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

I like how simple it is to log requests for help and suggestions for new items. It's also great for working together on projects with other people in your team.

Cons

The biggest thing that bothers me with Aha is that there isn't a particularly helpful or user-friendly dashboard where you can see all of your open support issues and ideas at once.

Pros

Tons of features giving you the ability to follow up on biggest to most minute details of projects which makes it very malleable to various needs.

Cons

The learning curve is steep compared to You track.
Schedules epics activities development tasks todos and several other features can be hard to distinguish and somewhat confusing.

Alternatives Considered

YouTrack

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Leadership decided

Pros

The ability to customize almost all aspects of Aha make it the choice for power users. If I can imagine it, I can probably do it. And when I can't figure out how to do it, Aha's team of professionals are there to help you out every time. The company isn't sitting on their laurels either, the engagement with customers on the Ideas portal is very active and features are constantly being added and improved.

Cons

Integration with other tools can be complex to set up, or missing for many tools. Jira integration is very important for my company, but it doesn't always have the capabilities I'd like. I'd also like to see better integration with collaboration tools like Slack, LucidSpark and PowerPoint. I realize Aha is building competitive tools for most of those, but they are not, as of yet, mature enough to make the switch to using them.

Pros

A fantastic tool for project managers to use as a roadmap organizer. The ideas are fantastic, and the integration with Jira at the tactical level of engineering is functioning smoothly. Additional sophisticated features, such as various business modules, aid in the strategic direction of PM.

Cons

It's odd that there aren't any external roadmap samples or case studies available from the makers of one of the greatest roadmap products in the world to aid with the design of your personal external roadmap.

Pros

I first used Aha! four or five years ago - and it was good then, but has come a long way.

I really like how Aha! brings together the why of product strategy with the how of product management. It enables our team to collaborate, stay informed, share, and stay on track in these areas in ways that are very difficult to do with JIRA alone, or some combination of product specifications and JIRA.

It's intuitive and the support is very responsive, knowledgeable and friendly. There is a lot of customization possible, although I have not dipped into that much yet. But it is clear that as the size and scope of our development organization and product line grow that Aha! has everything needed to manage, prioritize & focus our efforts.

Integration with Atlassian JIRA is also strong and a good option. We looked at only using Aha! - including for managing our development tickets & sprints - but that is not a fit at this point. Keeping the clutter & detail of all the workstream & ticket management for development separate is a better solution.

I definitely recommend Aha as best in class for product management.

Cons

The one major improvement that I see is the need for some type of Knowledge Base / Documentation tool set similar to Confluence. Write now, I find that I have to keep meeting notes in separate documents, as these will tend to cover multiple tickets, and have other work to assign tasks and so on. With Confluence + JIRA, you can both document meetings and develop specifications in one place, and then link this to all of the tickets that are related.

Alternatives Considered

Todoist, Jira, Confluence, Wrike and Twist

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Better combination of features and focus on specific needs of software product management.

Pros

I loved so many things about Aha!, but probably the most important thing was my ability to manage and prioritize a LOT of my product's features that can also be tied to Epics, Storys, Initiatives, and Goals in a very slick and powerful interface.

Cons

The product becomes cost-prohibitive, especially for startups, if you wish to use the "Develop" side of the product as well as the "Roadmap" side. For some reason, you need to step up to an extremely expensive Enterprise version, which makes little sense as smaller companies would of course want to use sprint planning and many other critical lower-level engineering and development features. The trials only allow one or the other, not both (without a very confusing experience), which seems odd for the same reason.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, Trello and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha! has well-thought-out capabilities that blend strategy and roadmap planning with powerful feature management. I don't believe there is another product out there that comes close in this regard. And in such a gorgeous, flexible, and easy-to-use interface.

