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Pealboard and Canny

Canny is a more developed feedback product than Pealboard's portal half, with a changelog, a roadmap, widgets and single sign-on that ship today. The structural difference is where the post lives: in Canny, and linked to a GitHub issue, or — in Pealboard — as the GitHub issue itself.

Which of these is you

Choose Canny

You want a public feedback board with voting, a roadmap and a changelog as one mature product.
You want an embeddable widget or an in-app feedback button, which Pealboard deliberately does not offer.
Single sign-on for your customers has to work today rather than in a later release.
Your engineering tracker is not GitHub Issues, so a GitHub-backed portal would have nothing to write into.

Choose Pealboard

Your engineers work in GitHub Issues and you do not want a second place a customer request lives.
You have more than a handful of customers and do not want to be metered on how many.
You need per-request visibility scoped to a customer company, not access scoped to a board.
You want the customer-facing status to be derived from the issue rather than set by somebody remembering to.

What was confirmed about Canny

Each line was read on Canny's own pages on the date in its source. Nothing about Canny appears on this page without one.

Free is $0 with 25 tracked users and 5 managers. Pro is $79 a month billed yearly with 100-plus tracked users and 10 managers. Business is a custom price.^[1]
Canny prices by tracked users: "End-users associated with feedback count toward tracked user limits." The "unlimited contributors" figure refers to internal contributors, not to the people who submit feedback.^[1]
Across the twelve feedback portals in this research, the market norm is that portal users are free and unlimited. Canny is the exception.^[8]
The GitHub integration is available on the Pro and Business plans.^[1]
Canny’s own marketing describes the GitHub integration as "Push issues from Canny to GitHub and link between the two."^[2]
The help center describes it as linking: "search a GitHub issue by name and link it. Only open GitHub issues can be linked", and "Each idea can only be linked to one GitHub issue." The Canny bot leaves a comment on the GitHub issue linking back to the post.^[3]
There are six statuses — Open, Under Review, Planned, In Progress, Complete, Closed — with custom public statuses on Pro and above. The end-user roadmap shows exactly three of them: "You must set exactly three."^[4]
Board access has three modes: public, visible to anyone with the URL; private, visible only to Canny admins; and custom access on Pro and above, restricted by authentication, user segment, email domain or named individual.^[5]
On custom-access boards, "All Canny admins will be able to view all custom access boards, regardless of their admin role."^[5]
Single sign-on is a JSON Web Token signed HS256 with a private key, carrying id, email, name and avatar. The expiry claim is optional: "The JWT expiry field exp is optional, but is respected when provided."^[6]
Canny offers a standard data processing agreement, and "All data is stored in the United States."^[7]

The difference, line by line

Pealboard	Canny
The request is the GitHub issue. There is no post and no link between two objects.	A Canny post is a Canny object that can be linked to one open GitHub issue, with a bot comment on the issue linking back.^[3]
Portal customers are unlimited and never billed, on every plan including Free.	Pricing is by tracked users, and end users associated with feedback count toward the limit. Free allows 25.^[1]
Visibility is per request — private, company or public — and a request is private to its requester and the workspace by default.	Access is per board. On a custom-access board every Canny admin can see every board regardless of their role.^[5]
Seven status words, derived from the issue and the project’s Status field every time they are shown, and never stored.	Six statuses, set on the post, with status-change rules that map a GitHub event onto one. The end-user roadmap shows exactly three of them.^[4]
Portal single sign-on requires an expiry claim of ten minutes or less. It is named for v1.1 and does not ship today.	JWT single sign-on ships today. The expiry claim is optional, and respected when provided.^[6]

What was not verified

These are gaps in the research, not findings about Canny. They are here because a comparison that prints only what was confirmed reads as though the rest was checked and found wanting.

Whether Canny’s current "Ideas" GitHub integration can create a new GitHub issue, or only link an existing one. The marketing page says "push issues"; the help center describes linking. The research recorded this as ambiguous and did not resolve it.
Whether Canny propagates an edit to a comment across the link. The research found no documentation either way, for Canny or for any other bridge it examined.

What Canny has that Pealboard does not

A changelog board, an embeddable widget, an in-app feedback button, custom portal domains and JWT single sign-on all ship in Canny today. In Pealboard the first three are out of scope, and the last two are named for v1.1.

The widget is a decision rather than a gap: a Pealboard customer goes to the portal, and the portal is not embedded as a snippet on somebody else's page. The changelog board and the public roadmap view are on the list for a later release and are not on this site's pricing page as though they were here.

One issue, one request

Canny constrains the link deliberately — one open GitHub issue per idea — and that is the right call for a bridge between two systems, because a many-to-many mapping creates conflicts nobody can resolve. Pealboard applies the same constraint for the same reason, and has one fewer object to keep in step: a request is the issue, and the customer's view of it is a view.

Look at your own repositories

The Free plan connects three repositories and needs no card. Nothing is imported, and nothing in GitHub changes.

Start free

Other comparisons

Sources

canny.io/pricing — Free at $0 with 25 tracked users and 5 managers; Pro at $79 a month billed yearly with 100-plus tracked users and 10 managers; Business at a custom price. "End-users associated with feedback count toward tracked user limits." The GitHub integration is "available on Pro and Business plans". Fetched 2026-09-09.
canny.io/integrations/github — "Push issues from Canny to GitHub and link between the two.". Fetched 2026-09-09.
help.canny.io/en/articles/3481076-github-integration — "search a GitHub issue by name and link it. Only open GitHub issues can be linked." "Each idea can only be linked to one GitHub issue." The Canny bot leaves a comment on the GitHub issue linking back to the post. Fetched 2026-09-09.
help.canny.io/en/articles/673583-post-statuses — the six statuses — Open (no status), Under Review, Planned, In Progress, Complete, Closed — custom public statuses on Pro and above, and the roadmap rule: "You must set exactly three". Fetched 2026-09-09.
help.canny.io/en/articles/3831745-choosing-the-right-board-access-public-private-or-custom and .../9829559-custom-access-boards — the three board access modes, and "All Canny admins will be able to view all custom access boards, regardless of their admin role". Fetched 2026-09-09.
developers.canny.io/install/widget/sso — JSON Web Tokens signed HS256 with a private SSO key, payload id, email, name and avatarURL, and "The JWT expiry field exp is optional, but is respected when provided". Fetched 2026-09-09.
help.canny.io/en/articles/1876821-is-canny-gdpr-compliant — a standard data processing agreement, and "All data is stored in the United States". Fetched 2026-09-09.
rohan-platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md §1.2 — the report's finding that the market norm is portal users free and unlimited, and that Canny is the notable exception with tracked-user pricing. Fetched 2026-09-09.

Recorded in rohan-platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md and rohan-platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md. Canny is a trademark of its owner; Pealboard is not affiliated with it.