Craft.io

Avantages

It feels like a product tool created by product people. The product is easy to use and no problems to integrate with Jira. Setting things up to how I want was simple enough and the broad range of features. Road mapping is pretty dynamic and easy to switch views subject to audience. It's great value for money in relation to others.

Inconvénients

Whilst the road mapping part is very good, cosmetically it is weaker than others (like Productboard or Airfocus). OKR management is a bit limited currently. Setting them up and connecting them is totally fine but I'd like to see better visibility on how well (or not) they are being achieved.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Craft.io

Avantages

The way it allows us to share the Product Development process with ease along with the team.
Coming from a similar product (Product Board) the learning curve has been short.
I would recommend to small remote teams in their early stages of development.

Inconvénients

Not always easy to browse through, requires more effort than necessary to find items that haven't been properly tagged.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Craft.io 

Pourquoi passer à Craft.io

Avantages

In overall it's still a usable product. The developer needs to focus on fixing the bugs to improve overall usability. Also, you need to have a fast computer to run it. Running this thing on an old mac is a nightmare.

Inconvénients

Plenty of bugs and poor usability features.

1. Assigning a story to somebody will move the current swimlane to the first swimlane.
2. Assigning a story to somebody will move the ticket to the top of the swimlane.
3. A “Command+click” (on Mac) on a ticket in a swimlane does not open the ticket in a new tab.
4. Unable to post links with ampersands in the URL in comments.
5. Permalinks stop randomly working and bring to a different view.

Avantages

The strategic roadmapping functionality has been great for providing clarity and transparency when presenting the roadmap to different product stakeholders and the development team.

Inconvénients

The platform it's very flexible and offers endless customisation, which it's great on one side but on the other side, it might get challenging for users with less experience.

Avantages

Craft's data entry approach is extremely fast, allowing you to get from a concept to a finished story in seconds. Craft is a fantastic all-around tool, which is why I chose it in the first place. Using the card view, you can add visuals to tales so that everyone can see what's happening on in real time. It's also quite simple to turn your random ideas into user tales. You can also use story points, effort, and custom fields to help you organize and prioritize your stories.

Inconvénients

It can be difficult to navigate, requiring more effort than necessary to discover goods that have not been correctly labeled.

Avantages

- RAPID data entry - if you have an idea of your first stories the views used allow you to rapidly write, press enter create a new story, and create another. This is actually massively time saving.
- One stop shop - you can go from ideation to planning to delivery using Craft. It's what actually drew me to the product itself.
- Picture support - pictures are supported in card view, so people at a glance can see what you're actually working on.
- Idea Dump - you can quickly go from random thoughts to actual user stories in seconds
- Fields - you can even add story points, effort, custom fields to help plan and prioritise.

Inconvénients

- Sometimes it's not accurate when it comes to who edited a story/item. This can cause quite the problem for paper trails.
- Zappier support is flaky at best.

Avantages

I really like the way craft is structured, and the different views it gives me to organise and work on my backlog items.

Craft has made life so much easier and more organised for me and my team. Starting with the roadmap where it forces me to thin in terms of goals and initiatives, and moving on to the backlog where it gives me a very helpful workflow view to take stories through a proper process, and finally the list view which I use the most to work on my stories.

Inconvénients

JIRA integration is painful and prone to introduce confusion since it needs to be manually pushed to JIRA from craft, but works live the other way round.

Also while I find it quite intuitive, new users find it particularly difficult to navigate round craft unless given some training.

Also the strategy section in editor could be better designed, so that goals etc are not just floating text fields but had more of a concrete hierarchy. Otherwise they get difficult to manage beyond a point.

Avantages

The onboarding process is the best I have experienced to date. The visualisation is really very clear and I also benefitted greatly for the FREE trial experience. The example project dealt with is intuitive and very easy to follow. It helped me to better understand whether the Craft solution is indeed what I am looking for.

I am looking at Craft on behalf of a current client whose business I am convinced will be greatly assisted by what the team offers. However, I found the Customer Success Team to be really very attentive. The Intercom dialogue feature is also a great help this early in the process.

Inconvénients

I have yet to broaden my experience with the solution offered by the Craft team and cannot, in all honesty, identify features least liked yet. The customer success team is on hand at all times and the response via the Intercom inApp messaging facility was in my experience almost instantaneous.

Avantages

It's easy and beautiful, plainly a joy to use it compared to Jira

Inconvénients

Not 100% final, but still better than the rest

Avantages

I love that I can use it from the start of a product strategy till managing and releasing. It helps with the full cycle of managing a product.

