Open source Productboard alternatives

No open source project fully replaces Productboard. Four maintained projects, Fider, LogChimp, Quackback and ClearFlask, cover the part Productboard shares with a plain feature request tools board: collecting requests and running a public roadmap. None of them include Productboard's prioritisation frameworks, its per-maker seat model, or a route into a CRM.

Prices and project states checked 22 August 2026, against Productboard's own pricing page and each project's repository.

What does Productboard actually do that a feature request board does not?

Productboard is product management software with a feedback board attached to it, not the other way round. It prioritises requests against a scoring framework, ties features to a roadmap product managers actually plan against, and syncs with the tools a product organisation already runs on. That is a genuinely different job from the one a self-hosted board does: somebody searching for an open source Productboard alternative because they want prioritisation scoring or a CRM connection will not find it in this category. What they will find is the collection-and-roadmap layer, done well, for free.

What does Productboard cost?

Productboard has a real free tier, not a trial: $0, with 50 AI credits a month. Paid tiers are priced per "maker", Productboard's own word for a seat, and the company says so directly: "Pricing is based on the number of makers in your workspace", while contributors "don't count toward your maker limit".

SAML SSO, SCIM and audit logs sit behind Enterprise only. For a compliance-driven buyer, that changes the real price more than the headline maker rate does: Free and Plus do not carry the identity and audit controls procurement usually wants, so the honest floor is the custom Enterprise number, not $19.

Which open source projects cover the request-and-roadmap piece?

Fider is the most established option: Docker, PostgreSQL 12 or later, and your own SMTP or SES for email, in exchange for a roadmap, voting and private boards. It has no changelog feature at all, a real gap if closing the loop with users was part of the appeal. Its own site, getfider.com, now redirects to fider.io, a commercial hosted product from Northern App Labs Ltd, and the docs describe that cloud instance as "the easiest way to get started". Self-hosting still works, but patching is on you: three releases in three months, v0.35.0 through v0.36.1, fixed a critical authentication vulnerability plus SSRF and XSS issues. Fider also briefly gated moderation and SEO indexing behind a paid tier, then reversed it a month later, saying the open core move "was aborted, and we moved back to making everything FULLY open source." Its pricing page currently shows two different numbers for the same tier, $25 on the card and $49 in the FAQ, so check directly.

LogChimp is open core, and the catch is the whole product: the free self-hosted build gives you posts, customers, one admin role and a custom domain, but boards, roadmaps and comments, the parts most people picture when they picture a feature request board, sit behind a $24-a-month Pro tier billed yearly, even on the version you host yourself.

Quackback is the newest and smallest of the four, at 237 stars, and it is the only one making a direct cost argument in public: its own framing is "$10 to $20 a month" on a small VPS, rising to "$50 to $100" for a larger team, against SaaS pricing it puts at "$29 to $999-plus a month". Treat that as marketing from a young project rather than a proven track record; it has not been running long enough to have a maintenance history worth judging.

ClearFlask is Apache-2.0 licensed and actively maintained, last pushed 5 August 2026, but at 448 stars it is a small project with a small community behind it.

Astuto is dead. Its repository was archived read-only on 8 February 2026, the maintainer posted an end-of-life notice pointing people at Fider instead, and its hosted version shut down after under a year of operation. It still turns up on open source roundup lists that have not been updated since. If you see it recommended anywhere, check the date on that recommendation before trusting it.

Is GitHub Issues a real alternative?

For some teams, yes, and it costs nothing on a public repository. Threaded discussion with reply-by-email, full-text search, permalinks and labels, and a request can link straight to the commit that shipped it. Against it: posting needs a GitHub account, which most buyers of a consumer product do not have. The interface is a bug tracker with assignees and an open-or-closed state, not a voting board, and reactions are not votes in any way a non-technical stakeholder reads at a glance. There is no changelog, no testimonials, no email capture, the board cannot live on your own domain, and every complaint filed there is public and indexed against your product name.

If the self-hosting side of this comparison is the part you want to dig into further, self-hosting a feature request board covers the hours involved and the running cost across all of it in one place, and every open source project in the category gets a longer look on its own page.

How should you actually decide?

If prioritisation scoring, per-maker workspace planning or a CRM connection is the actual reason Productboard is on the shortlist, stay on Productboard. No project here replaces that layer, and bolting it onto a feedback board is more work than the licence fee saves.

If what you actually need is the piece a plain feature request board covers, collecting requests, running a public roadmap, and closing the loop when something ships, the decision is between the open source projects above and a paid self-hosted tool that skips Postgres, Docker and your own SMTP server. Fider is the most capable open source option if you are comfortable operating that stack. Docket is a different trade in the same self-hosted category: a one-time $99 for Pro or $249 for Studio, static files plus two endpoints, nothing else to maintain. It is not a Productboard replacement either, it is a feedback board, scoped the same way the open source options are.

Frequently asked questions