Product management (not to be confused with project management) is the process of overseeing the development, marketing, and life cycle of a product from its initial concept through to its launch and eventual discontinuation. Product managers are responsible for guiding the strategy, vision, and execution of a product to ensure it meets the needs of customers, aligns with business goals, and stands out in the market.
With technology constantly evolving, product development teams need robust software tools to help streamline processes, collaborate with teams, and make data-driven decisions.
To help you navigate the overwhelming number of options, we’ve identified the 8 best product management tools based on personal testing, user reviews, and market suitability. These tools cater to a range of needs, from optimizing workflows and improving communication to enhancing every stage of the product development cycle—from ideation to launch.
Why do you need to use software for product management?
Aside from reducing errors and streamlining workflows, here are some reasons why product managers should use software:
Team Collaboration: Product management software fosters collaboration by providing a central hub where cross-functional teams can communicate, share updates, and collaborate on tasks. This ensures that product managers, designers, engineers, and marketers are always on the same page, minimizing miscommunication and improving efficiency.
Automatic Documentation: With product management software, all important decisions, tasks, and discussions are automatically documented, reducing the need for manual note-taking. This centralized documentation helps maintain clarity and provides a reference point for future decisions or audits.
Integration with Other Platforms: Product management software often integrates with other tools used by your organization, such as CRMs, project management tools, and communication platforms. These integrations streamline workflows, prevent data silos, and ensure that all teams are working with the most up-to-date information.
Enhanced Visibility and Reporting: Many product management software provide real-time dashboards and reporting tools that give you visibility into product progress, performance metrics, and team workloads. This helps you make informed decisions and identify potential issues early in the product life cycle.
Top product management software in 2025
1. Lark
Source: Lark
Lark is a best-in-class workplace collaboration platform that reimagines how businesses operate in the digital world. While most productivity tools focus on individual features, Lark takes a holistic approach by offering a complete suite of integrated tools designed to help businesses work seamlessly across departments.
The platform offers a suite of products tailored to various aspects of a modern business. For example, its communication tools include instant messaging, video conferencing, group chats, and email. Meanwhile, the productivity suite offers document editing (similar to Google Docs), task management, OKR, and Base.
Among Lark’s offerings, Lark Base stands out as a database and project management tool that helps teams streamline operations, track tasks, and gain actionable insights for informed business decisions. It has a strong focus on AI integration, allowing you to generate content at scale and optimize your workflow with automation.
Source: Lark
Lark supports desktop platforms but is also available on the web and mobile devices (including Android and iOS), allowing you to manage your teams and product development operations on the go. While it is feature-complete with very little lacking, it provides integrations with third-party apps and services, so you can seamlessly fit the platform into your existing product management workflow.
Key features of Lark
Document collaboration and Wiki: Lark transforms the traditional document experience into a product management hub. Your team can simultaneously edit product requirements, with changes reflected in real-time. And, documents can be added to Wiki, allowing you to build a unified knowledge base for your organization. Wiki supports multiple document formats, including docs, spreadsheets, presentations, bases, and external media formats.
Integrated meetings: Lark’s Meeting feature streamlines product discussions through an intelligent approach to meetings. Its AI generates detailed summaries and transcriptions automatically, capturing key decisions and action items without manual note-taking. You can seamlessly transition from chat discussions to video meetings, while the system automatically distributes meeting notes and tracks follow-up tasks.
Cross-tool navigation: Lark is a multi-function productivity suite that integrates many different tools within a single platform. As such, it enables seamless movement through your product development ecosystem. The universal search function indexes all documents, meetings, messages, and other content, making it easier to find requirements. Furthermore, the platform provides contextual links between different types of content, ensuring that information stays connected regardless of where it’s stored.
Zero-code database management: Lark Base is a flexible data management system for product teams. Its functionality can be customized to track everything from feature requests to bug reports, with multiple visualization options including Kanban, calendar, and grid views. You can create no-code automated workflows for approvals and notifications, while maintaining relationships between different data sets for comprehensive product tracking.
Advanced product forms: Lark's forms feature is a valuable tool for collecting and organizing feedback, feature requests, and product requirements from stakeholders, customers, and team members. The forms builder lets you create forms with custom fields and automatically store responses in the database. Lark Forms supports data-driven decision-making and improves internal communication by collecting insights that improve product strategy and collaboration.
Lark pros & cons
Pros:
All-in-one productivity platform
Seamless cross-tool navigation
Affordable for teams of all sizes
Integrated database management
Cons:
Customization options may be overwhelming at first
Pricing
Starter: Free
Pro: $12/user/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing; contact sales
Reviews
G2: 4.5/5
Capterra: 4.4/5
Best for
Lark is the perfect tool for product teams of all sizes, from small development teams, to large cross-functional teams in well-established enterprises. It boasts many features that works seamlessly together for a streamlined user experience.
