Voicebox and Canny solve the same problem from opposite directions: one is source-available software you can own outright for $34, the other is a subscription at $50+/mo run entirely on someone else's servers.
Head to head
| Voicebox | Canny | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $34 once | $50+/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $34 | $600+ |
| Ideas / voters | Unlimited | Plan-capped |
| Public roadmap | Yes | Yes |
| Merge duplicates | Yes | Yes |
| Official pinned replies | Yes | Yes |
| Anonymous voting | Yes | Limited |
| Self-hosted | Yes | No |
What Voicebox does well
- Public board — Anyone submits ideas and upvotes with one vote per visitor, plus comment threads on every idea.
- Spam defense built in — Per-IP rate limits on submissions, votes and comments, with vote dedupe enforced by a database UNIQUE constraint.
- Status workflow — Open, planned, in progress, shipped and declined-with-reason, with illegal jumps rejected so the roadmap stays true.
- Public roadmap — Kanban columns for Planned, In progress and Shipped, auto-populated from idea statuses and sorted by votes.
What Canny still does better
There's a real reason Canny costs what it does: a bigger team, broader integrations and dedicated support behind it. If that ecosystem is genuinely what you need, it's worth paying for.
Which one should you pick
If your workflow depends on Canny's specific integrations or you'd rather not run anything yourself, stay put — that's a legitimate call. If you're comfortable owning the tool and want to stop paying $50+/mo for a job your own hardware can do, Voicebox pays for itself and then some: voicebox costs less than one month of Canny once, and never asks for another dollar as your voter count grows.
Try Voicebox — $34, once
Public feedback board with upvotes, comments and an auto-populated kanban roadmap, self-hosted.