Canny Alternatives for Game Studios: Feature Voting Boards Compared

Canny is the default answer to “where do we collect feature requests?”, and its pricing shows who it was built for: software companies whose users are other businesses. It counts every person who posts, votes or comments as a tracked user. The free plan stops at 25, and 1,250 tracked users cost $579 a month billed yearly. A game’s community has thousands of them, and most of them post in Discord and on Steam, not on a web board.

This list compares the boards game studios actually run, checked against each vendor’s site in October 2026. BetaHub is one of them; we say where it’s the wrong pick.

The short answer

• You want a classic voting board with a roadmap and a changelog, at a flat price: Nolt. It emails voters when a status changes.
• You want a moderated board players can use without an account, like Enshrouded’s and Icarus’s: Feature Upvote, priced per board.
• You want feedback collected inside Discord and a support inbox in the same tool: Featurebase, on its Growth plan, priced per seat.
• You want it free and self-hosted: Fider, open source.
• Your players already post on Steam or in a Discord forum and you only need a place to show the plan: a public roadmap (many studios use Trello) next to the free channels you have.
• Your players suggest in Discord and you want AI to merge duplicates, with bug reports in the same project: BetaHub, free for one developer. Steam Discussions need its Pro plan.
• You’re a SaaS company with a few hundred business customers: Canny is still the reference.

What a game studio needs from a feedback board

A board for a B2B product and a board for a game get used differently. Five questions separate them:

1. What does a big community cost? Some tools charge by voter, some by seat, some a flat rate. For a game the difference is a free plan or a quote from sales.
2. Where can players post and vote? A web board loses everyone who’d have posted in Discord, on Steam or in the game.
3. Do they need an account? Every sign-in screen loses voters. Guest voting keeps them, but guests usually can’t be emailed later.
4. What happens to duplicates? “Add a photo mode” arrives in fifty wordings. Either someone merges them by hand or the tool does.
5. Do voters hear back? Players who never learn that their idea shipped stop suggesting. That’s the point of the board.

Canny — the reference, priced for SaaS

Canny has a polished board, roadmap and changelog, and its Autopilot compares new posts with existing ones and suggests or merges duplicates on every plan. When you change a status, you can email everyone who voted.

The pricing is the problem for a game. A tracked user is anyone who posts, votes or comments, including people whose feedback a moderator logs for them. The free plan covers 25. Pro is $79 a month billed yearly for 100 tracked users, $579 for 1,250 and $1,079 for 5,000; beyond that it’s the Business plan, by quote. Going over a limit upgrades the plan automatically unless you set a spending limit. Canny says it offers special plans for high-volume consumer products on request. Issue-tracker integrations (Jira, Linear, GitHub, ClickUp, Asana) and custom domains need Pro.

Limits for games: voting needs an account (Canny’s own login, Google, GitHub or SSO from your product); there’s no anonymous voting. Its Discord integration posts board activity to a channel, but players can’t post or vote from Discord. Some games run it anyway: VRChat signs players in with its own accounts and splits boards by platform, and GeoGuessr keeps bugs and ideas on separate boards.

Featurebase — collects inside Discord, priced per seat

Featurebase is now a support suite: help desk, help center and feedback boards in one subscription. The free plan has one seat, unlimited posts and end users, and one roadmap. Growth is $29 per seat per month billed yearly, Professional $59 and Enterprise $99.

Its Discord bot is the reason game communities look at it: anyone can submit with /feedback, and admins can right-click a message to send it to the board. That needs Growth, as do the custom domain and issue-tracker integrations (Jira, Linear, GitHub, ClickUp). AI suggests duplicates on every plan and merges them on Professional. You can let guests post, vote and comment.

Limits for games: guests don’t get status emails, and neither do players who post through the Discord bot, because Discord doesn’t pass their email to Featurebase. Games using it include the Minecraft server Origin Realms.

Nolt — the board built with games in mind

Nolt charges a flat rate with unlimited users, posts and admins: Essential is $29 a month billed yearly ($39 monthly) and Pro $69 ($89 monthly). There’s no free plan; the trial lasts 10 days. It has a player feedback page, 21 languages, and runs boards for Subnautica 2, Volcanoids and Tabletop Simulator.

A toggle lets players post, comment and vote without signing in, and those who do sign in can use Discord, Google and others. When a status changes, Nolt emails the author, commenters, voters and subscribers by default. The roadmap is on Essential, and a changelog can be written from posts. GitHub and Trello sync on Essential; Jira and Linear need Pro.

Limits for games: its Discord integration posts alerts about board activity and, per Nolt, lets moderators approve or remove posts from Discord; players can’t post from Discord. Duplicates are merged by hand, helped by a list of similar posts while a player writes. Nothing reads Steam.