2. Jira
Source: Jira
Initially created in 2002 as a bug-tracking software for developers, Jira has expanded its features to accommodate product development teams of various types and sizes. It provides a robust and customizable platform for teams to collaborate, plan, and track projects, with a focus on Agile workflows.
Key features of Jira
Roadmap planning on multiple timeline views: Jira offers a wide range of tools that help product managers visualize long-term goals, such as List, Calendar, Kanban, Gantt chart, and Project Boards.
Real-time collaboration with third-party integrations: Jira's real-time collaboration tools center around its robust integration with Confluence and other Atlassian platforms, allowing product managers to seamlessly link requirements, specifications, and documentation directly to development tasks. The platform offers real-time updates through smart notifications, @mentions, and custom automation rules.
Reporting and insights: Jira offers advanced reporting tools for tracking product development progress, velocity, and health. You can use custom dashboards to display contextual insights on key performance indicators (KPIs) and team performance. Moreover, reports like burnup charts and cumulative flow diagrams can help you discover timeline bottlenecks.
Jira pros & cons
Pros:
Advanced reporting and analytics
Powerful collaboration features
Lots of native integrations
Cons:
Steep learning curve for beginners
Expensive for larger teams
Slow performance at scale
Pricing
Free: $0
Standard: $7.53/user/month
Premium: $13.53/user/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Reviews
G2: 4.3/5
Capterra: 4.4/5
Best for
Jira is best for software development and IT teams managing complex, large-scale projects that demand deep integration with development tools and Agile features like sprint tracking.
3. ClickUp
Source: ClickUp
ClickUp markets itself as the "everything app for work," offering a broad range of features for product development workflows, documentation, team collaboration, and time tracking. While it’s versatile and adaptable to teams of various sizes, it tends to be particularly popular among software developers who benefit from its advanced task management capabilities.
Key features of ClickUp
Customizable workflows and views: ClickUp lets you create workflows for every stage of the product life cycle, from ideation to release. It uses a hierarchical task structure which you can visualize with customizable views, such as List, Kanban, Table, and even Map (tasks visualized by location).
Built-in product documentation: Product development often requires extensive documentation of features, tasks, workflows, and more. That’s why ClickUp provides Markdown formatted documentation tools, ensuring consistency across many platforms. Documents can reference each other and even external media, and can be created just about anywhere within ClickUp.
Third-party integrations: ClickUp offers native integrations with GitHub, Slack, Figma, and inline embeds for any website. You can also create custom integrations with webhooks and connectors like Zapier. However, it's worth noting that ClickUp tries to replace rather than fit in with your existing workflow.
ClickUp pros & cons
Pros:
User-friendly interface
Automation capabilities
Robust documentation system
Cons:
Features may be overwhelming
Limited reporting in lower plans
Limited functionality in the mobile app
Pricing
Free Forever: $0
Unlimited: $7/user/month
Business Plan: $12/user/month
Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing
Reviews
G2: 4.7/5
Capterra: 4.6/5
Best for
ClickUp is best for cross-functional product teams that want to take advantage of its extensive and versatile feature set to manage complex workflows on a single platform.
4. airFocus
Source: airFocus
airFocus is a cloud-based roadmap creation platform fully dedicated to product management. After all, it was designed by product managers to help other product managers build, manage, and communicate roadmaps with clarity and prioritization frameworks.
Key features of airFocus
Prioritization frameworks: airFocus’ Priority Poker helps you standardize prioritization with custom scoring frameworks like Value vs. Effort and Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. This way, your team, and other stakeholders can make data-driven decisions on which product features and tasks to focus on.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): OKRs are treated as first-class citizens on airFocus, which means they are distinct features rather than a part of another feature like Tasks. You can streamline OKR management with the dedicated dashboard and connect them with roadmaps and workflows.
Customer Feedback: airFocus provides a feedback hub for organizing all your messages from emails, chats, and other channels into a central inbox. This allows you to turn customer feedback into real-time insights during, and after product development.
airFocus pros & cons
Pros:
Custom-built for product management
Highly customizable for different needs
Centralized feedback hub
Cons:
Limited timeline and task management
Expensive for small/growing teams
Limited integration options
Pricing
Core: $74/editor/month
Scale: Request pricing
Enterprise: Request pricing
Reviews
G2: 4.4/5
Capterra: 4.5/5
Best for
airFocus is best for product managers who need a streamlined product management platform to enhance their existing workflow with prioritization frameworks.
