs? In this blog post, we will compare Shorter Loop and ProductPlan in various aspects, such as features, pricing, reviews, and more. By the end of this post, you will have a clear idea of which tool is the best fit for your product management workflow.

Features

Shorter Loop and ProductPlan both offer a range of features to help you create and share your product roadmap. However, some key differences between them can make a big impact on your productivity and collaboration.

Shorter Loop:

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1. Allows you to create multiple types of roadmaps, such as timeline, kanban, swim lane, single product roadmap, multiple product roadmap and more.
2. Most importantly, helps you create agile, realistic, strategic roadmaps while aligning with business objectives.
3. Roadmaps are built using various sources: feedback from customers and others + activities that have been added to the product backlog. Based on feedback gathering from customers, cross-functional teams, partners, and your own product teams and synthesizing that feedback with AI to get real-time insights into what are key feedback you need to focus on and turning it to work items to start working and incorporate in your roadmap right away. Also, the prioritization matrix helps you identify other product activities in the backlog that need to be prioritized based on the value it provide to customers with what effort is needed to build
4. Supports agile and lean methodologies, with features like sprints, epics, user stories, tasks, and feedback.
5. Integrates with popular tools like Jira, Slack and more.
6. Provides a comprehensive dashboard to measure and track product metrics to check user’s journey from acquisition, engagement, adoption, retention, renewals, etc. This further helps you measure and improve your product performance.
7. Enables you to customize your roadmap with tags, filters, and more.
8. Short/Mid and long-term roadmap
9. Allows you to collaborate with your team and stakeholders in real-time, with comments to edit/approve the roadmap
10. Offers a secure and reliable cloud-based platform that is compliant with GDPR and other country’s data privacy and security laws.
11. Supercharges productivity by 80%. With 30% increased satisfaction. With 53% reduced product risk to be a failure in the market. 70% more chances of doing experiments

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Crozdesk declared Shorter Loop as “Product Leaders” – Innovative Solutions with room for growth.

ProductPlan:

• Allows you to create timeline-based roadmaps with drag-and-drop functionality.
• Supports strategic planning, with features like goals, initiatives, dependencies, and prioritization frameworks.
• Integrates with popular tools like Jira, Trello, and more.
• Provides basic analytics and reporting tools to help you track your progress and alignment.
• Enables you to customize your roadmap with colors, tags, filters, and more.
• Allows you to collaborate with your team and stakeholders via email or web links.
• Offers a secure and reliable cloud-based platform that is GDPR compliant and SOC 2 certified.

As you can see, Shorter Loop offers more features than ProductPlan in terms of roadmap types, continuous AI-powered discovery, anytime feedback collection across the product lifecycle from customers, partners, and stakeholders and synthesizing these to share insights, most voted, most rated feedback, the problem summaries and probable solutions (backed by AI) to help you take right decisions what to build next and convey feedback to work items/epics/user stories/features.

Plus following the agile methodology and scrum/OKR/Sprint framework, it helps you create realistic roadmaps tying these to business objectives and customer-centricity. Plus 1:1 support, metrics tracking, analytics, customization, and continuous collaboration and efficiency in communication. Shorter Loop also helps you streamline your workflow and avoid switching between multiple product management tools, thus saving millions of dollars and hundreds to thousands of hours.

Pricing

Shorter Loop and ProductPlan both offer different pricing plans based on the number of users and features. Here is a comparison of their pricing plans as of January 2024:

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Shorter Loop:

All the pricing plans provide an unlimited roadmap with goals, times, schedules, month-by-month, activity and quarter-wise. Give you a complete picture with easy and clean UI

• Free plan: For students and solopreneurs. Includes all features of Shorter Loop other modules or suites like Discover (Vision, persona, value prop and GTM (go to market), unlimited experiments), Define/Design (MVP and Impact Map), Plan (prioritization, roadmap and user story), Build (backlog), Listen and Measure (dashboard and experiments), Idea Manger (Feedback collection and synthesizing to problem summaries, probable solutions and place them under relatable themes powered by AI) including product roadmap, like timeline roadmap, kanban roadmap, integrations with Jira, comments by product teams and anyone who has access to the tool. Also, provides sprints, epics, user stories, tasks, feedback, integrations with Jira, Slack and more. Online email, call and chat.

Shorter Loop also has FREE Trial Option.