Feature Upvote — no accounts, moderated, priced per board

Feature Upvote charges per board, with no limit on suggestions, votes, contributors or admins: Indie is $49 a month billed yearly ($59 monthly) and Standard $99 ($119). There’s no free plan; the trial lasts 30 days. Jira, custom CSS and hiding “Powered by” need Standard.

Players post and vote without an account, which the company calls its preferred option, with cookies and rate limits against vote stuffing. New posts and comments wait for a moderator by default, and a restricted moderator role lets community helpers approve, merge and split. Boards come in 19 languages. Games run large boards on it: Enshrouded has over 6,000 suggestions and sends bug reports to its in-game reporter instead, Icarus takes bugs and ideas together, and V Rising runs one on its own domain.

Limits for games: Discord gets notifications of new posts and comments; players can’t post from Discord. Duplicates are merged by hand, and a merge can’t be undone. There’s no separate roadmap view, only a Planned status, and a changelog of done suggestions arrived in October 2026. When a status changes, the author and commenters get a daily email; voters only if you turn on asking voters for an email address, and then only those who leave one.

Fider — free and open source

Fider is open source (AGPL) and free to self-host. The hosted version is free up to 250 feedback items and costs $25 a month for unlimited items and moderation, flat, with no per-user pricing.

Limits for games: voting needs an account. Discord and Twitch logins work as custom OAuth, and webhooks can post new posts and status changes to a Discord channel, but nothing collects from Discord. Duplicates are merged by hand. Status emails go to subscribers: authors are subscribed automatically, voters aren’t. There’s no native Jira, Linear or GitHub integration, and recent releases are mostly security fixes.

Other boards worth a look

• Frill: flat price from $25 a month ($22 yearly, capped at 50 active ideas) to $149 (Enterprise $349), unlimited users, guest and anonymous voting, voters notified by email and in-app. One board by design, no Discord integration, no free plan.
• FeatureOS (formerly Hellonext): its Discord integration collects posts with a slash command and a message action, and it detects duplicates with AI. From $60 a month for 5 seats; no free plan.
• Sleekplan: a free plan for one admin with a changelog, anonymous voting, paid plans from $13 a month billed yearly. Voters are emailed only when a post is marked Completed, and there’s no Discord integration.
• UserVoice: enterprise feedback management, priced by quote. No Discord, GitHub or Linear integration.

The free baselines: Steam, Discord forums and a public roadmap

Before buying a board, look at what your players already use.

• Steam Discussions. Many games run a suggestions subforum, such as Valheim’s and Deep Rock Galactic’s, each with hundreds of active topics. It’s free and players are already signed in. There are no votes, no statuses and no merging, so reading it is the whole job.
• A Discord Forum channel. Discord’s own guide for game communities suggests a forum for feedback, with tags such as “Under Review” and “Implemented”. Reactions work as rough votes. A tag change doesn’t notify anyone, and duplicates are merged by hand.
• A public Trello roadmap. Phasmophobia and Schedule I publish theirs, with voting turned off. It shows the plan; it doesn’t collect ideas or count them.

These are where most game studios start, and where the tools below plug in.

BetaHub — suggestions from wherever players are

BetaHub is a player-feedback platform for games: bug reports, suggestions and support tickets in one project. Its suggestions are a voting board fed from the places players already talk.

• Players suggest where they are. In Discord, /suggest opens a form, forum threads become suggestions automatically (with comments synced both ways), and, once enabled, a moderator can turn any message into a suggestion with a reaction. On the Pro plan, repeated requests from your Steam Discussions become suggestions too. The web widget, the Unreal and Roblox plugins, hosted forms and the API take them as well; the Unity plugin takes bug reports only.
• Discord votes need no extra sign-up. A 👍 on a Discord forum thread is a vote. Votes on the public board need a sign-in with Discord, GitHub or email; forms can stay anonymous.
• AI merges duplicates on every plan. New suggestions are compared by meaning with existing ones and merged, with votes combined and each person counted once; a wrong merge can be undone. AI also splits a post that holds several ideas, writes clear titles, tags and categorises, and holds spam for review. All of it is on the free plan.
• A public board and roadmap. Players see suggestions as a ranked list or as Under Review, Planned, In Progress and Complete columns, with your logo, banner and colours on every plan.
• Players hear back. By default, when a suggestion’s status changes, its author and everyone who voted for it are told, on Discord or by email. Forum threads show the new status too.
• Bugs live next door. The same project takes bug reports from the same Discord bot and your game, with duplicates merged and reporters told when a bug’s status changes. Suggestions and bugs don’t get mixed on one board.
• Players are never billed. You pay per developer seat, not per voter.

