airfocus

Pros

The customization of the prioritization formula. Easy to learn and use. Capability to work with different views and different workspaces.

Cons

Great product, waiting for more features to come

Pros

The best thing about Airfocus is its modularity, which enables an extremely high level of flexibility. Literally everything can be customised within each workspace: roadmap views, fields within each view, swimlane groupings... even if something I need isn't immediately obvious, there is a way to make it happen!

Cons

The user interface is quite overwhelming at first glance. There are many ways to configure every aspect of the product, so proper training and onboarding are critical. Some of my product colleagues have been hesitant to use Airfocus for this reason.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

The prioritisation features and ability to share roadmaps dynamically with different stakeholders

Cons

The JIRA integration is still missing important features. I would like to be able to control more of JIRA from Airfocus itself.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

- Flexibility in creating custom views and fields
- Ability to push stories to different Jira projects easily
- Convinient flow for working with insights and feedback
- Great customer support
- Good and intuitive UI

Cons

- Some things you still need to do in Jira, like setting parent links and updating ranks between issues

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

What I like best about Airfocus is its ability to help us visualize and communicate our strategic initiatives, especially in the context of lean portfolio management. The tool allows us to create compelling, well-structured roadmaps that make it easy to align various stakeholders within our organization.

Cons

We’d love to see even more dynamic and user-customizable views, to tailor roadmaps and reports to different stakeholder needs.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing airfocus

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

I like it very customizable, so I can choose a template that I need and adjust it. I used a project management roadmap template, really like the way it's set up with tasks list, kanban board and timeline, 3 key views I need.
Overall I like kanban board the most because it's quite clear for the team to know what's done, and what's in progress.

Cons

It's relatively quite expensive comparing to other tools.
I'm using it for project management with several workstreams and departments, so not that interested in the prioritization, because things are planned beforehand. But seems that feature has to be there and can't get rid of the scoring when I don't need it. And also I can't trace history version or activities, so if someone did something wrong in my team, we need to manually fix it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

A the kids say, It is intuitive asf. It required almost little to no time to familiarize myself with the feature set and how to make use of them which is rare in a new piece of software.

Cons

Well I understand the reasons why, it is not all that easy to share/collaborate with teams outside of your product group.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

Airfocus is magic, because it allowed my growth team to not work on the latest, shiniest idea. It allowed me to get my team to think more objectively about what projects will actually make the most impact.

Cons

I think onboarding could be a lot easier so I don't have to spend much time walking folks through how to use it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

Airfocus is an excellent tool for managing prioritization and roadmaps.

Cons

While Airfocus is great for prioritization and roadmapping, it might lack features like deep task tracking or workflow automation that you need for complex projects.

Pros

The support team is amazing. Sometimes when I ask a question I receive a short video tutorial that they created for my specific use case. I also like how easy it is to setup a workspace for collecting feedback as an airfocus beginner and in addition to that Airfocus offers a lot of workspace templates that you can customize to your needs.

Cons

When the user send us a feedback the user doesn't receive a confirmation/notification email.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

I love how customizable everything is in AirFocus. You can build as many workspaces and views as you'd like that help you organize epics, ideas, feedback and initiatives. Really great tool for product roadmap socialization and prioritization.

Cons

Once you get it, you get it. However, some of the features are not as intuitive to figure out how they work or even their potential. I highly recommend scheduling time with the support representative to get set-up. After that initial setup time, you're good to go.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Airfocus is powerful and once setup, it gets out of the way. This is exactly what you want in a product.
I like the single-source of truth but with limitless views which makes creating tailored views for teams and stakeholders a breeze.

Cons

Airfocus can be daunting to setup. The team attempts to minimize this by proving templates.
The real trick to using AirFocus is to start small and work outwards on what is needed.

Pros

- Easy to use
- The prioritization module is excellent
- The visibility I can give to the team and the board of directors
- The customization of the views and fields

Cons

- Sometimes it gets slow
I have no other product cons

Pros

airfocus is by far one of the most sophisticated prioritization solutions I've tried that is still easy to use. I also really like that you can share and discuss the projects with a remote team.

Cons

It'd be nice to have an undo button. So far I've not felt the need to use it, but I think it can be a useful feature to have.

Pros

Quick roadmap creation and clear interface

Cons

Freemium unavailable. That's sad but I wouldn't switch to some other service.

