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Original research · October 2026 · Last verified 2026-10-21

Canny vs Linear vs Productboard vs Sprig: Four Meters for the Same Product Decision

Four tools that all sit between customer signal and the roadmap, priced on four completely different things: the customers you track, the people on your team, the makers who write specifications, and the AI credits they consume. Captured 21 October 2026, one compliant fetch each, with robots.txt tested against every path first.

4
Vendors captured
4
Different meters
$79/month
Canny Pro, per month
Short answer

Who each one is for, and what they are actually billing you for

Canny bills on your customers. Its entry paid plan is $79/month billed yearly, and the thing that moves the price is the number of users you track feedback from, which starts at 25 tracked users on the free plan and 100+ tracked users on Pro. The vendor's own selector runs from 25 to 5k plus, and above that sits its Business plan, which is quoted. If you have a large installed base and a small product team, this is the one where the bill is not driven by your headcount.

Linear bills on your team, and only on the plans: $10 per user per month on Basic and $16 per user per month on Business, billed yearly. Its free plan is the curiosity of this census, $0, unlimited members: 2 teams and 250 issues, not members. The limit is scope of work, not people, and that is a deliberate shape.

Productboard bills on makers, contributors and now on AI credits. The plan prices are not in the document we fetched, so this page has none for it; what is in the document are the allowances: 500 credits per maker per month, 1,500 base plus 800 per additional maker on Enterprise, 5 makers, 25 contributors on Business, and $5 for a 50-credit bundle for top-ups on monthly plans. In 2 currency figures on a whole pricing page, both are credit bundles.

Sprig bills a negotiated enterprise agreement. Its pricing page calls itself an enterprise survey platform, serves 3,668 characters of text and contains 0 currency figures. There is no number here to compare, and no reason to invent one.

Two of these four publish enough to price today. The other two publish the shape of the bill without the number: Productboard states a credit economy and no card, Sprig states a category and no figure. The useful comparison is not which tool is cheapest. It is which meter your growth actually pushes on: customers tracked, seats, makers, or respondents reached.

Last verified 2026-10-21. Plans move and prices follow usage bands; confirm current rates before you quote this page.

The census

What each vendor bills, and what each one lets you see

Captured 21 October 2026, one compliant fetch each, robots.txt tested against the exact path first. "Published" means the figure is in the document the server sent, whether in visible copy or in the vendor's own structured price data.

VendorThe meterPrice publishedEntry publishedWhat moves the billWhere the number stops
Cannyusers you track feedback fromYes$0/month free, $79/month ProHow many of your customers it watchesits Business plan, which is quoted above Pro
LinearSeats, on paid plans onlyYes$0, unlimited membersHow many people on your product teamNothing stops: three tiers, all priced
ProductboardMakers, contributors and AI creditsno$5 for a 50-credit bundle in credit top-upsHow much AI work your makers doPlan price not in the served document
SprigRespondents reached and studies run0 figuresnonePanel and research volumeEnterprise agreement
Count4 meters, 4 different units2 of 4 publish a plan price
Two vendors publish a plan price, one publishes an entire credit economy with no plan price attached, and one publishes nothing. No two of the four would give a finance reviewer the same shape of bill for the same team.
The four, by their meters

Same shortlist, four different things you pay for

Icons collected from each vendor's own site on 21 October 2026. The line under each name is the unit on the invoice, which is the only fair way to put these four next to each other.

Canny logo

Canny

Tracked customers: the users whose feedback it watches
Linear logo

Linear

Seats on paid plans; the free plan caps scope, not people
Productboard logo

Productboard

Makers and contributors, plus AI credits per task
Sprig logo

Sprig

Respondents and studies reached, priced per agreement

A 20-person team with 5,000 customers gets four different-shaped bills from these four pages.

Logos 4 of 4 tiles: each icon is the vendor's own declared site symbol, fetched once from the page the prices come from, normalised to PNG and hashed in the arm's logo-manifest.json. Trademarks belong to the vendors and are used here to identify them. No third-party logo source, and no logo where the vendor was not collected.

The published numbers

Every figure this census can attribute to a document

Columns one to three are quoted from the vendor. The last column is ours: published price divided by published allowance, or published price multiplied by a stated team size, with the operation shown.

