Aha! Reviews

Pros

It is made by Product Managers for Product Managers
It has features around the vision and strategy of the company
There is clear separation between ideas and features
There are Personas that can be attached to ideas and features
There are goals and strategies
There are areas to store your files
You can create shareable presentations that update dynamically
You can build wireframes within the tool
You can house everything you need as a Product Manager is one locations
The support is amazing
Integrates with JIRA

Cons

I find it difficult to find what I am looking for in the knowledge base
Some of the features are not very intuitive to use
There are a few features I would like to see added

Alternatives Considered

Targetprocess, Quip, ProductPlan, Craft.io, GoodDay, Confluence, monday.com, Wrike, Productboard and ProdPad

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

JIRA does not provide the features needed for a Product Management Team

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Because it was the only one that had all of the key features we were looking for.

Pros

Very powerful software, and almost no learning curve compared to Jira. So much more intuitive despite having a ton of advanced capabilities. I especially love how easy it is to share information with non-users, without having to manually update spreadsheets or slide decks.

Cons

The Roadmaps pricing is a bit steep, but the Develop pricing is affordable enough that it makes up for it.

Alternatives Considered

Trello

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

Tired of Jira's illogical UX and unnecessary complexity.

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha! was more flexible in terms of which software development methodologies we could practice; Trello was too purpose-built for Kanban and Linear was too specific to Scrum.

Pros

Cool logo. Good space to house personas and competitor analysis.

Cons

In the initial onboarding process I would contact customer support for clarity, seeing as how I've never used such a software. I had one phone call, fairly short. I was later tasked with sole responsibility for the software - evangelizing and coaching others on how to use it. When I reached out to support for more clarity, the reps did EVERY possible not to get on a call with me. They would email me back every other day - directing me to instructional videos - refusing to get on the phone. I needed to integrate with Jira, "Please HELP!!??"- guess what? "We have some videos that can help you.

Awful support.

As well, not very user friendly, not customizable, and just down right inferior cosmetically.

Pros

The best thing about this product is the huge flexibility resulting from the degree of customisation that is available. This is dangerous if mishandled, obviously, but in a company where processes are evolving, it has allowed me to accommodate all manner of requests and requirements.

Cons

The UI can be a little inconsistent. Many features are paywalled; I'm constantly being upsold as if I'm on a freemium version. Some of the tools are a little unloved (text editing is clunky and unreliable, some presentation tools lack flexibility). And navigation isn't the smoothest.

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Craft.io, monday.com and Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Huge flexibility to mould it to our (changing) processes, and to capture eveything.

Pros

Any organization that wants to be thoughtful, deliberate, and wants to link everything they build to the reason WHY they are building it should use this tool. It takes energy and effort to adopt, but the results are amazing. Every feature and release can be linked to a strategic element. In fact, what you are getting with AHA is not only a tool, but a best-practices thought model for product management (this can be challenging to implement but the rewards are high if you get through it. A key benefit is that once created, roadmaps and reports stay FRESH, meaning all changes to dates of features and releases are instantly reflected in your roadmaps and reports. No more updating Excel rows where cells are months!! Last but not least, their support is second-to-none!

Cons

While I really like AHA overall, the UI has many challenges. There are many inconsistencies (some places have a save, other autosave, some screens have a URL, others don't, some settings can be applied to everything at once, others have to be set manually one-by-one). Also for a single page app, it often struggles with refresh after edit more than it should in 2021.

Alternatives Considered

Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Richer reporting, deeper feature sets, better use of strategy elements, MUCH better integration.

Pros

Aha Ideas provides flexibility, security, and automation, allowing us to interact with customers at scale in a fashion that fits our business. Aha Roadmaps+ offers a very compelling product planning tool that integrates directly with our Jira instance. Aha regularly updates both products with new and compelling features. Aha also reaches out on a regular basis to check in, showcase new things, and troubleshoot any issues we're having.

