Quick answer: Canny is a good feedback board for software products, but it prices by tracked users, anyone who posts, votes or comments, and its free plan stops at 25 of them and leaves out the changelog. A game with even a modest community passes that in a day. Bugnet gives game studios a public known-issues tracker, a roadmap and a changelog on every plan, fed by real reports from inside the game, with anonymous player upvotes that never count toward a limit. Keep Canny if you mainly need an idea board for feature requests.
Public roadmaps work wonders for games. They cut the “is this a known bug?” questions in Discord, show players their reports go somewhere, and turn patch day into a story. Many studios reach for Canny because it is the best-known feedback tool. Then the community shows up, the votes roll in, and the pricing model built for B2B software meets a player base. Here is what to use instead, and when Canny is still the right call.
What Canny does well
Canny is built for software companies collecting feature requests from customers. Users post ideas on feedback boards, vote and comment, product teams prioritise, and a roadmap and changelog show what shipped. It is polished, well integrated with tools B2B teams use, and good at turning a pile of requests into a ranked list.
The tracked-user problem for games
Canny counts tracked users: anyone who has given feedback by creating a post or voting or commenting on one. From Canny's pricing page at the time of writing (October 2026):
| Canny plan | Price | Tracked users | Changelog | Remove branding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 25 | No | No |
| Pro | From $79 a month, billed yearly | 100 and up | Yes | Yes |
| Business | Custom, billed yearly | 5,000 and up | Yes | Yes |
For a SaaS product with 200 business customers, that model makes sense. For a game, it inverts: the healthier your community, the more you pay to let players click a vote button. A Steam Next Fest demo that brings in a few hundred voters in a weekend is already past the free plan and into the paid tiers, and a launch with thousands of engaged players needs a sales conversation.
What players actually want from your public pages
Game communities ask three questions, over and over:
- “Is it just me?” They want a known-issues list they can search before reporting.
- “Are you working on it?” They want to see what is open, in progress and fixed.
- “What changed?” They want patch notes that mention the bug they reported.
Notice that all three are about bugs, not feature ideas. That is the gap between a generic feedback board and a game-specific tool.
Bugnet's public pages
Bugnet publishes three hosted pages per project, on every plan:
- Public bug tracker at
/tracker/your-game: a known-issues list players can browse, search and filter by status and category, and upvote without an account. Each bug has its own page with your public comments; internal notes are never shown. - Public roadmap at
/roadmap/your-game: your bugs grouped by status as a board or a list, sorted by priority, newest or most upvoted, with vote counts if you want them. - Changelog at
/changelog/your-game: entries written in Markdown, or drafted automatically from the bugs you resolved in the last few days and edited before publishing.
All three share a brand profile (logo, accent colour, background and text colours, custom CSS and a support email). The “Powered by Bugnet” badge is shown on the free plan and can be hidden on Studio and above.
The difference from a feedback board is where the content comes from. Items are not typed in by players on a website: they are real bug reports filed from inside your game through the SDK widget, or captured automatically when the game errors, then grouped so repeat reports become an occurrence count instead of noise. You can mark any bug private so it never appears publicly, and add your own items from the dashboard for planned work.
Canny vs Bugnet for a game studio
| Canny | Bugnet | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Feature requests for software products | Bugs and player feedback for games |
| Where items come from | Users post on the board | Reports from the in-game widget, automatic crash capture, and your team |
| Voting | Each voter is a tracked user | Anonymous upvotes, no account, no per-voter cost |
| Public roadmap | Yes | Yes, board or list |
| Known-issues page | Boards can serve as one | Dedicated public tracker with search and filters |
| Changelog | Pro and Business | Every plan, with drafts generated from resolved bugs |
| Crash reporting and in-game widget | No | Yes, for Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameMaker, Construct 3, Pygame and the web |
| Price for a game community | Grows with every voter | Free to start; $19 or $79 a month flat |
When Canny is still the better fit
If your community's main input is feature ideas rather than bugs, say a creative tool, a modding platform or a long-running live game whose players vote on what to build next, a dedicated idea board like Canny's does that job better than a bug tracker. Players can post brand-new ideas on a Canny board; on Bugnet, new items come from the game and your team. Some studios run both: Canny for ideas, Bugnet for bugs, crashes and patch notes.
Setting up a public roadmap and known-issues page in Bugnet
- Create a free project and add the SDK for your engine, so reports start flowing from the game.
- Review what is public. Every bug not marked private can appear on the tracker and roadmap, including auto-captured reports with their descriptions. Mark sensitive ones private before you switch the pages on.
- Enable the public bug tracker and choose whether players can search and upvote.
- Enable the roadmap, pick the statuses to show and the sort order, and add your logo and accent colour.
- Publish your first changelog by auto-generating a draft from recently resolved bugs and editing it.
- Link the pages everywhere players ask: your Discord's pinned messages, the Steam community hub, the in-game pause menu.
The public pages documentation covers every option. For the strategy side, see setting up a public roadmap for your indie game and best practices for running a public bug tracker.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Canny cost for a game?
At the time of writing Canny's free plan covers 25 tracked users, the Pro plan starts at $79 a month billed yearly for 100 or more tracked users, and Business is custom for 5,000 or more. Because anyone who posts, votes or comments counts as a tracked user, a game community usually outgrows the free plan quickly.
What is a tracked user in Canny?
Canny defines a tracked user as someone who has given feedback, by creating a post or by voting or commenting on a post.
Can players vote on bugs in Bugnet without an account?
Yes. Bugnet's public bug tracker and roadmap let players upvote without creating an account, and upvotes do not count toward any plan limit.
Does Bugnet have a changelog on the free plan?
Yes. The public changelog, roadmap and bug tracker are available on every plan. On the free plan the pages show a Powered by Bugnet badge, which Studio and higher plans can hide.
Can players submit feature requests in Bugnet?
Players report through the in-game widget, and you can add your own items for planned work from the dashboard, but Bugnet is not an open idea board where anyone can post on a website. Studios that want a dedicated feature-request board often run one alongside Bugnet.
A public roadmap should get more useful as your community grows, not more expensive.