VendorPlan or unitPublishedOur arithmetic
CannyFree$0/month, 25 tracked users
CannyPro$79/month, billed yearly, 100+ tracked users$0.79 per tracked user at the Pro floor
CannyBusinessits Business plan, which is quotednot computable
LinearFree$0, unlimited members$0 for a team of any size, within 250 issues
LinearBasic$10 per user per month, billed yearly$200 per month at 20 seats
LinearBusiness$16 per user per month, billed yearly$320 per month at 20 seats, 60 percent above Basic
ProductboardCredit top-up, monthly plans$5 for a 50-credit bundle$0.10 per credit
ProductboardCredit top-up, annual plans$60 a year for 600 credits$0.100 per credit
ProductboardBusiness allowance500 credits per maker per month$5.00 of top-ups to analyse 100 more feedback items
ProductboardEnterprise allowance1,500 base plus 800 per additional maker
ProductboardA written specification50 to 200 credits of credits$20.00 of top-ups at the monthly bundle rate
SprigPlans0 currency figures on the pagenot computable
The Productboard rows are the interesting ones: the vendor publishes a credit economy in detail, including what a task costs in credits, and no plan price at all. The derived columns are therefore real marginal costs expressed in an abstract unit, which is exactly the position a buyer is left in.
Charted from the census

Every published monthly figure, in one view

Canny Pro (flat)$79/moLinear Business (per user)$16 / userLinear Basic (per user)$10 / userProductboard top-up (50 credits)$5Productboard plan priceallowances published, plan prices notSprig plansno figures on the pricing page

The units differ and the chart says so in each label; that is the point. Per-user bars are not comparable to flat bars, and a credit bundle is not a plan price.

What this exposes

Four things the meters say

1

One of these meters is your customer base

Canny is the only vendor here that bills on how many of *your* users it watches: 25 tracked users on free, 100+ tracked users at the Pro floor, and a selector that runs 25 to 5k plus. At the published Pro floor that is $0.79 per tracked customer per month. For a company with a big installed base and a small team, this is the expensive meter; for a team of forty watching two hundred customers, it is the cheap one.

2

A free plan can limit scope instead of people

Linear's free plan is $0, unlimited members with 2 teams and 250 issues, not members. The interesting part is what is unlimited: the members. You can put the whole company on it and pay nothing, and you will feel the ceiling in teams and issue history rather than in seats.

3

Credits are a real meter and a fake price

Productboard says a specification 50 to 200 credits and a hundred feedback items around 30 to 50 credits, and sells $5 for a 50-credit bundle bundles. That gives a genuine marginal cost, $20.00 of credits per specification, with no plan price to put beside it. You can budget the AI usage before you can budget the software.

4

The two pages with no numbers are the two enterprise-shaped ones

Sprig calls itself an enterprise survey platform and serves 0 currency figures. Productboard's page carries 2 currency figures, both of them credit bundles. Publishing a price is a mid-market behaviour: the closer a vendor is to an enterprise negotiation, the less a page tells you.

The buying lanes

This category is three jobs, not one

  • Signal collection. Canny exists to capture, deduplicate and triage what customers ask for. Its meter is customers tracked, and it is the one of the four whose cost you can forecast from your own product data rather than your org chart.
  • Execution. Linear is an issue tracker with roadmap semantics. Its meter is seats, and it is honest about the free plan being about scope rather than size.
  • Decision infrastructure. Productboard sits between the two: feedback in, prioritisation and specifications out, with AI work now metered in credits per maker.
  • Primary research. Sprig is a different purchase: reaching respondents, running studies, and paying for a panel rather than for software seats. If you need to know why customers churn rather than what they asked for, this is the lane, and it starts with a quote.
  • What this means for a shortlist. Four tools that all appear under feedback-and-roadmap queries are three kinds of line item: per-customer, per-seat, and per-study. A scorecard that prices them in one column has already made an error.
Deep dives

Each vendor, with what we could verify

Canny - the only one billing on your customers

Tracked usersPrice publishedBusiness quoted

What it is

A feedback hub: capture requests from support, sales and a public board, deduplicate them, and let customers vote, so the roadmap is driven by a ranked list rather than the loudest voice in a Slack thread.