Cons

The seat-based licensing model prevents us from fully adopting Aha Roadmaps as our standard planning tool. Doing so would require our program managers, engineering managers, and designers to have paid seats. Also, as with other highly customizable tools, it's very confusing for the uninitiated. We've had to create extensive internal documentation for onboarding new product managers. Finally, we've been asking for a SOC2 report for years, Aha hasn't been willing to undertake this (ISO27001 is not equivalent).

Pros

Really easy to get to grips with, with a lot of customisable elements. The idea link up is a great feature.

Cons

There can be a learning curve, and the way in which you manage your portfolio, or view it, may need to change to fit into their model.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

More focused on product management over project work

Pros

Tons of functionality; quick responses from support

Cons

Difficult to learn. Recommend going for Enterprise Plus Plan so you get that Concierge help!

Pros

They really have thought of everything! The platform has such comprehensive functionality, everything you could need to plan, deliver and communicate your product releases. With so much content, it's a tough job to ensure users can easily learn and get value from the platform but this company is Best in Class at demo's; KB articles, how to videos and live training sessions. Everything is super clear and easy to learn. Why wouldn't you want this as a Product Manager?

Cons

Sometimes the sheer volume of "what's possible" can be overwhelming. Simple things can be hard to figure out because you didn't notice this one setting that is active. With that said, the times that I have needed to figure something out, the articles are super clear and the response time for support is unreal.

Pros

It's so easy to use and allow users to submit their ideas and proposals thru the platform

Cons

There isn't anything specifically, sometimes I feel it is a bit barebones, but when deploying to tons of users and customers, it honestly is better that way

Pros

I always tell people that Aha! brings together the why and the how of a solution, giving the view into the overall strategy components of a solution, mixed with the back end development and ongoing progress. It captures everything our teams needs to collaborate, stay informed, share, and stay on track. It's easy to use and the support team is fantastically responsive, knowledgeable and friendly. As someone with little technical background, the platform and an ever-growing knowledge base made it easy to customize the experience to our unique needs.

Cons

Sometimes too many options can be a bad thing. Aha! will let you do basically anything you want, but sometimes having that ability makes it feel overwhelming. However, I'd hardly call that a con since 1) I'd rather have too many options than not enough, and 2) the support team and knowledge base help you through whatever scenario you're in.

Pros

Aha! has made a huge difference in our ability strategically plan our releases and align across multiple delivery teams. It's the only tool flexible enough to accommodate our broad and multifaceted product suite, and allows us to report on it all without requiring engineers to create reports for us.

The customization and integration capabilities are better and more user-friendly than any I've seen in any product. When configuring customization and integrations in other products, I often find myself thinking "if only this were as easy as Aha". Same thing about reporting - it can be a bit complicated but I think they do a great job of making it as simple as possible even with a huge variety of options and massive flexibility.

Their support is also incredibly responsive and friendly, and their documentation is good. It's been really easy for me to teach myself the ins and outs of the product and get answers to my questions.

Cons

Our biggest barrier to getting more value out of Aha is the cost. We would love to bring our scrummasters and UX leaders into Aha in more than essentially just a read-only capacity, but the cost to do that is prohibitive. While the benefits of Aha are huge, so is the cost, so it's something we need to be constantly ready to justify to management.

The navigation is also somewhat poor, and there are a handful of specific views that are hard to use, which is a point of confusion for many users. But that's not too bad since we can usually create the view we want via a report.

Alternatives Considered

ProductPlan and ProdPad

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

Because our development teams make heavy use of Azure DevOps Server, we had previously been trying to use that for our product & release planning as well. But Azure DevOps server didn't provide enough ways to track work across many projects and teams, the reporting was not flexible or user-friendly enough, the customization was a nightmare. At the end of the day, we needed a tool built for product managers, not engineers.

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha was the only tool that offered the level of customization and hierarchy that we needed for a large and multi-faceted suite of products, and it also integrated well with our development tools. Most other tools we looked at seemed like they were made with small portfolios or startups in mind, not a fully fledged enterprise-grade product suite.