Pros

One of my favorite things about airfocus was the setup process the wizard really guided me through it and I was able to easily setup the software the way I wanted to.
The bubble charts are a big help when it comes to discussing prioritization in-between teams when everyone has a different focus.

Cons

When I share a roadmap with a link, I would like to be able to set filters for the receiving persons view of the roadmap.

Pros

Airfocus is a clean, clear and concise way for us to prioritize our feature requests and backlog. It has helped to create more visibility within the organization on what the team is working on and have more direct say in what they want to have implemented.

Cons

We had a few issues initially with fitting our process into the software and had hoped for one or two more customizations around ranking, but overall that didn't negatively affect our experience.

Pros

We use Jira, Trello, and Zapier. It was so easy to integrate these tools and as result it took off some work and made daily stuff easier.

Cons

I really had not faced issues using the tool as well as my team members.

Pros

The Gantt Chart is good, and a functionality that trello doesn't have. The 'Prioritisation Poker' feature was also good for feature prioritisation, and I liked the visual matrix of feature priorities by value and cost.

Cons

The Kanban board doesn't really do anything that trello doesn't do. I also didn't like how limited the features were unless you bought more licences, which is harder for a startup like us.

The situation it left us with was using a trello kanban functionality as unless we paid more, people other than myself were view only. This was clunky because you had to manually push each change.

Pros

As the person who runs product and engineering at our organization, there are requests coming in from every department for features, updates, and new products/pages. Being able to build a prioritization framework that the entire org is bought into that I can share with everyone has been invaluable. The entire team can now see our roadmap and why we're working on certain things. We built a google form to ingest requests, which creates an asana and airfocus task. We then enter their scores for impact, and our scores for effort and other teams can clearly see where their projects fall on the prioritization list. It's made conversations about bandwidth so much easier and made our teams work more transparent.

Cons

Currently, there is no way to have multiple frameworks inside a single project. It's also a bit expensive on a per-user basis.

Pros

It’s easy to use and it provides enough flexibility in a visual and intuitive way.

Cons

The quadrant matrix visualization could be further improved with better functionality, especially when it comes to displaying labels of each project/data point

Pros

The Priorization possibilities, the Asana integration and the Iframes possibilities to let to stakeholder to track.

Cons

Manual synchronization. Not Asana Due date synchronization , finished task in Asana are not considered. I think that Asana synchronization in general is a big advantage but you should still work on it to obtain maximum information from Asana tasks.

Pros

The Trello integration and timeline features are most useful to me.

Cons

The board portion isn't something we use much, since we have Trello.

Pros

The prioritization element and the ability to integrate with Trello.

Cons

It's a bit pricey to have multiple editors - would be great if the package levels increased the number of editors not just contributors.

Pros

As a compnay we were struggling with prioritizing and answering the 'what's next?' question. Airfocus is a great tool to help you do this in a transparant and convenient way.

Cons

These guys are working really hard and the software gets updated on a regular bases. At the moment we are just missing some simple editing (copy, move,...) features, but they are already on the roadmap.

Pros

Visually stunning way of presenting data

Cons

Some improvements required but roadmap requires us to wait a while

Pros

- flexible and various visualization of common data
- helpful prioritization and rating tools
- flexible and individual synchronization with JIRA (applying filters, indivudal field mappings aso)
- great support and fast implementation of our new ideas

Cons

- slow synch with JIRA, no "live" updates, status of synchronization not so visible
- sometimes instabilities

Pros

As a Product Director, I've found Airfocus to be a game-changer for our team's prioritization and roadmap planning. The priority scoring system has been incredibly impactful, helping us identify high-value tasks aligned with our strategic goals. The ability to create customizable roadmaps has enhanced our communication with both internal teams and stakeholders, showcasing our plans visually. Integration with Jira speed up our workflow. Collaboration features enabled easy feedback collection. Additionally, we have great support from our Customer Success Manager, who proactively helps us achieve success with Airfocus.

Cons

Like every platform, Airfocus contains some limitations, but they are not very troublesome, and Support helps prepare the workaround if they occur.

Pros

You can build so many individual workflows and customize it according to your needs

Cons

Limitations of the mirror app, that you can not integrate if, then options for customized fields and that you can not customize the rules and calculation within one factor for the priority score.

Pros

The prioritization features and the priority chart view. Love how the prioritization is calculated automatically, definitely gives you a different view of the importance of your roadmap items; especially when using the priority chart view. Makes it really easy to see what features you should focus on next.