• Starter plan: $21 per user per month (billed monthly) and $15 per user per month (billed annually). Up to 10 users and unlimited roadmaps. Includes all free features plus swim lane roadmap, objective and key results, prioritization of roadmaps, single or multi roadmap, One view of roadmap activities with business objectives tied to it, Admin management, and dedicated support team. Online email, resources, videos, in person trainings, call and chat.
• Scale-up plan: $35 per user per month (billed monthly) and $25 per user per month (billed annually). Up to 50 users and unlimited roadmaps. Includes all starter features and a dedicated support team. Online email, resources, videos, in person training, call and chat.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing. Unlimited users and roadmaps. Includes all scale-up features plus customization, and integration, data migration and backup, setting up the products, more in person training, advanced admin, dedicated account manager and customer success manager.

ProductPlan:

• Basic: $39 per user per month. Includes Unlimited Roadmaps, Unlimited Viewers, Customizable Roadmap Views, and Prioritization Board
• Professional: $79 per user per month billed annually. Provides features of Business Plan plus Portfolio View, Roll multiple roadmaps, Roadmap Standardization Tools, Advanced Admin Management, Single   Sign On, Product Strategy and Key Results
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing. Everything from Professional and Idea Capture, Opportunity Validation, Launch Management, Custom Terms of Service

As you can see, Shorter Loop offers more affordable pricing than ProductPlan for all segments and sizes of users. Shorter Loop also offers a free plan which ProductPlan does not give, they have a limited free trial option.

Reviews

Shorter Loop and ProductPlan both have positive reviews from their customers on various platforms such as G2, SourceForge, Crozdesk and Trustpilot. However, there are some differences in the ratings, feedback, and testimonials that they receive. Here is a summary of their reviews as of January 2024:

Shorter Loop: Received close to 100 reviews from all the marketplaces with 5 stars

• G2: 5 out of 5 stars from 11 reviews. Ranked High Performer in the Product Management Software category.
• SourceForge: 5 out of 5 stars from 16 reviews. 100% of users rated it 5 stars. Ranked #1 in the Product Management Software category.
• Crozdesk: 5 out of 5 stars from 53 reviews. 100% of users rated in 5 stars. Ranked Leader in the Product Roadmap and overall Product Management Software category.

Product Hunt: 5 out of 5 stars from 10 reviews. 100% of users rated in 5 stars. Ranked Leader in the Product Roadmap and overall Product Management Software category.

• Trustpilot: 5 out of 5 stars from 2 reviews. 92% of users rated it 4 or 5 stars.

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Some of the common praises for Shorter Loop are:

• Easy to use and intuitive interface
• Flexible and versatile roadmap types
• Agile and lean support
• Rich integrations and analytics
• Great collaboration and customization features
• Responsive and helpful customer support

Some of the areas in Shorter Loop are enhancing more value to its users:

• Knowledge Management
• Release management
• More user analytics and integrations with other apps

ProductPlan:

• G2: 4.4 out of 5 stars from 149 reviews.
• SourceForge: 4 out of 5 stars from 1 review.
• Crozdesk: 4.4 out of 5 stars from 145 reviews.
• Trustpilot: 3.3 out of 5 stars from 1 review.

Some of the common praises for ProductPlan are:

• Simple and elegant interface
• Strategic and high-level planning features
• Smooth integrations and alignment
• Customizable and shareable roadmaps
• Reliable and secure platform
• Friendly and knowledgeable customer support

Some of the common complaints for ProductPlan are:

• Lack of roadmap variety and detail
• Limited agile and lean support
• Basic analytics and reporting tools
• Expensive pricing and no free plan
• Slow and infrequent updates

As you can see,

Shorter Loop has higher ratings than ProductPlan on all platforms and more positive feedback from its customers. Shorter Loop also has more reviews than ProductPlan indicating a larger and more satisfied user base.

Conclusion

Based on our comparison of features, pricing, and reviews, we can conclude that –

• Shorter Loop is better than ProductPlan for creating and managing your product roadmap. And it offers more than product roadmap planning but the whole suite of product management (listen. ideate. discover/strategize. define/design. plan and roadmap. build. launch and measure continuously) in one comprehensive platform powered by design thinking, saas, agile, continuous discovery and Gen AI.
• Shorter Loop offers more value for money, functionality, and flexibility, rich in analytics and deeper discovery and fail-proof strategy. It has more collaboration and customization features than ProductPlan.
• Shorter Loop also has more positive reviews and ratings from its customers showing that it is a trusted and preferred tool for product leaders, business owners, managers, and product marketers/digital marketers.

If you want to try out Shorter Loop for yourself you can sign up for a free account here (app.shorterloop.com/register) and start creating your own roadmaps today. Check Shorter Loop Insights, Whitepapers and Video Tutorials, and Glossaries to stay up to date on Product Management. We hope you found this blog post helpful and informative, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

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