Pros

- Easy to use and learn
- Excellent support team, knowledgeable and responsive (all former product managers!)
- Several templates to choose from, or create your own
- Well defined structure for strategy, vision, goals and initiatives - single source of truth for the Product team
- Easy to share content with stakeholders
- Highly configurable to our organizations terminology and product hierarchy

Cons

- The presentation capabilities are somewhat rudimentary (formatting, graphics)
- Limited ability to support the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology (there are ways, but it's a bit of a square peg in a round hole)
- Embedded tables aren't sortable so it's a bit like older versions of Confluence

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ProductPlan, Asana and Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha is more comprehensive, going beyond the roadmap and the "what" we are building to having dedicated space and structure for the "why" and "who" that drives the strategy. It's really product strategy + product development all in one. We weren't looking for an engineering tool like JIRA - we have that. We needed a place for business case development and strategic planning, sharing of real-time roadmaps, and a single source of truth for all things related to product strategy. The other tools seemed like targeted solutions to parts of product management rather than the entire discipline.

Pros

Aha! is very easy to use product management software we love to use following software:
- Product Roadmap
- Idea generation
- Sprint planning
- Epics, feature and requirement descriptions

Cons

I think as a tool it solves a lot of issues but I could be more interactive like miro.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

In Trello you we didn't have the - Product Roadmap, Idea generation, Sprint planning

Switched From

Trello

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha have all aspects of Jira, Trello

Pros

The breadth and depth of its functionality. You can really tell this is a platform built BY product managers FOR product managers.

Cons

The ramp up time took a little longer than we would've liked but thats the nature of the beast when you are working with a tool this powerful. Once I, as the power user, got the hang of everything, I was able to hold a few lunch and learn sessions with the rest of the team to get them up to speed as well.

Alternatives Considered

Strategic Roadmaps and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

Not nearly enough power for what we require.

Switched From

Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Better roadmap functionality, much bigger emphasis on planning and external facing capability to allow our customers to share their feedback on our roadmaps.

Pros

Aha! is a great canvas to organize your business, product and customer journey. You can take many of the miscellaneous thoughts you have rattling around in your head, and the many post-it notes you have scattered around your office and put them to use in an organized way. It is hard to emphasize the importance of seeing your ideas and tasks written down and prioritized. Aha! makes it easy to articulate your goals and initiatives in a way that is compelling. Then when feature requests come in (as they inevitably will) you have a canvas for deciding how a request compares against the priorities and compared to other requests. It helps you and your stakeholders come together, discuss and come to a consensus on 'what should we build next.'
Another think that I love is the fact that Aha! team does not have a sales function. Instead the platform has invested in a top notch customer support team who will help you customize and build out your plans. They help with introductory, small and big projects.

Cons

Can't think of any specific shortcomings. The platform is very deep and customizable so it can grow with your team's needs.

Alternatives Considered

Wrike and ProdPad

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha! is the most complete and functional tool for managing the business side of product. It is critical to get this part right before a team writes a single line of code. There are many good tools for managing code development and release pipelines, but that is a different set of utility. The good news is Aha! integrates with code management tools to keep /management/sales/marketing/product in-sync with development.

Pros

For my role as Head of Product Management: The strategic view of the product portfolio is all important for the company to see and for me to report. The functions I use most are the strategic and portfolio roadmaps, goals and linked initiatives. I absolutely love the dashboard function, especially for executive resporting. And now use the different workspaces for the different departments who are dependant on the product management scheduling, this is also an added bonus.

Cons

I really wish the functions would allow clarity for Strategic objectives, rather than goals and support the framing of dependant team and individual OKR's. I also find it difficult to delete releases and features on the Strategic level workspace. It would benefit the different types of users to have the functionalities that they need and navigate to it easily. From my role as head of to the associate product manager, we have different uses and feature requirements.

Alternatives Considered

monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

I was used to Aha from my previous company, we found the functionality to be expansive, used accross tthe departments it was coordinated and allowed mixed methodologies in its monitoring and reporting in the products being eveloped. The product management function in the company I am now in is new. I wished to introduce the best in class product management tool, for transparency, acountability and reporting capability accross the company. we have offered many in house demo's and everyone is very impressed, especially as they now know how they can access the information they need to fulfill and support their departments too

Pros

Aha! provides a comprehensive set of tools to allow our teams to track work from an initial thought through to completion. Using Aha! we managed an extremely complex software implementation with multiple integrations and were able to track the work at varying levels of detail while always knowing status. Aha!'s My Work dashboard, assignment and commenting capabilities ensured our team members, with minimal effort, could readily identify their work, call out and address roadblocks and communicate progress. Team members who are more interested in doing the work than saying what work they did are converts to the value of Aha!, praising searchability, ease of use and a central repository for all the critical information.