Pricing (verified 2026-10-21)

$0/month on the free plan with 25 tracked users, and $79/month billed yearly on Pro, which also appears in the vendor's structured price data as USD. Pro starts at 100+ tracked users; above that is its Business plan, which is quoted.

What the meter really is

The page defines it as a question to the buyer: users you track feedback from. The selector runs 25 to 5k plus, and the vendor tells you to start low and scale up. At the published Pro floor of $79/month, 100+ tracked users tracked users works out at $0.79 per tracked customer per month.

Strengths

  • A published entry price with a stated allowance
  • Cost scales with customer coverage, which is the thing product teams actually want more of
  • The free tier gives a real workflow, not a demo

Limitations

  • Installed-base size drives the bill, so a company with many free users pays more than one with few customers
  • Business is quoted, so the second step up is a conversation
  • It is signal collection, not prioritisation framework or roadmap execution

Best fit

Teams whose problem is that they cannot see what customers are asking for, and whose tracked-user count is bounded enough to forecast.

Linear - the clearest price list in the set

Per user per monthAll tiers publishedFree plan with unlimited members

What it is

A product development tool for issues, projects and roadmaps, positioned as the execution layer that product teams work in rather than the intake layer.

Pricing (verified 2026-10-21)

$0, unlimited members with 2 teams and 250 issues, not members; $10 per user per month on Basic and $16 per user per month on Business, both per user per month billed yearly. Business adds unlimited teams, private teams and guests.

What that costs a team

Twenty people on Basic is $200 a month; on Business, $320, which is 60 percent above the Basic seat. And a twenty-person team on the free plan pays nothing, until the issue or team limits bite.

Strengths

  • Every tier priced in the document, so a budget line needs no sales call
  • Free plan does not cap the number of humans, only the amount of work
  • The seat uplift between tiers is small and legible

Limitations

  • It is not a feedback capture system: customer intake comes from elsewhere
  • Seat pricing is the usual slow poison for a growing product org
  • The 250-issue ceiling on free makes it a pilot rather than a long-term plan for an active team

Best fit

Product teams that want the roadmap and the backlog in one tool, and a price they can read without asking anyone.

Productboard - a credit economy with no price card

Makers, contributors and creditsAllowances published, prices not

What it is

Product management infrastructure: feedback in, prioritised ideas, roadmaps, and AI-assisted documents and specifications built from that context.

Pricing (verified 2026-10-21)

no. The page publishes allowances and top-ups, not plan prices: 500 credits per maker per month on Business, 1,500 base plus 800 per additional maker on Enterprise, and top-ups of $5 for a 50-credit bundle or $60 a year for 600 credits. Plan prices appear only after the page's client-side code runs, which is outside what we fetch.

What the credits mean

The vendor states the exchange rate of work to credits: analysing a hundred feedback items around 30 to 50 credits, and a comprehensive specification 50 to 200 credits. At the monthly bundle that is $0.10 a credit, so a specification costs about $20.00 of top-ups and a batch analysis about $5.00. Annual bundles are cheaper per credit at $0.100.

Strengths

  • Credit usage is documented at task level, which most AI-priced vendors do not do
  • The maker and contributor distinction means reviewers do not consume a paid seat
  • Plan minimums are stated: 5 makers, 25 contributors on Business

Limitations

  • No plan price in the served document, so the entry bill is a conversation
  • A credit meter means the invoice depends on how much AI work the team chooses to run
  • Five makers minimum on Business puts a floor under the purchase that a two-person team cannot use

Best fit

Product organisations with several PMs who need shared prioritisation infrastructure, and who will actually consume the AI work rather than trial it.

Sprig - the enterprise research purchase

Studies and respondentsNo published figuresEnterprise positioning

What it is

In-product research: surveys and studies delivered at the right moment in a web or mobile experience, with an AI analysis layer, sold to research and product teams at scale.

Pricing (verified 2026-10-21)

There is nothing to report. The pricing page titles itself an enterprise survey platform, serves 3,668 characters of server-rendered text and contains 0 currency figures. Whether the numbers exist behind client-side code or only in a negotiation, we cannot tell from a compliant fetch, and we do not guess.

Why that matters in this census

Sprig is the clearest illustration of the pattern in this category: the more the purchase is a research programme (participants, studies, panel access) rather than a seat count, the less likely a page is to carry a price. It is not a transparency failure so much as a category shape.