Pros

The roadmap functionality and features, ideas portal and the ability to create dynamic presentation are key features that have been critical to our product teams. I like that we can connect the strategy of our business, goals and mission at the function and feature level. The UI is easy and intuitive and connecting to Jira is a huge plus for our collaboration with solutions engineering teams.

Cons

SAFe methodology is not completely implemented - although we have found ways to engineer it to fit our organizational maturity in adoption of SAFe

Alternatives Considered

Product Management Dashboard for JIRA, SharpCloud and Productboard

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

It did not provide useful tools for product management, strategy, ideas portal. It was hard to see the tracebility and provide senior level management reporting

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Customer support, ease of use and setup, great UI, ability to have cohesive view across all areas, strategy, product, development teams, marketing, etc.

Pros

Aha is incredibly feature-rich. It can handle ideation, business planning, product management, and so much more.

Cons

With all the functionality, the learning curve is a bit steep. For example,

Pros

What has been most useful to us is the ability to let the respective teams remain in their tools of choice while being able to knit together an end to end picture from top-level goals down to the execution of features and go to market activity. The pre-built integrations to Salesforce, Zendesk, GitHub, Slack, and Asana made linking the picture together across our org a pretty light lift.

Cons

We struggled with the UI here and there as well as getting folks fully up to speed on the available capabilities/best practices as it is feature-rich. Our approach was an incremental deployment starting in the middle of the data model. If I had a chance to do it again, I would start at the top with clear goals, vision and a focus on capturing product strategy details and then move down through the initiatives and into tracking the implementation details via releases/epics/features.
Some of the new enterprise + features around collecting customer feedback are pretty interesting.

Pros

I liked the quick responses from the support team and the fact that the ideas were linked to the boards and roadmap planning.

Cons

We currently use Jira and found the separate workflow and webhook added an additional layer to our work processes without adding a lot of value. We also found the system far too overcomplicated for our small start up needs. It would be great for a big enterprise with loads of processes, however we prefer and quick and easy product workflow without all the formalities and steps that Aha is created for.

Alternatives Considered

ProductPlan, airfocus and Productboard

Switched From

Canny

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Ideas and reporting.

Pros

The product has great tools for defining your product strategy, vision, mission, and allows you to easily track ideas, features, and plan your releases effectively. It offers a great integration with development software such as Azure Devops or Jira to bridge the gap between product management and development. I've found the software easy to learn and intuitive as I never had formal training and was still able to figure out how to use it well.

Cons

I haven't experienced any feature that I've found troublesome or largely lacking in an essential capability as it is customizable in the right places. There are some features (i.e. polls) that I don't have access to with the current license that we have that I would like to try out so I can't say for sure if there are any gaps in such features.

Pros

Product customization is exteremly flexible, especially if combined with the Enterprise+ customization possibilities.Integration with DevOps is working very well.Customer support is very proactive and fast to provide help and solutions.

Cons

Ideas integration with the features could be improved to have better automation, but overall is working well.

Pros

Having been on a long journey over the years with many different types of project/product management software solutions, none of them ever seemed to be "the one". Aha takes a different approach, and focuses on management of end-customer value that is aligned against the vision you have for your company and its products.

It's the first work management platform I've used that took this holistic approach, and actually its massively empowering. I'm now able to construct high level roadmaps for complex projects that span multi-discipline teams that can be reported to all stakeholders very clearly and easily.

Managing the features the team are going to focus on in a customer centric way is also great. Yes, you can use Aha for task management, but often in a product management capacity it's more important to express WHAT customer outcomes & benefits we want, and then let the team figure out HOW to deliver them.

Moreover, the customer support from the Aha team is excellent, with plenty of guides not just how to use the platform, but also how to strategically tackle typical challenges that product managers face.

