18 Best Idea Management Software to Facilitate Innovation 2025

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More than 80% of executives believe ideas and innovation are crucial to their business’s success. By any standard, that’s a lot of execs. 🤯👀
While coming up with the next big thing(s) might sound like the hard part here—managing those new ideas is the real struggle.
But TBH, most teams have enough on their plates as it is. Instead of brainstorming an entirely new or complex system to organize your thoughts, why not seek out a collaborative solution like idea management software?
Flexible and powerful idea management software not only stores your new ideas—it does the heavy lifting by taking them over the finish line. Trust us, nothing is worse than watching a new idea—full of potential—wither away into the ether.
Instead, tend to your initiatives on a platform that ensures no task falls through the cracks. Luckily, there are plenty of idea management software options on the market to help you achieve this level of organization.
And we’ve done the work for you by ranking the best idea management software by their top features, pros and cons, reviews, and price, so you choose the one that’s right for you. 🏆
Read along as we dig into what is idea management, its key benefits, features to look for, and the top 18 idea management software options to bring your brainstorming to life.
Idea management is the strategic process of gathering, assessing, and prioritizing ideas provided by stakeholders or shared by team members in tactical brainstorming sessions.
These tactics typically have to do with new ways to meet your customer’s needs or making major improvements to your product—which is why idea management is so important! It keeps your operations relevant because they directly benefit to a change your customers want to see.👏
Many organizations highly prioritize innovation to stay ahead of the competitive curve and actively seek out creative ways to generate exciting initiatives among the team—and that’s where idea management software really comes into play.
But with more ideas at your disposal comes the need to organize them—and that means there is a lot riding on your idea management software to perform the way you need it to. 👀
But the question remains, what does the perfect idea management software look like anyway? We got you on this one.
While every tool brings its own je ne sais quoi to the table, there are a few features to keep an eye out for to ensure you’ll get the job done. 🔑

ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform designed for teams across industries to manage and gather ideas, monitor project updates, and work together—all on one screen. Whether you meet in the office or online, ClickUp’s powerful brainstorming and ideation features can stretch the size of any team and encourage every member to take a walk on the creative side of things.
With over 15 unique ways to visualize your ideas and brainstorming features connected directly to your workflow, it has never been easier to present ideas to your team and start acting on them. Whether it be your simple to-dos or even the most complex projects, ClickUp’s ever-growing list of customizable features is flexible enough to scale with your business while allowing each team member to work in the way that works best for them. Here, we’ll show you what we mean. 🙂
TBH, it’s hard to pick just one. But for an intuitive and flexible idea management solution, you will love ClickUp Whiteboards and Mind Maps. 🎨

Whether you sketch out your thoughts on a good old-fashioned legal pad or simply miss the days of Microsoft Paint, whiteboard software helps you effectively manage your ideas with the team. And did we mention that ClickUp offers the only whiteboard powerful enough to create, collaborate, and connect ideas directly to your workflow?
Draw ideas from scratch, add outside media, embed links, share documents, and so much more on an infinite canvas that can be edited along with the rest of the team! Plus, you can choose from nine dynamic templates for flowcharts, diagrams, and ClickUp’s Kanban-style boards to add a clean and flexible structure to your board—perfect for teams who need to present their ideas to stakeholders, even at a moment’s notice.
But that’s not all! Here are just a few of our other favorite ClickUp Whiteboards features:

Especially if you’re looking to map out the next steps of your new idea, ClickUp Mind Maps will be your new best friend.
Like branches on a family tree, Mind Maps convey the flow of your upcoming tasks in a highly visual way, with lines or arrows connected to nodes that represent tasks—and they can be as simple or complicated as you like!
Think of it like a free-form web, every task is tied together by a common thread and clearly communicates task dependencies by showing which task to complete and in what order. 🕸
Some of our favorite Mind Maps features include:
P.S., you can create Mind Maps from scratch on your ClickUp Whiteboard too. 😎

Miro is a digital whiteboard platform that enables remote teams to collaborate in real-time. With Miro, teams can brainstorm and gather ideas, map out processes, and create visual representations of their work.
Bonus: Compare Miro vs Mural

Coda is a collaborative text editing tool that combines many common document and spreadsheet features into one software. It is a popular tool for organizing information, creating detailed wikis, and managing knowledge bases in structured and easily shared documents.
Important PSA—Coda’s pricing isn’t based on the number of total team members, it’s based on the number of people on your team who will be creating documents, known as the Doc Maker.
Bonus: Compare Coda Vs. Airtable

Canny is an AI tool that helps teams capture, organize, and analyze product feedback so they can better understand what their customers want to see. Canny allows you to add relevant company data from other work tools, categorize feedback based on use cases, and filter the requests you see rolling in so no customer request goes untouched.