Strengths

  • Reaches users in-product rather than relying on a feedback board they might not visit
  • Covers mobile apps as well as web
  • Positioned for organisations doing continuous discovery, where the constraint is respondents, not tickets

Limitations

  • No way to budget from the public page
  • Different unit of purchase from the other three, so comparison shopping across them is not meaningful
  • Requires genuine research ops maturity to get value from

Best fit

Teams whose bottleneck is hearing from customers who never write in, and who buy research capability rather than software seats.

Scenario map

Which tool for which situation

SituationStart hereWhy
Customers ask for things in five places and nobody knowsCannyCapture and dedupe is the product, and $79/month is a published number
A large installed base and a small product teamLinearSeats are the meter; tracked customers are not
A small installed base with heavy customer feedbackCannyThe meter matches where the work actually is
Product team of twenty wants one budgeted lineLinear$200 to $320 a month, both published
Whole company needs read access to the roadmapLinear or ProductboardLinear's free plan is $0, unlimited members; Productboard counts 5 makers, 25 contributors on Business makers separately from contributors
PMs writing specifications with AIProductboardIt is the only vendor here that prices the AI work in stated units, even without a card
You need to know why users churn, not what they requestSprigPrimary research, not a feedback board
Pilot with no budget approvalLinear free or Canny free$0, unlimited members versus $0/month with 25 tracked users
Procurement wants the number in writing before a demoLinearThe only complete published ladder in the census
The honest case against

When to buy none of them

If nobody on your team reads feedback as a job rather than a chore, a feedback tool makes the backlog louder, not better. The failure mode in this category is a hub full of untriaged requests and a roadmap that still gets decided in a meeting. Fix the process, and you may find the spreadsheet you already have was enough.

If you have fewer than about a hundred active customers giving signal, a free plan is genuinely permanent here. Two of these four give you one, and Linear's does not even cap your headcount.

And if the real gap is that you do not know what to build because you have never asked, an intake tool will not ask for you. That is research, and it is a different purchase from software. The most quotable number in this census is also the cheapest to act on: a hundred feedback items around 30 to 50 credits credits of analysis, which is not nearly as important as deciding what you will do about them.

Where it goes wrong

The implementation traps

  • Reading a per-customer price as a per-seat price. $79/month covers 100+ tracked users of the people using your product, not twenty colleagues of yours. This is the single most common misread in the category.
  • Assuming an unlimited-member free plan is unlimited. Linear's free plan caps 2 teams and 250 issues, not members. Seats are free; scope is not.
  • Budgeting a credit meter like a seat meter. Productboard's usage is a choice: 50 to 200 credits for one specification, around 30 to 50 credits for a hundred-item analysis, and a team that leans on the AI will not land near the base allowance of 500 credits per maker per month.
  • Comparing a plan price to an allowance. Two vendors here publish plan prices, one publishes credit allowances, and one publishes nothing. A table with a number in every cell would be a fiction; this one has the cells it has.
  • Missing the minimum. 5 makers, 25 contributors on Business. A two-person team is being quoted for five.
  • Treating annual bundles as free. The per-credit difference between monthly and annual top-ups is real: $0.10 against $0.100.
FAQ

Questions people actually ask

How much does Canny cost?

$0/month on the free plan with 25 tracked users, and $79/month per month billed yearly on Pro, which starts at 100+ tracked users. its Business plan, which is quoted above that.

What does Canny actually count?

Your customers, not your team. The page asks users you track feedback from and the selector runs 25 to 5k plus. At the published Pro floor that is about $0.79 per tracked user per month.

How much does Linear cost?

$10 per user per month per user per month on Basic and $16 per user per month on Business, billed yearly, with a $0, unlimited members free plan. Twenty seats is $200 or $320 a month.

Is Linear's free plan usable?

Yes, and unusually: 2 teams and 250 issues, not members. Any number of members, but the work is capped rather than the people.

How much does Productboard cost?

This census cannot say. The served page has 2 currency figures and both are credit bundles: $5 for a 50-credit bundle on monthly plans, $60 a year for 600 credits on annual ones. Plan prices are rendered client-side, which a compliant fetch cannot read.

