GravityBoard does: GravityKit sells lifetime licenses, including a Lifetime All Access Pass, so you can pay once and keep receiving updates and support. Canny is a subscription-only SaaS, so there is no lifetime option, and your boards stay online only while you keep paying.

Both tools handle this well. Canny has a built-in changelog module that automatically emails users who voted for a feature once its status is marked complete. GravityBoard uses event-based Gravity Forms notifications: add GravityBoard’s voter-emails merge tag to a “Card Changed Lane” notification and everyone who voted is emailed when a card moves to your “Done” lane.

It can serve as one, with one honest caveat. GravityBoard is a self-hosted Kanban board for Gravity Forms entries that runs entirely on your own WordPress site, so your feedback data stays in your database and the board lives on your own domain rather than a separate vendor subdomain. Add its card voting and status lanes and it can serve as a public feature-request board. Just know it is a board with voting first, not a dedicated feedback portal like Canny, so you assemble the workflow yourself rather than getting one out of the box. Our guide to building a Canny-style board with GravityBoard walks through the setup.

No. GravityBoard is a flat annual WordPress license (from $119/yr for a single site), and the number of people who submit and vote does not change the price. Canny bills by “tracked user,” meaning anyone who posts, votes, or comments, so its cost rises as your audience grows, from a free tier of 25 tracked users to Pro at $79/mo (billed yearly, or $99 month-to-month) for 100, scaling up from there. For a public board with a large or growing community, GravityBoard’s flat license is the more predictable cost, though it does also require a paid Gravity Forms license. See the GravityKit pricing page for current figures.

A few, depending on what you need. Canny itself has a free plan (up to 25 tracked users), and there are open-source, self-hosted tools like Fider that are free to run on your own server. GravityBoard does not have a free version; it starts at $119 per year and assumes you already run WordPress and Gravity Forms. The trade-off is that the free options either cap your audience (Canny’s free tier) or ask you to host and maintain a separate app yourself (open-source), while GravityBoard keeps everything inside the WordPress site you already manage.

Yes. Visitors submit ideas through a standard Gravity Form on your site, each submission becomes a card, and logged-in users upvote them. GravityBoard supports up and down votes, an upvote-only mode that suits idea boards, sorting cards by vote count, and per-user “vote budgets” that give each person a fixed number of votes to spend. Voting requires a logged-in WordPress account, which also helps prevent duplicate or fake votes. The GravityBoard product page covers the voting options.

Partly. GravityBoard’s status lanes, for example Ideas, Planned, In Progress, and Complete, give you a public roadmap-style view of where each request stands, and it can notify submitters through Gravity Forms when a card moves. What it does not include is a dedicated changelog or release-notes feature. Canny ships both a native roadmap and a changelog with subscriber emails, so if publishing formal release notes to your users matters, that is a point in Canny’s favor.

No. Because Canny is a hosted SaaS platform, it operates outside of your WordPress database. To let your logged-in WordPress users vote on Canny without creating a second account, you need to configure a custom single sign-on (SSO) integration using JSON Web Tokens (JWT). GravityBoard lives inside WordPress and natively recognizes your existing users and roles.

Not natively. GravityBoard works inside the WordPress and Gravity Forms ecosystem, so it uses Gravity Forms notifications and can reach tools like Slack through Gravity Forms webhooks or add-ons, but it has no built-in catalog of SaaS integrations and no single sign-on. Canny offers native integrations with Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Intercom, Slack, and Salesforce, plus SSO (several on higher tiers). If native, out-of-the-box integration with your existing product stack is a priority, Canny leads here.

GravityBoard is the clear winner here. Because GravityBoard is built on top of Gravity Forms, you have access to custom fields, complex conditional logic, file upload restrictions, and multi-page forms. Canny uses a standardized form structure optimized primarily for simple text-based software feature requests.

Yes. GravityBoard is a Gravity Forms add-on, so it requires a WordPress site with Gravity Forms (a separate paid plugin) installed, plus a form with a dropdown or radio button field to create the board’s lanes. GravityView is optional and only adds a sortable table view. Canny needs none of this because it is a hosted service, so GravityBoard makes the most sense when you already run WordPress and Gravity Forms.

Yes. Canny is the stronger option for built-in AI. Its Autopilot features automatically detect duplicate feature requests, group them together, and generate summaries of long comment threads, saving product managers significant manual triage time. GravityBoard does not include AI feedback processing.

Choose GravityBoard if you already run WordPress and Gravity Forms and want a self-hosted board you fully own, with flat pricing no matter how many people vote, especially if you also want a Kanban tool for managing the work behind the requests. Choose Canny if you want a turnkey, dedicated feedback platform with a native roadmap and changelog, deep integrations, AI-assisted triage, and no WordPress to maintain, and you are comfortable with per-tracked-user pricing and hosting your data on Canny’s cloud. The two overlap on collecting and voting on feedback; everything around that is where they differ. Our Canny-alternative guide shows what the GravityBoard version looks like in practice.

With GravityBoard, the board sits natively within your WordPress theme, so it matches your site with complete CSS control and no vendor branding. Canny shows “Powered by Canny” branding on its lower tiers, and removing it requires a paid plan, a common frustration among users.