Inconvénients

Since we are an independent product studio, I'd love for Craft to create a way where we can add client accounts (free) so they can add their comments and only view certain aspects of the product management effort.

Avantages

Iteration planning is where I spend most of my time in craft and that feature works very well.

Inconvénients

Client sharing is a little complicated but we make it work.

Avantages

The reporting functionality is great and is just what we needed

Inconvénients

We have seen a few bugs/ issues so far, but the support team at craft have been very responsive

Avantages

We have been using the tool for our software development practices for quite a while. Supports multiple products. We are doing weekly sprints and are now on sprint 65 or so. Supports all essential features, like image uploads, attachments, planning, etc.

Inconvénients

UI is not always very intuitive. For example, deleting a ticket might not always be very clear where to find this feature. The whole UI is very different from other similar software. There is a learning curve. I suggest you try the software before paying.

There are some small quirks that you would expect the software to perform. One example is selecting multiple tickets to move them to another swimlane by drag-and-dropping. This seems to only move the first ticket, even you selected multiple.

Avantages

- Allows me to capture all the documents I need from 1) feature prioritization, 2) discovery, 3) design, 4) User testing all in one place. (Also supports implementation but we still use Pivotal Tracker for that.)
- Very natural feeling interface, particularly once you learn how the story attributes (theme, epic, story type, version, sprint, team, and worker) work in the interface.
- Allows stories to be assigned to different teams (and sprints for each team) for different stages of development (prioritization, discovery, design, user testing, etc.) is awesome
- The kanban boards are well designed and implemented

Inconvénients

- It's still an early stage product so some of the features are incomplete and I occasionally run into bugs. That said, they are really responsive with bug fixes and feature requests.
- Some features I would like, for instance, having kanban boards contain stories and tasks from multiple products, aren't yet available. (It's on the roadmap)
- The roadmap diagram feature is weak. (It's slated for improvement.)

Avantages

It's fast to create tasks and the drag & drop system is easy to navigate.

Inconvénients

The unique terminology--it's hard to figure out what a simple project, milestone or task is when they call it epic, story, etc.

Avantages

I liked how the idea management feature is set up to get approval before being moved to a feature stage.

Inconvénients

I didn't like how complicated it was to use features like scheduling or adding additional tags to an input.

Avantages

- Incredible UI/UX
- Good support

Inconvénients

Poor number of integrations with other platforms and tools

Avantages

Easy to organise stories in story map with Feature and Topic levels above Epics

Inconvénients

Some features which seem basic are not there, like uploading stories, or exporting story details in csv.

Avantages

The visual user story view is a game changer. Most tools place emphasis on plan and build, but Craft excels and wrangling in the mountain of spreadsheets and docs in the discovery phase. This tool ensures shared understanding with the entire team, arguably the most critical aspect to a successful product launch. Oh, and yes, it does push and integrate with Jira with two-way sync. So there is little reason to not give this tool a go. Last thing I'll say, the tool is beautifully designed and so intuitive and easy to use. For that alone I'm a fan.

Inconvénients

Although they're constantly working on the product, I'm eager to have a mobile companion app as part of the offering.

Avantages

User friendly and user interface is good and dynamic.

Inconvénients

After recent update it is totally change.

Avantages

Craft.io is a clean space to organize ideas and features of a new product. It comes with good tools/ideas : Story Mapping, Story ordering, PDF generation

Inconvénients

The good ideas of Craft is not well served the app model. Some strict choices (like Theme/Epic/Story) can be blocking points when the projet organisation isn't Craft compatible.

The good ideas of Craft is not well served by the app UI. It's often difficult to find the good action link, the place of a feature used yesterday.

Avantages

It is an all in one toolbox for what every product manager ever dreamed of having. From Features, epic, and user stories - it's all there. It's a one-stop​ shop all you need.

Comprehensive​ and detailed, allow planning of versions and goals.
Your product manager carrier ​would be split bef​ore and after you will start this tool

Inconvénients

Need work on the editor and some UX, Not all functionality is precise​.
It's a learning curve.

Avantages

User interface, ease of use, support, to say a few

Inconvénients

Some features were deprecated that were particularly useful

Avantages

The ability to have workflow in a dynamic perspective with many ways to view what's happening.

Inconvénients

It is so robust (complement:) that it is very hard to understand how to establish a complete workflow methodology.

Avantages

The product is very well aligned with the product management needs, covering the entire lifecycle from user feedbacks to work and releases planning.

Inconvénients

The interface, although very well designed, requires a little time to get used to the workflow that the tool offers.