What are Productboard credits worth?

Between $0.10 and $0.100 per credit depending on bundle, which puts a written specification at roughly $20.00 of top-up credits and a hundred-item analysis at $5.00.

Does Sprig publish pricing?

Not in the document we fetched: 0 currency figures on a page titled an enterprise survey platform.

Which of these is cheapest for a 20-person product team?

On published numbers, Linear: $200 a month on Basic. Canny's price does not depend on your team size at all, so the question does not have a single answer across meters.

Where does DataDab fit?

We do not resell product management tools. We publish censuses like this one because a buyer who can read a price is a buyer who can make a decision, and because what a page does and does not put in its HTML is exactly what our extractability audit measures.

Who this is for

Four readers, four things to take

Founders. Decide which meter you are buying. If your bill scales with customers, Canny's model is the one to forecast from product data; if it scales with headcount, Linear's is the one to put in a plan.

Product leaders. Two of these four vendors publish a plan price. If you are comparing four tools in one spreadsheet column and one of them is Sprig, the spreadsheet is wrong, not the tools.

Product operations. If you adopt an AI-assisted roadmap tool, ask what one task costs. Productboard answers it in public: 50 to 200 credits per specification. That number belongs in your rollout plan next to the seat count.

Researchers and journalists. The quotable object here is the meter mismatch: within one category, four buyers with the same team size get a bill driven by customers, seats, makers plus AI credits, or respondents reached. Every figure traces to a captured document with a hash printed below.

Limits

What this does not show

  • One capture per vendor on 21 October 2026. Plan structures and credit allowances move; this page is re-verified quarterly.
  • We did not execute JavaScript and did not switch user agents. Productboard and Sprig may well show prices in a browser. What we report is the document, because the document is what a procurement file, a crawler and an AI answer all read.
  • Canny's per-tracked-user figure is our division of the published Pro floor by the published tracked-user allowance. Vendors do not price linearly, and their own selector produces a different number at every setting.
  • The Productboard derived costs use the top-up bundle rate, which is the only credit price published. Bundled plan credits are not priced per credit by the vendor, so the derived figures are a marginal cost, not an average one.
  • No negotiated or enterprise pricing, no feature evaluation, and no claim that these four are substitutes for each other. Three of them are frequently bought together.
  • This is a census of published price and published meters. It does not measure product quality, nor what any AI engine says about these vendors.
Methodology

How we checked

Four vendor pricing pages were captured on 21 October 2026, one compliant HTTP fetch each, after reading every host's robots.txt and testing the exact target path against the User-agent: * block. Every path was allowed for non-search agents; the per-host check is recorded in the collection protocol at docs/plans/vendor-comparisons-protocol.md in the DataDab repository.

What counts as published. A figure is published when it appears in the served document, either in visible copy or in the vendor's own schema.org price data. Canny's Pro price appears in both, and we record both. Productboard's plan prices and Sprig's appear in neither, and we record that instead of substituting a number from a review site.

Our arithmetic is labelled. Where a cell says ours, it is derived from two published figures by the operation printed in the methodology table of the audit file: price divided by allowance, or price multiplied by a stated team size. Those cells are the only numbers on this page a vendor did not write.

Minimums and units. This census records the billing unit next to every price, because the unit is the finding. A price without its meter is marketing copy.

No vendor paid for inclusion, and none saw this page before publication. If a figure has moved, the corrections address in the cite box is real and changes are dated on the page.

VendorPage capturedRetrievedSHA-256 (first 12)
cannyhttps://canny.io/pricing2026-10-21db9a22d3e5a8
linearhttps://linear.app/pricing2026-10-217286e2628470
productboardhttps://www.productboard.com/pricing/2026-10-21cc664cf83a55
sprighttps://sprig.com/pricing2026-10-21de1df4da03f7
Cite this study

Covering this research? Please link the primary source so readers can verify the data and methodology:

Markdown: [Canny vs Linear vs Productboard vs Sprig: Four Meters for the Same Product Decision | DataDab Research](https://www.datadab.com/research/canny-vs-linear-vs-productboard-vs-sprig)

Spot an error? Send the URL to amit@datadab.com; corrections are published on the page.

This page is re-verified quarterly. Check the methodology section for the current verification date before quoting figures.