Cons

What I liked least, and this is just for the sake of having to list something, is the abundance of templates. There are tons of templates but they are all based on the same functionality with slight settings tweaked. AT first, I found this confusing and overwhelming as I did not understand what the difference was. Until I spent a good amount of time using it then chose what I liked the most from each and made it into my own.

Pros

The first thing my team and I liked most about this software is that it covers all the bases for project management: Gantt roadmap, Kanban board and the Priority Chart. The second thing we liked most was how easy it was to use and how it effortlessly integrated into Trello. The customization was the icing on the cake; it allows you to create custom weights for your items and then graphs those items in the Priority Chart which gives a nice high-level overview of your activities in terms of priority. My team was very impressed with this functionality. Finally, the customer service has been outstanding. Representative, their head of marketing & sales has promptly responded to every question and even took a call on short notice to help us address a couple of hiccups which their dev team quickly resolved.

Cons

At the moment Airfocus does not have a dependency feature, which would be great for the Gantt roadmap. Having a visual dependency link between items would make Airfocus and one-stop-shop for all things project management. However, representative has told me that this functionality should be available very soon. One other potential con is, depending on the size of your business, the cost of the editor license. It´s not cheap but for the scale and duration of my team´s projects, it certainly has been worth it so far.

Pros

- Priority poker are easy to use and very powerful to make people involved in the priorization process
- Item mngt is intuitive (with a very nice filtering capability, thanks for that!)
- talking with the support team is easy and productive
- new features are released frequently improving the overall experience

Cons

- Paying a full "contributor" fee for inviting my local product users to organize one priority poker every 3 months is expensive...

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing airfocus

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

Airfocus is so easy to get stared with, the software is simple to use and the setup guides are really good. I really love the roadmapping capabilities of Airfocus, the ability to build powerful portfolio views and align initiatives to my strategy is so important.

Cons

Integrations are limited (unless you use Zapier, but then you're building in external dependencies). MS Teams native integration would be good to see. Slack is there already but if you're a Microsoft centric business you'll find it less simple.

Pros

It provides a good high-level planning tool with some good visualisation to look at your pipeline in different ways.

Cons

Editor accounts are expensive. So your whole team can't fully collaborate on it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

Loving Airfocus. I love the simplicity of the tool and it is helping me do some focused product planning without worrying about too many bells and whistles. It is simple but still is flexible enough for me to add my own custom fields and play around with the scoring formula. I also love how the standard template setup is still good enough to get started and the backlog flows smoothly into the roadmap and the roadmap into the release plan. The integration with JIRA also makes this so end-to-end because now I can turn my roadmaps into action items for engineering easily and have reverse visibility in JIRA as well.

Cons

I would have loved to share our roadmap publicly with our customers and get their feedback and feature requests here. Right now, this feature is missing.

Pros

The items and chart sections are my most frequently visited sections. I use the items view to see the prioritized list of projects and their scores and the chart view has been helpful to visualize and highlight the quick win projects.

Your integration with Asana (and other project management platforms) is brilliant. It helped us get our data in quickly which helps our adoption rate of your product, and it helps us be efficient because we don't have to update information in multiple spots

Cons

I think educating your customers could be improved. You may have a lot of helpful content, but it wasn't at the forefront of my onboarding experience. For our business we use ActiveCampaign for our email automations and we setup an "onboarding sequence" that gives our users a nugget of help each day for the first 7 days (during their trial) to educate them on how to setup their websites with us. Those emails have a video tutorial for each feature which seems to really help. We've learned that the more information the user inputs into our system, the more likely they are to continue using it, which reduces our churn greatly. It seems you have a great product but I would really like to understand it more so I get the value out of it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

It is easy to use and manage your ideas/tasks. The categorization of ideas and value algorithms can be adjusted very easy, this gives the user maximum flexibility. Prioritization planning works really good.

Cons

The timeline usability was bad, setting up lots of tasks/ideas was really pain. What I was missing mostly was the ability to relate ideas/tasks to milestones. You can set milestones in time, but you can not assign ideas to milestones.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

It's easy to use, which makes it great for when you need to onboard new team members - the other tools were too complicated to use for what we needed at the moment
The Board view is exactly what we needed for our roadmap
The timeline feature is also very useful for our Hardware teams
Aesthetics was also a very big reason why we decided to use this tool
I also like that we can customize the value indicators

Cons

The one major thing I noticed, is that it's hard to close / archive a full month (column) in the Board view. You are only allowed to delete it, and then you have to archive all the cards.