Cons

Determining the workspace structure proved challenging for us and we are still trying to decide what's the right configuration. Still, there's really no wrong way to set it up and the flexibility and adaptability of the product will allow us to evolve our structure to meet our evolving organization's needs.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Confluence and Wrike

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

limited capabilities, poor visualization, high touch for PM and minimal features for team members

Switched From

Smartsheet and Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Usability and intuitive UI, tagging and commenting, and project management without a big lift for team members who just want to get work done.

Pros

I am a management consultant. I work with small to medium-size businesses. Often these engagements involve helping leaders get their arms around a complex set of long-range forecasts roadmaps, projects, initiatives, strategic goals, products, services, and more. Aha! brings clarity to my clients like no other tool I have used. There are other tools that do this or that but nothing is as easy to use and drives clarity for leadership in an organization.
I love the ability to create a live web page that shows changes and updates to the roadmaps and other documentation in real-time.
The time savings alone in not having to create a new slide deck for the executives is a sheer delight to my clients.

Cons

If you are looking for something to manage the details of your project, I would not use Aha! It just isn't made for that. I always set Aha! on top of a project or product management system; jira or smartsheet.
Getting your head wrapped around the hierarchy of Aha! can be a learning curve but once you get that down it makes sense and works great.

Alternatives Considered

Jira and Pivotal Tracker

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

That's simple, Clarity. Aha! beats everyone hands down for creating clarity at an executive level.

Pros

Philosophically, the software gently pushes you to validate decisions that are key to product management - why are you building this, who is it for, how is it helping you achieve strategic and tactical goals? With that in mind, it sets up the team to be critical in their choices, extremely important in the current market. You're not forced to use these features, but it helps with both top-down alignment and bottom-up justifications for expenditure.

From a feature perspective, the JIRA and Confluence integration work well for our purposes, the cascading templates help us ensure consistency in communication with Engineering across the product lines, an the Ideas portal is a great addition for internal and external feedback.

Cons

Additional data types for the extensible entities would be nice - lists of custom entities for one.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ProductPlan, Productboard and ProdPad

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Functionality - the blend of features jives really well with how we view product management and product investment, which starts well before the first requirement is written. Incorporating this into a cohesive package at a reasonable price point, and providing rapid responses to queries was key.

Pros

I like how easy this product is to use and all the features it has to offer. It's easy to setup and configure to meet most of the needs of my team. We are operating within the Scrum Framework and this tool is being used by all Scrum teams in the Agile Release Train (ART). We have been pleased with the analytics functionality to report out how we're doing as an ART.

Cons

There isn't functionality specific to Scrum teams. It would be great to have a 'Sprint report' auto generated so that we can easily see what was done, what was not done during a Sprint, burndown report and other key metrics reported for our Sprint Reviews. Right now, we piece all of this together.

Pros

Easy to integrate with development software and link to that work to the strategic goals and initiatives to make sure we build the right things the right way, in the right order for the right reasons.
Achievements build and are tracked overtime to show the ROI quickly and easily.

Cons

The price per user prohibits it from becoming the main tool used by all staff. It requires project tracking to be done in the development tool to minimise project costs overall.

Pros

We like the ability to standardise our product management processes and data model across teams that had historically operated in different ways. Integration with Jira makes it easy to reflect development work being done with limited manual intervention required. The support team is always great and prompt to respond to queries. Good communication on new/upcoming features, too.

Cons

Some small improvements could go a long way for us - prioritisation views for initiatives, clearer record rankings, more configurability of the nicer-looking roadmap views, and so on. Additional configurability in user licenses would also be really beneficial (i.e. adding advanced functionality for just a subset of users) as there are some add-ons that could add a lot of value to some users but aren't always needed by all.

Pros

The roadmapping, release planning and feature boards.

Cons

The price tag is deterring the organisation to adapt it fully.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

We use them in parallell.