I highly recommend Aha. It's a liberating product from a team that clearly have an awesome culture based around customer success.

Cons

Aha is a sophisticated tool that's very flexible and configurable so it takes a little while to get fluent with everything it can do, and understand the best workflow patterns with it. That said, once you find your groove it gets much easier. The support team help with that though.
Pricing is also in the premium end of the market, particularly for smaller companies, but then you do tend to get what you pay for.

Pros

Very initiative to use and can be extremely powerful if setup with some foresight. It is flexible enough to be tailored to any kind of business yet rigid enough to instill needed discipline when using across a team or teams..

Cons

Not much to dislike. While it can feel expensive, their reviewer and viewer (free users) make it easy to scale across many team members.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, monday.com and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

No comparison.

Pros

It is user friendly while being extremely robust as you get deeper into the functionality. So far I've found that almost everything is possible in Aha and sometimes just takes a little thought on how you want to achieve it that will fit your organization.

Cons

I can't say there is anything that I don't like about this software. We're in the middle tier package and anything I would mention here is included in the highest tier.

Alternatives Considered

Jira and Airtable

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

All in one.

Pros

Aha is a powerful tool that gives you ability to customize the core product around how your team does its job. The easy integrations with engineering development tools like Azure DevOps or Jira make it an accurate status reporting tool for product teams while allowing engineering functions to do their execution work elsewhere. The dashboards and reports in Aha are super powerful and it's the only way we report on roadmaps and status. And finally the Ideas portal with Ideas advanced allows us to be in touch with our customers in a meaningful way and let's us communicate internally and externally about what's coming next for our products.

Cons

The cost of a license is not cheap, and it took my business a long time to convince senior executives to allow us to get the Ideas Advanced licensing. It would have been really helpful if Ideas Advanced could have been enabled for a subset of users or a product line within a corporate tenant account.

Pros

Aha! has always had outstanding customer service and user experience. I have used this product for many years and have easily onboarded and mentored product managers' careers using this product. I like that we have traceability from the business strategy all the way to the requirements. It has been an invaluable tool for my team to articulate the 'why' to our IT partners.

Cons

The product can be overwhelming at first for new users, but the knowledge base and tutorials are beyond sufficient to bring folks up to speed. It would be great if the product allowed more configurable design to its presentations and roadmaps so we can migrate fully out of ppt and use presentation mode instead.

Pros

I used Aha! in my previous job as a Product Manager. When I started my own company, Aha! was the obvious choice for me to use to build our short and long term roadmaps. Aha! guides you through roadmap creation starting from your strategy, vision and business environment. The way Aha! is set up makes you think through all critical aspects of your business like the competitive landscape, and take them into account in your roadmap planning. Going through the roadmap process in Aha! ensures that we stay focused on the right things that bring us the most value.

Aha! Customer Success Team is legendary. In my 20+ years of career I've never experienced anything like it. True professionals who know what they're doing. The team responds to issues within minutes. They resolve the issues within minutes. They want you to be successful, and provide you advice and best practices to get you there. This is how customers should be treated, and Aha! is an inspiration to us in that!

Cons

I love it all! Only downside is that now I get really annoyed when contacting someother companies' customer service and my questions and requests disappear into a black hole. Aha! has shown a new standard that other companies would benefit in trying to reach!

Pros

I love that it's specifically built for product managers, instead of trying to force us into using project management software. I daily use the reports for monitoring progress, as well as for setting expectations within the company around our roadmap. I've used the integrations both with Jira and Azure DevOps, and both are very solid! The ideas portal is fabulous! Easy to configure, easy to use, and saves me hours of headaches trying to manage that.

Cons

Creating a brand new report from scratch is actually harder than you would think it should be. Though, if you want to create a report from a template, it's super easy. Also, the UI definitely feels a bit dated in places. When trying to convince my company to use Aha rather than Productboard, it was difficult for them to see past the "Sexier" UI in Productboard to understand that Aha had better & more features