Aha! Reviews

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

Aha! solves nearly every need we have for product management. It easily integrates with systems we've found difficult to connect in the past and it provides a straightforward, easy-to-use interface for stakeholders to provide Ideas and Requirements. One or both of these have been a major struggle for other applications we've tested. On top of this, Aha! provides a structure to our product management and future roadmap that we've not had in the past. This is important as a single user may work across multiple workspaces managing a multitude of products.

Cons

If you are not familiar with the technical setup, there are some complexities to work through, especially if integrating with other systems. However, once done correctly, these integrations work flawlessly. Also, if you are new to agile product management or you've never worked in a rigid product roadmap structure in the past, there is a learning curve. With this said, once learned, it will make you a better product manager while making you far more productive.

Alternatives Considered

Lucidchart, Azure DevOps Services and Smartsheet

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

They solved for nearly all of our use cases and provided an experience and product that will allow use to grow over time.

Pros

It is in the same time very complete and powerful and very simple to use.

Cons

Kpi building wihich is already a good feature inside Aha! could be improved.

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 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

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

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

Has all the features I need to conduct my daily Product Management work, and the tool's speed and performance makes it very easy to work with.

Cons

Pricing gets very expensive as it is paid per user. Should have an option of unlimited guest members (viewers)

There are many features and functionalities. I believe the onboarding tutorials could be more detailed and show real daily examples of features usage.

Pros

Easy to use the Aha & support are very highly help

Cons

Looking to have Integration with other Atlassian products

Pros

This app can facilities all aspects of Product Management, goals, Roadmaps and etc. The features of the app are also good.

Cons

The mobile interface of the app is not that great.

Pros

I like the flexibility to create and modify schedules and reports. I can create tasks for team members and Aha! sends them reminders (upcoming and past due). I manage business operations projects and this feature has been very helpful and has eliminated my having to chase down most tasks.
I like the feature to create various reports with multiple slices of data/views for different purposes by just adding or removing filters vs. building something from scratch.
Customer support is top notch. Someone always gets back to me within a couple of hours if not sooner whenever I reach out with questions or requesting help.

Cons

This software is complex, IMO not very intuitive and has a steep learning curve. There are tutorials that are very helpful and walk you through most everything you can think of, but it takes time to watch them and/or read. Once you get past the initial phase of learning the software and features you need, you will love it.

Alternatives Considered

Planview Portfolios and Clarity

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

This was an enterprise tool previously selected by my company. I would have preferred a PPM tool, but at the moment we don't need such a robust tool for project/portfolio management, so Aha! just fits the bill, and now that I've learned it serves me beautifully. Plus we are also using it for product management and integrating it with Jira.

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

Aha! allows you to tie higher level goals to initiatives that can dial down to the most granular level. We wanted the capability to pull reports for our C-level executives to see what we're working on and our previous project management system didn't have that as an option.

Cons

We also loved the workflow features, however there's a little snag in the way we need to visually see our activities and tasks so, unfortunately, right now they don't have the capability to have a true workflow (phases and milestones) tied in with our processes because they get buried in the top level schedule/project. Since we work in the marketing world, our processes are different than the product release projects. If we could have the phases and milestones as a part of the activities so that if we push back the project (schedule) date or postpone in the status field that it would push back all assigned dates accordingly - that would be ideal. Right now, we are managing manually...

The notifications are another issue. There's a LOT of notifications that come through my email on a daily basis. Even though I have it set to a daily and weekly digest on each workspace, I still receive too many emails for every task completed or created in projects that I follow. But I don't get an email when somebody comments on something, I have to go to my notifications for that.

The my work view is really robust as well. Once you get the hang of where you need to look, it's helpful. However, the naming convention of the records doesn't allow you to know right away which task is tied to a particular project, so we're trying to make sure that we title the tasks and activities accordingly - but that's tough to do manually for project templates with generic tasks.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

We needed transparency, a department wide overview of all projects and campaigns that we could easily share with the powers that be. There was little project management capabilities that truly helped the team move campaigns forward - so the robustness of Aha! takes care of that and so much more! Now we have a birds eye view of every detail of what we do.

Switched From

Basecamp

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Because Aha! is even more robust. I used Asana in my marketing firm for years and loved it, but we are not a Google based company and it still had limited options that Aha! beats.

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

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

The ease of use is awesome, and bringing new users onboard is simple and quick. The integration to JIRA, and SSO, makes my administration and use simple and straightforward. It allows me as a product manager to manager the roadmap, and dev to concentrate on their JIRA environment which they are comfortable in.

Cons

The presentation module could use some more customizations, and tools, it is OK, but I end up creating PDF's and moving them to powerpoint.

Alternatives Considered

Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

I was familiar with it, and the price is fair.

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

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

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

The software makes Product Management possible at scale. What I love is the ability to gather all different feature and enhancmeent ideas from around my company easily through Aha's idea portals. All of our employees now know to drop any of their ideas into our portal so that the product team can actively manage them and push them into the product. Gone are the days of countless emails saying, "I wish the product did xyz..." or being stopped in the hallway to be told about a feature request. Our employees easily transfer ideas from our clients directly into our portals too. It's a lifesaver!

Cons

The product is great and I don't have any negatives to say! Takes a little while to think about how you want it implemented, but it's very flexible and can scale with your team.

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.

Pros

Aha is a very user-friendly application that provides powerful functionality for a product manager. The ease it offers to collect feedback as ideas from stakeholders and move them forward into features and epics that get handed off to a development team is great. I also really like the ability to create multiple boards that I can use to organize my thoughts and prioritize the work.

Aha is also very easy to get started with because of the knowledge base and videos that exist.

When you do have a problem you can't work through the support team is great. Amazingly quick response, friendly and ready to help.

Cons

There used to be features that I was looking to have added, but Aha puts out frequent releases and has added everything I was looking for. They also make it easy to submit ideas for future enhancements through the Aha idea portal that they have set up for their own product.

Pros

Seamless features and hierarchies and flexibility across entities. Excellent integrations with JIRA and very appealing dashboards. We particularly use the worksheet feature that allows us to literally create complex queries and link things and view stats the way we want. But the roadmapping process, view by releases etc. is very powerful as we create the direction but also when the product owners take it to the PI planning sessions

Cons

Capacity planning needs more options as enterprise software planning is rarely as simple. But as i mentioned above, the worksheet feature allows us to create custom fields and tables to get around this. It is an area that we would love for them to enhance as their reports in that area are awesome.

Pros

Use, customisation and reporting tools are great. The integration options are powerful and simple to setup and configure.

Support are really quick at coming back to you and helpful.

The ideas portal is a great tool. Help documentation is very comprehensive.

Cons

A lot of features/pages, can be difficult to navigate for new users. Their billing team can be a bit keen at times.