Canny is a good product. If what you need is a public place where users post feature requests and upvote each other, it does that job cleanly, and its Autopilot now auto-captures feedback from tools like Intercom and Zendesk. Plenty of teams should just use Canny.
But a voting board answers only one question — “what do the users who bothered to post want?” — and it answers it by counting hands. The feedback that predicts churn almost never arrives as a well-formed feature request with votes attached. It arrives as a frustrated support message, a 2-star review, a cancelled trial’s exit note. If nobody posts it to the board, the board can’t count it.
Where the two tools actually differ
| Canny | Sentriment | |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | Users post & vote on requests; you triage the board | AI reads every item from every channel and clusters it into ranked themes |
| Feedback that isn't a request | Falls outside the model — bugs, complaints and churn signals need a post to exist | First-class: sentiment, emotions and type detected on every message automatically |
| Quantification | Vote counts | Theme volume, trend, and revenue at stake (MRR behind each theme) |
| Churn signal | — | Per-user health score (0–100, explainable), at-risk alerts, sync to Mixpanel/Amplitude |
| Asking questions | Browse and search the board | Ask in plain language, get a verdict with numbers and cited quotes |
| Pricing model | Per tracked user — free to 25, Pro $79/mo (billed yearly), Business custom | Per feedback item analyzed — free to 100/mo, paid from $49/mo, unlimited seats |
| Data residency | US-based | 100% EU-hosted (Frankfurt), PII redacted before storage |
The pricing models encode the philosophies. Canny charges per tracked user — the more of your users engage, the more you pay for the counting. Sentriment charges per item analyzed, because analysis is the work being done; seats are unlimited on every paid plan, since feedback is only useful when the whole team sees it.
When Canny is the right choice
- You want a public roadmap and changelog your community rallies around — that’s Canny’s home turf.
- Your feedback volume is small enough that reading everything is genuinely feasible.
- Engagement itself is the goal: you want users debating and voting in the open.
When you’ve outgrown the board
The tell is always the same: feedback exists in five places, and the board holds the loudest tenth of it. You’re making roadmap calls on votes while churn hides in support tickets nobody tagged. At that point the job changes from collecting feedback to understanding it — clustering by meaning across every source, weighing themes by the revenue behind them, and catching the user whose tone shifted three messages ago. That’s the job Sentriment was built for: one item goes from raw text to a labelled theme in about 8.7 seconds, every claim links to the quotes behind it, and the free tier plus 1,000 free imported items means the demo runs on your own backlog, not ours.