Elements vs Canny
Canny is a hosted product feedback tool for software companies. Customers post feature requests to a public or private board, vote and comment, and a product team sets each request's status, merges duplicates, publishes a roadmap and writes a changelog. Canny's Autopilot also pulls feedback from support and sales conversations in tools such as Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gong and Zoom, and Canny connects to project trackers such as Jira, Linear and GitHub, and on its Business plan to HubSpot and Salesforce (pricing). Canny is a subscription priced by tracked users, which Canny defines as "someone who has given feedback" by posting, voting or commenting. The Free plan covers a small number of tracked users, Pro rises as you track more, and Business is priced on request (pricing).
Elements is not a feedback tool. It is what an AI agent uses to build and run a web app, and a feedback board needs only a few of its parts: a Postgres database for requests, votes and comments, sign-in, realtime rows so votes and status changes appear in every open browser, email templates sent through an SMTP provider such as Postmark, and background jobs. A software company can ask an agent for a feedback board and run the result on a server of its own.
Canny rents you a board; with Elements you can own one. On Canny, the board, the integrations and the AI capture belong to Canny, and the price follows the number of people who give feedback. A board you build is yours, at a fixed monthly cost, and it can share one database with your other customer-facing tools, or live inside your product, where your customers are already signed in. What you give up is Canny's integrations and its automatic capture from support calls and tickets. Whether that trade makes sense depends on how much of Canny you use, and on what else the same app would replace.
What Canny Gives You That Is Hard to Build
A feedback board is a small app. Much of what Canny sells sits around the board, and an app you build cannot easily match some of it.
- Autopilot. Canny finds feedback in conversations from support and sales tools, removes duplicates and attaches it to requests (pricing). An app you build collects what customers post to it.
- Integrations. Canny links requests to issues in Jira, Linear, Asana, GitHub and others, posts to Slack and Teams, and on Business ties feedback to revenue in HubSpot and Salesforce (pricing). Each of these in your own app is an API integration someone builds and maintains.
- Compliance paperwork. Canny lists SOC 2, GDPR and CCPA, security reviews and enterprise sign-on with Okta and Entra ID (pricing). If a customer's security team asks about your feedback board, Canny has the answers ready.
- A free plan. For a small number of tracked users, Canny costs nothing (pricing).
- No upkeep. Canny runs, updates and supports the board. A board you build is yours to keep running, with an agent doing much of that work.
What Building It Looks Like
A feedback board is a few tables: requests, votes, comments, statuses and release notes. Here is how each Canny feature translates:
| Canny feature | In an app you build with Elements |
|---|---|
| A board of feature requests, with search and sort by top or new | Pages in Elements HTML, rendered on the server, with requests stored in your Postgres database (html, database, search and filter recipe) |
| Customer accounts and sign-in | Sign-in and sessions, with customers as rows in your own database (authentication recipe) |
| Votes that update live | One row per customer per request, kept in sync across every open browser by a LiveTable (likes and votes recipe, livetable) |
| Comments | Threaded under each request, showing up for everyone viewing it the moment they are posted (live comments recipe) |
| Statuses, merging duplicates and actions for the team | Admin pages and server functions gated by a role column (admin roles recipe, rpc) |
| Email to voters when a request changes status | Email templates in Elements HTML, queued as background jobs and sent through an SMTP provider such as Postmark (email, jobs) |
| A public roadmap | A page that groups requests by status, read by anyone without signing in (public admin views recipe) |
| A changelog that links shipped requests | Release notes written in markdown with a live preview (markdown editor recipe) |
| Autopilot capture, project tracker and CRM integrations | No equivalent. An agent can build a particular integration through that product's API, but none of them come built in. |
If your product is itself an Elements app, the board can be a few pages inside it. Your customers are already signed in, every vote is tied to a real account, and the request, the customer and what they pay you are rows in one database.
The Demo: Wishcairn
Wishcairn is a feature request board built with Elements by an AI agent from one prompt. Customers sign up, post a request with a title and description, browse, search, sort by top or new, vote and comment. The team sets each request to under review, planned, in progress, shipped or closed, merges duplicates with their votes, and posts changelog entries that link the requests they ship. A public roadmap shows planned, in progress and shipped columns. Votes, comments and status changes update live, and customers get an email when a request they voted on changes status.
The demo page has the exact prompt; hand it to your agent and Wishcairn is built again on your own machine, for you to adapt.
Adding It Up
On its own, Canny is usually the cheaper choice, and its Free plan costs nothing. The case is a board alongside the other tools your customers see. Every company is different, so this section shows how to make the comparison for your own rather than making it for you.
This is an example, not a customer. A small software company pays for five tools besides its help desk, each charging a different way:
| Subscription | What it charges by |
|---|---|
| Canny | By plan, priced by tracked users |
| Statuspage | By plan, priced by subscribers and components |
| UptimeRobot | By plan, priced by monitors and check interval |
| Sentry | By plan, priced by data volume: errors, spans, logs and replays |
| Bitly | By plan, priced by links each month |
To compare, add up what you pay for these each month and set it beside the cost of one app of your own:
- Elements, $100 a month: one license for your development machine and one for the production server (pricing).
- A server from DigitalOcean.
- An email provider such as Postmark, priced by the number of emails sent.
Where it usually turns:
- Usage-priced plans grow with you. Canny's price rises with tracked users, and other tools rise with error volume, monitors or links. Elements' cost does not.
- Several flat subscriptions add up. Each of these tools is modest on its own, and five of them together can pass the cost of one app.
- A single cheap tool is usually cheaper to keep. A board and nothing else costs less on Canny.
Run that app on its own server, apart from the product it watches, so the status page stays up when the product is down. Three more demos show the other parts, each built from one prompt:
- Uptimebell: checks every minute, incidents after three failures, and a status page that emails subscribers.
- Faultkeep: a paste-in snippet that reports errors, grouped into live issues with charts and email alerts.
- Shortwick: short links with live click counts, referrers and QR codes.
The customers who vote, the subscribers to the status page and the people who click your links are one list. The subscriptions overview works through this case with a help desk included.
When to Keep Canny
- Canny's Free plan covers your tracked users. Nothing here beats free.
- A board is all you would build. Canny Pro usually costs less than running your own app.
- You rely on Autopilot. Capturing feedback from support tickets and sales calls is Canny's work, not a page you write.
- Your team works from Jira, Linear or Salesforce. Canny's integrations keep feedback where your team already looks.
- You would rather not run software. Canny does the upkeep.
Questions
How much does Canny cost?
Canny has a Free plan for a small number of tracked users. Pro is priced by tracked users and rises as you track more, and Business is priced on request. The current figures are at canny.io/pricing. A tracked user is anyone who has posted, voted or commented.
Is building my own feedback board cheaper than Canny?
Not on its own. A board of your own costs $100 a month for Elements, plus a server and an email provider such as Postmark, which is usually more than Canny Pro. It can cost less when the same app also replaces other tools, such as a status page, uptime checks, error tracking and short links.
Can the feedback board live inside my product?
If your product is an Elements app, yes. The board is a few pages and tables in the same app, so customers vote with the account they already have, and their requests sit in the same database as their plan and usage.
Can an Elements app pull feedback from Intercom or Zendesk like Canny's Autopilot?
Not out of the box. An agent can build an integration with a particular product's API, but automatic capture from support and sales tools is part of what Canny sells, and an app you build starts with the feedback customers post to it.
Can I move my Canny data to my own app?
Confirm with Canny what it lets you export before you plan a move. Once you have your requests, votes and comments as files, an agent can import them into your app's database.