Bluescape is a cloud-based visual collaboration platform where teams turn raw concepts into finished ideas by brainstorming, collaborating, and presenting them through a digital whiteboard space. It is highly visual and offers a robust image search feature and media upload capabilities—great for creative, content, or design teams.

Brightidea is a cloud-based innovation management software that offers multiple products for organizations to develop and implement new ideas.
Brightidea’s products are tailored to specific parts of an organization—tap into your creativity with its whiteboard tool, create a digital idea box, restructure your tasks management process, or connect with external partners.
It provides a platform for users to submit, vote, comment on pictures, and track implementation progress.
Contact Brightidea for the most up-to-date plan and pricing information.

Ideawake is a collaborative idea management platform and crowdsourcing software to help teams collect ideas from employees, customers, and partners. It features an easy-to-use interface and robust idea management capabilities to ensure that every idea is heard and none are forgotten.
Ideawake offers three pricing plans per number of users up to 1,000 and you must contact their sales team for information on all three of them.

Ideanote is a web-based tool that helps people prioritize and act with multiple product “areas” to dive deeper into every aspect of the idea management process. Less of a brainstorming tool and more of a digital suggestion box, Ideanote aims to collect potential new ideas from teammates, customers, and stakeholders from across the web, prioritize them, and add them to your funnel.

Idea Drop is a collaborative innovation software that aims to help teams think strategically and prioritize new concepts. Through a combination of crowdsourcing, gamification, communication, and evaluation tool, it prepares teams to act on their ideas by organizing them in a clear pipeline.
This tool offers different paid plans, but you must contact their sales team for pricing information on each of them.

Aha! Ideas is meant to fill you with those breakthrough moments that we all love. 💜
It is a product roadmap platform that helps teams turn raw concepts into your biggest ideas. It also breaks them into actionable plans with various idea management tools and portfolio-planning features.
Aha! Ideas offers a free trial and two additional paid plans.

Lucidspark can be used for various purposes, including project management, note-taking, and more. It’s an intuitive and popular tool for brainstorming on a digital whiteboard or creating mind maps to better organize tasks or ideas.

Qmarkets is a suite of idea management software solutions that can be used together or stand-alone to help teams approach challenges with creativity and innovation.
Products including Q-360, Q-ideate, Q-optimize, Q-scout, and Q-trend are intended to target ideas at specific stages in production—from inception to implementation. Though Qmarkets’ sweet spot lies with internal innovation, people departments, and employee engagement.
Contact Qmarkets for any pricing information.

MindMeister is a mind mapping tool to visually organize your thoughts, ideas, and new concepts. It is most commonly used for brainstorming, project planning, and other creative tasks because MindMeister maps are collaborative, easy to present, and share.

Planbox is an agile suite of products that integrate customer feedback and bug reports with common project management tools to help teams manage ideas, resources, and tasks.
Contact Planbox for up-to-date pricing plans.

OpenideaL is an open-source content management system that helps organizations collect ideas from customers and internal teams. The tool is designed for the decision-makers in an organization to make strategic decisions about new ideas based on insights and feedback to build meaningful customer and employee relationships.
Contact OpenideaL for all pricing information.

Planview Spigit is an innovation management tool that automates crowdsourcing so you can spend more time prioritizing and developing the most promising ideas. Once your new initiatives are implemented, Spigit also offers reporting and analytics tools to determine their success.
Contact Planview Spigit for all pricing information.