I think there are some key features missing:
* I wish we could see links for all the previous share views set up, not just the API key, this doesn't help
* I wish we could edit the settings we had for all previous share views
* I wish we could link workspaces so that I could make smaller workspaces but still see an overview of all workspaces
* I wish there was a way to save the custom colors and assign color to JIRA integrations so that I don't have to re-color everything everytime I have new items coming in

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

The design is really user-friendly. Even if there are lots of features and information, we can easily find what we're looking for.

I also really appreciated the chart view (which is my preferred feature) and the priority poker.

Cons

I cannot manage to find a notification system, as we have the ability to comment and interact with people.

Moreover, it would be great to have more dependencies options between tasks. Currently we just have the choice between "This item blocks..." and "This item is blocked by...". Could be cool to have dependencies like "Duplicates...", "Caused by...", "Fixes..." etc.

Finally, I think that the scoring set-up is a little bit complex, because too complete. According to me, there are too many options. And the ability to set up the importance and weight of every notation would only be a powerful point if properly configured (which can be complicated at a first glance).

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing airfocus

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

Easy to get started with listing and sorting items. Good and extensive variety of views available that you can toggle between

Cons

Drag and drop feature not available to drag items between objectives. A bit overwhelming to begin with as there are so many options and fields

Pros

There are many roadmapping tools out there. I've tried them all. However none allowed me to prioritize with ease and display important initiatives in a visual & decisive manner such as Airfocus. The options to customize & visualize priorities are world class!

Cons

Perhaps the timeline view can become more visually appealing. It lacks some of the UI features that other tools may have.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing airfocus

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

Really appreciate how easy it is use for transparent prioritization of features among multiple stakeholders. Eliminates confusion and concerns about what we're going to build next.

Cons

Would like a little more flexibility with formatting the columns, but overall, it's quite easy to use

Pros

I really love the visualized priority charts. Haven't seen something like this before. airfocus is easy to use and makes our planning simple.

Cons

I have nothing bad to say. It could be a bit less time consuming to copy manually added items to another workspace. But I guess that is an edge case.

Pros

I like that it gives option to create customized boards, ability to create customized tags for each board and also to create different ratings on each card per user value, financial benefit and also time for delivery. This helps me a lot when it comes to creating a priorities for next features to be delivered. I very much so like and use the preview of items that represent small wins and those that are to be dropped for now.

Cons

I did not like that I experienced kind of distability. Occasionally it is not working or it stops work and I am changing browsers to make it work.

Pros

On boarding of an existing list of items is very easy, the custom tags allow you to group features/items so that when deciding on next set of improvements and functions, you can achieve economies of scale. The swim lane style structure really helps us visualise where we are, what we have prioritised, and what we have completed allowing easy to create presentations for stakeholders when communicating roadmaps and progress.

Cons

I'm not sure the feature voting function is something we will use, and it would be great to have a MoSCoW feature. The user roles and permissions also need evolving, change history would be extremely handy and a function to allow you to create unique ticket ID's would be fantastic, but these are improvements more then dislikes.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to airfocus

Pros

It allows you to create different pre-set views of your roadmap and to create customised formulas for prioritisation. It allows you to create custom fields in order to categorise your roadmap. It also integrates natively with jira.

Cons

Struggled to use the outcome based roadmap - but this is most likely a user error.

Pros

The Timeline and Scoring features make prioritization, which most companies/teams can struggle with, easy to do. It's also nice to have bi-direction sync to everyday third-party products (trello/jira).

Cons

I'd like to see the pricing model change to allow for unlimited contributors. The value of this product is inclusion. That said, I'm looking forward to the public portal feature (Q3).

Pros

I like the different views provided by the software and the the new "portal" feature to present the public roadmap is really great!

Cons

Nice features like the "priority poker" are only available in the more expensive tiers.

Pros

The software attachs well with Trello and gives the needed outputs that Trello does not provide alone, turning one data input into many useful visuals for use in managing tasks and projects while briefing at many levels.

Cons

Takes a while to get to grips with set ups for functionality, not as intuitive as I would like but then as I learn to adapt in my inputs this will be less of an issue.

Pros

Easy to setup to mirror our current manual / ad hoc process, but provides a lot of time saving functionality. Does not feel bloated like some other product planning software that tries to do everything.

Cons

We have 20-30 features in progress at any point in time. It can be difficult to see this on the roadmap or the timeline view. Needs a "dense display" or the ability to "zoom out' to see the overall progress.