5. Wrike
Source: Wrike
Wrike is a cloud-based work management and collaboration platform designed to help teams streamline product planning, organize tasks, and improve communication. It caters to teams across various industries and is valued for its customizability and robust feature set for managing complex projects.
Key features of Wrike
Customizable workflows and dashboards: Wrike’s customizable dashboards provide product insights and visibility to all stakeholders at a glance. It offers several templates to get you started quickly and lets you enhance your view with custom widgets, formulas, and charts.
Resource management tools: Wrike provides built-in tools for planning, tracking, and optimizing resource allocation across individuals, teams, and projects. The Resources dashboard gives you instant visibility into resource allocation, user attributes, and specialized skills. Furthermore, the collaborative resource database lets you keep all resources in the same place, ensuring easy access and improved organization among team members.
Request forms: This feature streamlines work requests using fully customizable forms. Simply build the form with checkboxes, dropdowns, short answers, date selectors, and other custom fields to collect all the information you need. Then, Wrike takes over and uses smart automation to generate tasks, workflows and entire projects from a single form.
Wrike pros & cons
Pros:
Industry-specific tailored solutions
Scalable for different team sizes
Advanced resource management system
Cons:
Poor performance on large projects
High cost for premium features
Limited offline functionality
Pricing
Free: $0/user/month
Team: $10/user/month
Business: $24.80/user/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Pinnacle: Custom pricing
Reviews
G2: 4.2/5
Capterra: 4.3/5
Best for
Wrike is best for product management teams that handle complex, cross-functional projects requiring advanced resource management and robust collaboration features for alignment and efficiency.
6. ProductPlan
Source: ProductPlan
ProductPlan focuses on roadmapping, allowing product managers to create, visualize, and communicate product roadmaps in an intuitive and collaborative way. It is designed to work with other product management platforms, helping teams align around product strategies, and share plans with stakeholders in real-time.
Key features of ProductPlan
Visual roadmaps: ProductPlan lets you create visually engaging roadmaps that improve alignment on your product strategy. It offers the timeline, list, and table layout for your roadmaps, enabling you to create custom views tailored to specific audiences.
Real-time collaboration: ProductPlan’s prioritization board provides insights that help your team make data-driven decisions on which features to spend time on. In addition, flexible permissions let you choose who to share your roadmap with, while team members can communicate in real-time with comments and mentions.
Integrations with task management tools: Since ProductPlan focuses on product roadmaps, it provides robust integrations with third-party task management tools like Jira, Trello, and Slack. However, it doesn’t offer many native integrations and instead relies on Zapier for custom integrations.
ProductPlan pros & cons
Pros:
Streamlined feature set for roadmaps
User-friendly interface
Built-in shareholder communication tools
Cons:
Pricing information is not transparent
Few integration options
Limited roadmap visualization options
Pricing
Book a consultation to obtain a custom quote
Reviews
G2: 4.4/5
Capterra: 4.4/5
Best for
ProductPlan is best for product managers who are dissatisfied with their existing roadmapping tools and need a platform that can fit into their existing management workflow.
7. Aha!
Source: Aha!
Aha! is a cloud-based roadmapping tool that helps teams define their strategy, prioritize features and outline their goals. It supports end-to-end product development, from ideation to release, by providing tools for strategy, planning, and execution.
Key Features of Aha!
Roadmaps: Aha! provides templates for setting up your visual roadmaps within minutes. Its roadmap presentation tool automatically updates with changes to the roadmap, so your stakeholders are always aware of the latest state of your product strategy. In addition, the built-in prioritization tool lets you set scoring metrics, refine estimates, and share your plan with the development team.
Idea management tools: What really sets Aha! apart from other roadmapping tools is its idea management tools for crowdsourcing feedback, gaining customer insights and prioritizing features that generate revenue. It integrates with Salesforce to centralize customer requests and uses automation to track voting trends and keep customers informed of product status.
Whiteboards: Aha!’s collaborative whiteboard is a vital tool for your team during brainstorming and strategizing sessions. It provides over 100 canvas templates to kickstart your creative sessions and even lets you design product UI, so you don’t have to use third-party tools like Figma.
Aha! pros & cons
Pros:
Built-in ideas portal
Cross-functional teams collaboration
Whiteboarding and brainstorming tools
Cons:
Expensive for small teams
Complicated pricing model
Limited task management tools
Pricing
Aha! Roadmaps: $59/user/month (includes Ideas, Whiteboards, and Knowledge)
Aha! Ideas: $39/user/month (includes Whiteboards and Knowledge)
Aha! Whiteboards: $9/user/month
Aha! Knowledge: $18/user/month (includes Whiteboards)
Aha! Develop: $9/user/month
Reviews
G2: 4.4/5
Capterra: 4.7/5
Best for
Aha!’s idea management and feedback tools make it a great fit for customer-centric teams that rely on user feedback to drive product development.