Limits: BetaHub’s issue-tracker integrations (Jira, Linear, GitHub and others) carry bug reports, not suggestions, so a planned suggestion doesn’t create a ticket for you. There’s no web changelog, release notes (posted to Discord) aren’t linked to the suggestions they ship, the board can’t be embedded on your own site, statuses are fixed rather than custom, and a custom domain and removing BetaHub’s logo are Enterprise features. Everyone who manages suggestions takes a developer seat, so with several moderators a flat-rate board costs less: five developers on Standard are $130 a month, against Nolt’s $29–$89. If your feedback is mainly a web board for players who don’t use Discord or Steam, Nolt or Canny is the better board.

The free plan covers one developer and 2 active projects with 1,000 suggestions, 1,000 bug reports and 1,000 tickets every 30 days, Discord bot and public boards included; past the limit, new submissions pause after a 50-day grace period. Standard is $26 and Pro $43 per developer per month, with no limits on submissions. See the suggestions board and pricing, or the guide to collecting suggestions on Discord.

Side-by-side

Tool	Price shape	Free plan	Vote without an account	Collects from Discord	Duplicates	Voters told on status change
Canny	Per tracked user	25 tracked users	No	No (alerts only)	AI, all plans	Yes, email (per change)
Featurebase	Per seat	1 seat	Optional guests	Yes, /feedback (Growth)	AI suggests (all plans), merges (Professional)	Yes, but not guests or Discord-bot posts
Nolt	Flat	No (10-day trial)	Optional	No (alerts, moderation)	Manual	Yes, email by default
Feature Upvote	Per board	No (30-day trial)	Yes, by default	No (alerts only)	Manual	Author and commenters; voters if turned on
Fider	Flat / self-host	250 items hosted; self-host free	No	No (webhooks)	Manual	Subscribers only
BetaHub	Per developer seat	1 developer, 1,000 suggestions / 30 days	No extra sign-up for 👍 in Discord; the board needs sign-in	Yes: /suggest, forums, moderator reactions	AI, all plans	Yes, on Discord or by email

Prices and plans from each vendor’s site, October 2026. They change; follow the links for current numbers.

How to choose

• A web board, a roadmap and a changelog, at a price that doesn’t grow with your community: Nolt, or Fider if you’ll host it yourself and can skip a changelog.
• A large board players use without accounts, with moderators approving posts: Feature Upvote.
• A SaaS-style board and you’re under Canny’s tracked-user limits, or have a quote that works: Canny.
• Feedback from Discord into a board, plus a help desk, and you’re fine paying per seat: Featurebase Growth. Know that Discord posters won’t get status emails.
• A community that lives in Discord and on Steam, a game that also produces bug reports, and a team that wants AI to do the merging: BetaHub. The free plan is enough to connect your Discord and see what comes in; Steam Discussions need Pro.
• Already on Nolt or Feature Upvote: stay if players use the web board and you rely on its changelog, custom domain or Jira link for ideas. Look at BetaHub when most ideas arrive in Discord and merging them takes your moderators hours. Existing posts don’t import automatically; our team can import a Feature Upvote board on request.

Common questions

Is Canny free for game studios?

Up to 25 tracked users, and anyone who posts, votes or comments counts as one. A game community passes that quickly. Pro is $79 a month billed yearly for 100 tracked users and $1,079 for 5,000; larger communities need a quote, and Canny offers special plans for high-volume consumer products.

Can players vote from Discord?

On BetaHub, a 👍 on a forum thread counts as a vote, with no sign-up beyond Discord. Featurebase and FeatureOS collect posts from Discord with a slash command; votes still happen on the board. Canny, Nolt and Fider post notifications to Discord, but posting and voting happen on the web.

Is there a free, open-source Canny alternative?

Fider is open source and free to self-host, and its hosted version is free up to 250 items. Sleekplan and Featurebase have free plans for one admin, and BetaHub’s free plan covers one developer and 1,000 suggestions every 30 days. Nolt, Feature Upvote and Frill have trials but no free plan.

Should bug reports and suggestions share a board?

Usually not. Subnautica 2’s Nolt board asks players not to post bugs there, Enshrouded sends bugs to its in-game reporter, VRChat and GeoGuessr keep separate boards, and a bug needs logs and steps that a suggestion doesn’t. Icarus shows the other way: one board for both, sorted by moderators. Tools that only do suggestions leave bugs to something else; BetaHub keeps both in one project with separate queues.

What does BetaHub cost?

The free plan covers one developer and 2 active projects with 1,000 suggestions, 1,000 bug reports and 1,000 tickets every 30 days, including the Discord bot and the public boards. Standard is $26 and Pro $43 per developer per month; players and testers are never billed. See pricing.