Suggestion box software

The best suggestion box software depends on who's collecting. A software company running a public roadmap needs a different tool than a school, charity or small office that wants a simple, ideally anonymous, box for anyone to drop an idea in. This roundup is built for the second reader, sorted by cost and fit rather than by feature count.

Every price below was checked against each vendor's own pricing page between 20 and 22 August 2026, and the billing basis is stated wherever a figure appears.

What is a suggestion box, and who actually needs one?

Nearly everything sold under "feedback" or "feature request" software is built for a company with a product, a public roadmap, and paying customers who vote on what gets built next. A suggestion box is a plainer, older idea: a place to drop a note, sometimes with a name attached, sometimes not, read by whoever is meant to read it. A school, charity, office or small team asking for this usually isn't choosing between roadmapping tools, it's deciding whether it needs software at all. For the software-company version of this category in full, see feature request tools.

Does anonymity actually work, and which tools support it?

Anonymity is the one thing that matters most to this reader, and it's the one thing none of the tools below confirm. Every vendor's pricing and product pages describe boards, votes, seats and workspaces; none of them, in any pass of research behind this piece, states plainly that a submission can be made without an identifiable submitter. Docket is a clear example of the opposite design: its submitter emails are captured and encrypted at rest, with a different ciphertext generated each time, which only makes sense if an email is expected in the first place. If anonymity is the actual requirement, ask the vendor directly and get it in writing before paying anything. Do not assume an optional name field is the same thing as a genuinely anonymous submission.

Which of these have a genuine free tier?

Free means something different at every one of these, and it matters more here than in a roadmap comparison, because a school or charity is usually trying to spend nothing at all, not trade up later as it grows.

Canny.io's free tier covers 25 tracked users, a count that includes anyone who posts, votes or comments, and the count only rises from there. UserJot's free tier covers 2 boards. Featurebase's free tier covers 1 seat and 1 board. All three are built to be outgrown; that's the business model, not an oversight, and it suits a company expecting growth far more than a fixed-size office or a school with roughly the same number of people asking next year as this one.

Sleekplan's free "Indie" tier is different in kind: genuinely free forever, a single admin, no seat count to trip. For one person running one box, that ceiling may never bind. Productboard has a real $0 tier too, with 50 AI credits a month, priced per "maker", its own word for the person managing the workspace; contributors don't count against that limit. Jira Product Discovery is free forever for 3 creators, and its unusual generosity is that contributors, meaning anyone submitting or commenting, are free and unlimited on every tier including Free, and don't need a Jira licence to take part.

Docket's free edition never expires, needs no card and no account, and includes bugs and feature requests, a roadmap, a changelog, an FAQ and testimonials, with unlimited products. The catch for this particular reader is setup: it ships with INSTALL.md, written to be run by a coding agent, not a form a school office manager fills in by hand. For a team with someone technical to call on, that's a non-issue. For a charity with no developer on staff, it's the whole difficulty in one line.

Where does a form and a spreadsheet actually win?

For a genuinely small, genuinely internal box, none of the tools above may be the right answer at all, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than steering a reader toward software they don't need. A paper box, a Google Form or a Microsoft Form feeding a shared spreadsheet costs nothing beyond tools most schools, charities and offices already have, needs no setup skill, and can be made genuinely anonymous simply by not asking for a name, a choice entirely in your own control rather than a vendor's promise. What it doesn't do: no votes, no public roadmap, no changelog, nothing automatic, and someone has to remember to open the spreadsheet. For a one-off box collecting ideas from parents, staff or members, that trade is usually the right one. For a running product with a subscriber base who want to see what happened to the thing they asked for, it stops being enough, and that's the point where the tools above start earning their keep.

Sorted by what free actually gets you

So what should you actually use?

Answer three questions before paying for anything.

1. Is this genuinely one internal box, not a public product? If yes, a form and a spreadsheet is the honest answer, and software here is solving a problem you don't have. 2. Do submitters need to stay unidentified? If yes, none of the vendors above confirm it, so build it yourself with a form that has no name field, rather than trust a claim nobody actually makes. Our guide to how to collect feedback from customers covers the setup either way. 3. Will this grow into a real public roadmap with votes and updates over time? If yes, that's the moment to look past this page and toward what each tool costs to run once it's genuinely a product, covered in what feedback tools actually cost.

Frequently asked questions