8. Trello
Source: Trello
Another tool under the Atlassian banner, Trello is a Kanban-based project management tool that visualizes tasks using boards, lists, and cards. It is popular among tech enthusiasts and software developers because it provides an intuitive way of organizing each stage of the product development cycle.
Key Features of Trello
Power-Ups and integrations: Trello uses built-in and user-created power-ups to enhance its functionalities. For example, integration power-ups can help you streamline your workflow with external tools like Slack, GitHub, and Google Drive.
Board templates and Butler automation: Trello is one of the fastest platforms to set up, thanks to its pre-built templates for agile frameworks (like scrum boards). Its proprietary AI, Butler, can automatically handle repetitive tasks like trigger-based stage progression, team assignments, and recurring sprint meetings.
Card hierarchy and management: Trello handles task management using Cards, which can contain detailed product information like feature specifications and requirements. You can set up basic prioritization using card labels and acceptance criteria. And, card relationships help you map dependencies between features so you can properly visualize blocking tasks and resolve timeline bottlenecks.
Trello pros & cons
Pros:
Exceptional visual product planning
Highly customizable with power-ups
Quick and easy setup for small teams
Cons:
Limited project views and reporting
Becomes cluttered with large projects
Limited collaboration features
Pricing
Free: $0/user/month (10 max. collaborators per workspace)
Standard: $6/user/month
Premium: $12.50/user/month
Enterprise: $17.50/user/month (annual billing only)
Reviews
G2: 4.4/5
Capterra: 4.5/5
Best for
Trello is best suited for small to mid-sized product teams (typically under 15 people) working on straightforward products with limited dependencies.
How to choose the best product management software for your needs
Choosing the right product management software for you and your team depends on your unique needs and the organization’s goals. Some of the key aspects to consider include:
Ease of Use: A good product management software should enhance your workflow, not complicate it. That’s why your tool must be intuitive, with a user-friendly interface requiring minimal training. Look for a platform with simple workflows, clear dashboards, and easy access to key features. This ensures that your team can quickly adapt to the software and begin using it productively without unnecessary delays.
Price: Your budget can make or break your project. While many product management tools offer a wide range of features, their cost varies significantly, depending on the features you need and the number of users. You should consider your budget and weigh the value of the features offered against the cost. For example some tools start out affordable, but quickly increase in cost as your team grows.
Teams and Workspaces: The software you choose should cater to the specific needs of teams and workspaces within your organization. If you have cross-functional teams, the tool should provide proper support and facilitate real-time communication between them. Consider whether the tool supports role-based permissions, allows for easy task assignment, and offers workspace customization to suit different workflows.
Integration: When evaluating software, check whether it supports the integration of tools you already rely on, as well as the ease of data transfer between platforms. An integrated software ecosystem eliminates data silos, ensuring that all relevant teams can access and share information in real-time.
Customer Support: Lastly, consider the customer support provided by the software vendor. A responsive and helpful support team can be a huge asset, especially when implementing the software or troubleshooting issues. Look for providers that offer multiple channels of support, such as live chat, email, and phone support.
Optimize your workflow with Lark
Product management thrives on seamless communication and efficient workflows, making your choice of software a crucial factor in driving team success.
Lark stands out as a powerful, all-in-one platform designed to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity for teams of all sizes. By combining key functionalities like messaging, document sharing, project management, task tracking, and video conferencing into a single platform, it eliminates the need for multiple disjoint tools, reducing complexity and boosting efficiency.
Do you want to optimize daily operations and achieve more with less effort? Try Lark for free today and see why it’s fast becoming the number one productivity suite for businesses.
FAQs
Is product management the same as project management?
No, product management is not the same as project management, although they work closely together. Product management is more concerned with overall strategy and the product life cycle, while project management deals with the execution of specific goals within a set timeline.
I’m a project manager, can I still use Lark Base?
Yes, you can. Lark Base is designed to adapt to various roles and functions, including but not limited to project management, bug tracking, product management, task management, CRM, and software development.
Are there product management add-ons for Lark Base?
Yes, there are product management add-ons for Lark Base, such as Timeline, Translator, Batch Formatter, and the Mermaid diagram tool. This allows you to use Lark as one seamless productivity ecosystem that contains all the tools and features you need.
Can I integrate Lark Base with other product management platforms?
Yes, you can integrate Lark with other product management platforms like Trello, Github, Notion, and Mockplus. However, you should note that Lark, in itself, is a very robust product management platform with several features to meet your specific needs. To explore more tools that can be integrated, visit the Lark App Directory.