You those reality contest shows like American Idol or Love Island where it’s up to the audience to vote on their favorite contestants? Codigital has a similar vibe.
Built for large groups in virtual workshops or conferences, Codigital allows you to post simple questions that the entire team or organization can respond to with possible answers. Once Codigital has collected a certain number of answers, members can vote again on their top picks. It’s an interesting take on large-group brainstorming sessions.

edison365 is a cloud-based ideation and innovation management platform built on Microsoft365 that enables organizations to capture, develop, and commercialize ideas. It includes a suite of tools including edison365 Ideas for managing the entire innovation process, from idea generation to implementation.
This product offers a free trial but all other pricing details are only available upon request.
Let’s be real, proposing new ideas to the group is hard enough as it is. But organizing them too? That’s a big ask.
Idea management software is designed to alleviate this challenge by proving the proper tools to capture, track, and manage ideas—right when they happen. And if you’ve never used software like this before, it’s important to know what to look for ahead of time to make sure you have the right tools in your box!
Here are some of our favorite must-have features for a solid idea management solution:
There’s no point in investing in software if your team can’t use it! And relying on one software guru in the group is not the key to efficiency either. Look for a tool that you find easy to navigate and you’ll be more inclined to use it regularly.
Ideation sessions are rarely only text-based, so your idea management tool shouldn’t be either.
We all process information differently and it’s important to embrace that among your team with an accessible tool that offers multiple ways of conveying your thoughts and managing your workflows—i.e. images, documents, drawings, diagrams, or flowcharts.
An idea management tool is more than just a place to organize ideas, it is also a haven for developing, creating, and acting on them. Brainstorming tools like digital whiteboards or diagrams that can be accessed by the entire team provide a safe and stress-free environment to encourage creativity—even if the ideas you propose aren’t fully fleshed out yet.
Where is the value in a ton of cool features if you can’t share them with your group? More than ever, team collaboration is crucial to successfully communicating within the best idea management software for everyone.
Whether it be a chat feature, flexible sharing permissions, live editing, assigned comments, or all of the above—transparency and direct communication always come first!
A critical part of task management and organization is knowing which ideas to act on first. Tools with ranking, voting, or priority features are helpful for quickly understanding which ideas are of the utmost importance. It also lets you know what to table for another week.
Idea management software helps collect, evaluate, assess, and provide feedback on any new idea so you can make fast and informed decisions regarding if and how it should be implemented. A win-win!
But that’s not all. 😎
The right idea management tool will follow your initiatives throughout the entire project lifecycle, encourage innovation, and ultimately lead to a greater number of creative strategies to explore. Other major benefits of using idea management software include:
Idea management software improves communication and collaboration among teams—whether they work asynchronously or in person.
The best idea management software is collaborative by nature. As a tool designed to help teams work together, the proper platform will offer multiple ways for your team to connect and share ideas completely transparently. Meaning anyone can easily refer back to relevant documents, whiteboard sessions, tasks, or checklists at any time, and edit them alongside their teammates without overlap.
With features to chat, comment, and edit together, idea management software can help facilitate discussion between employees and optimize feedback processes.
The collaborative nature of an idea management system is contagious! Use your platform as a tool during meetings and brainstorming sessions to address ideas shared in your workspace by other team members. This not only encourages discussion but helps individuals feel a sense of ownership and responsibility over their contributions on and offline.
As a tool for tracking, evaluating, and prioritizing new strategies, idea management software can help you determine whether an idea will be successful, faster. Features to create product roadmaps, user personas, mockups, and tasks will give you a clear idea of how your team will develop potential ideas and what recourses you’ll need to do it.
You read that right!
While idea management software is an investment, it’s well worth it. These platforms are built to help you be more productive with your time by streamlining and automating your processes.
The perfect idea management system provides a way to track and manage ideas, from initial submission to implementation. This ensures that no idea is left behind or forgotten, and every new thought is given the proper time and attention it deserves.
Idea management software helps teams keep innovation at the forefront of their minds and encourage every member to share their thoughts. But at the same time, idea management software is only beneficial if the team knows how to and wants to use it!
That’s why it’s so important to seek out an intuitive, flexible, and fully customizable idea management software.
This ensures that everyone can both develop and manage important company ideas in the way that makes the most sense to them. Plus, if you choose a powerful productivity platform like ClickUp, you can also start acting on these ideas the moment they happen.
With collaborative ClickUp Whiteboards, Mind Maps, over 15 customizable views, and over 1,000 integrations, ClickUp makes it easier than ever to take action on your thoughts and feel a sense of meaningful ownership over your ideas.
But don’t just take our word for it, tap into your own creativity and show the team what you can do with ClickUp at absolutely no cost. You heard us!
Start customizing your ClickUp Whiteboard and access tons of collaborative features free, forever.
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