Pros

Vast amount of functionality related to almost all aspects of project management. The scheduling tools to set up different timelines and dependencies on a project is the best I have seen in a single self-contained project management tool. Apart from basic time management and scheduling tools there are also a wide array of data analysis that can produce graphs, charts, and reports on project details recorded into Aha!, providing info previously unrecorded or not taken advantage of while using previous platforms. This allows you to see how much time you spend, your pain points, and areas of improvement for a single project or for the entire company as a whole.

Cons

As with any complicated software, the software has a steep learning curve and it is difficult to build new processes in a company for a program with this much coverage and that touches so many aspects of the company. Oftentimes when we began using the product for a certain purpose we found that it was often required to make adjustments in other areas of the company to effectively use the software. A good example would be our adjustment of protocols in the company with JIRA to effectively leverage functionality in Aha!. This often meant work required in those areas that was not initially foreseen. However, when was said and done - after on-boarding the product the benefit was a net increase in our ability to effectively manage projects.

Pros

As a product manager you get a lot of information daily from all kinds of sources - and none of the tools that R&D typically use support you in structuring that information. So, you end up with Excel sheets, One Note notebooks, word docs in Sharepoint folders - everything scattered out. When we introduced Aha! the immediate effect was that suddenly everything has a place: from vision to strategic goals to tactical user story specifications, wireframes etc. It's right where you need it when you need it.

Cons

Introducing Aha! requires a mindset change in the Product Management team - everybody needs to embrace it and actually start using it to make an impact. This has been, and still is, the biggest challenge we're facing. I do not recommend buying Aha! if you don't have an internal champion who will help standardizing the usage and train the other team mates.

Pros

Prioritizing work and managing the roadmaps are the most intuitive and foundational parts to Aha!. The Integrations to various development systems are also strong.

Cons

Additional integrations with UX-type solutions such as Figma are only available through the additional development product. Our current development product is so integrated into our development activities, that it'll be very hard to move to a new system to take advantage of these additional integrations. Direct product usage integration would also be immensely valuable to add to the software to track the performance and engagement of delivered work and monitor KPIs.

Pros

Tool allows you to easily and visually create product hierarchy

Integration with Jira is incredibly helpful

Support reps respond promptly and always have the answer (even if it is "that's not possible")

It's improved massively in the last two years since I started using it

Easy to customize fields/issues

Cons

Some views meant to be easy to view are still ugly and not easy to change (pivot table / custom roadmap)

Occasionally Buggy - this comes with the territory of continually improving

The hierarchy can be restrictive, although I've noticed this has improved recently as well so hopeful it's eliminated as a problem in the future

Some features (capacity planning, dynamic forms, idea widgets) are only on the enterprise+ plan which is annoying considering how basic they are to the function of Aha

Pros

Aha! is SaaS based Release management software that provides a very flexible and customizable process based engine which provides unsurpassed reporting and analytics of your releases and strategy. The product provides good integration with other devops tooling and non-licensed based portals for access by average non-seated users.

Cons

There is a need for strong SCRUM or process background and it will take some effort to setup the processes. This is not necessary a con but the tool requires a couple of weeks of effort to setup before adding users. Even then I suggest you add a project test the process and adjust.

Pros

Comparing Aha! with other business software like Trello, Airtable, Jira, etc entirely misses the point. Aha! is about strategy. It's a serious tool for serious thinkers, not a lightweight, card metaphor.

It encourages you to think through what you want to accomplish and why, while enabling you to link the releases and features that make up your strategic roadmap to these measurable, strategic objectives.

Features can (and should!) be easily linked with tactical Jira User Story (and Subtask) and Task issues, which will then bi-directionally sync Feature/issue data between systems and automatically update completion percentage for at-a-glance executive status reporting.

I've tried a LOT of other products, including those solutions built on top of Jira. Save yourself the time, and check out Aha! It's the only product that actually helps me think through my strategy and links these models and timelines to tactics so that I can see progress against my objectives.

Cons

The state of Gantt charts can be a little confusing, e.g. "Click here for latest version" and/or enabled "Save" button, when I haven't made any changes.