What a changelog tool does
A changelog tool gives you one place to publish product updates and a permanent, linkable record of what shipped. Customers read it to see whether the product is moving, sales and support link to individual entries, and it answers the question 'did you ever build that?' before anyone has to ask it.
Most changelog tools stop at publishing. Looph's changelog sits in the same workspace as your feedback boards, votes and roadmap, so every entry can carry the requests that led to it. That link is what turns a list of release notes into a message to the specific people who asked.
How publishing works
Write the entry in Markdown, give it a type (New, Improved or Fixed) and, if you like, a category so readers can filter, and attach the feedback posts the release resolves. Linking is optional; an entry with no linked posts publishes like any other release note. Each entry gets its own page, with a search title, description and share image you can set.
Lead with what changed and who it affects, not with the internal epic name. Two sentences and a screenshot usually do more than a bulleted list of tickets, because the reader is the customer who reported the problem, not the engineer who fixed it.
One publish reaches every channel. Each changelog has a public page with search and filters, an RSS feed and a read-only embed, and any Slack or Discord channel subscribed to changelog entries gets a card linking to the new one. An entry goes live the moment you publish it, and you can unpublish it again.
How voters are notified
When you publish an entry with linked posts, a dialog shows how many posts and people it reaches and offers three choices, all ticked: mark the posts Complete, tell the people following them that it shipped, and comment on each post with a link to the entry. Each person gets one message, by email and in-app, listing everything they asked for in that release, and followers of duplicates merged into a linked post are included. Someone already told that a post shipped is not told again by a later entry. Nobody has to export a list of voters or remember to send the follow-up.
Followers are also notified when a post changes status or is merged. When the changelog marks a post Complete, the separate status email is held back, so nobody hears the same news twice. On paid plans, emails to your customers carry your workspace's name, logo, colour and reply-to address.
How the changelog closes the loop
The changelog is the last step of one loop. Customers post and vote on your feedback boards, you move the posts you commit to onto the roadmap, and when the work ships the changelog entry tells everyone who asked. Roadmap columns are board statuses, so marking a post Complete moves it on the roadmap too.
The API creates draft entries and reads published ones; publishing stays with a person in Looph, because it can notify everyone following the linked posts. A changelog.published event lets you pass each release on through Zapier or a webhook. With GitHub connected, from Starter up, each published GitHub release can become a draft entry, and posts linked to GitHub or Jira issues move to Complete when the work is done, before you even write the entry. If you run the rewards engine, a request reaching Complete earns points for the person who posted it and a smaller bonus for the people who voted for it, which gives contributors a reason to keep posting.
Which plans include the changelog
The changelog is on every plan. Free costs nothing and needs no credit card: unlimited members, 2 admin seats, 1 public board, 100 tracked voters, the public roadmap and changelog, Slack and Discord notifications and the Chrome extension.
Starter, at $19/mo, adds private boards, 1,000 tracked voters, automations, CSV import, the GitHub, Jira, Zapier and Make integrations, and the API and webhooks. Growth, at $59/mo, adds a custom domain, removal of Looph branding, the rewards engine, the Segment integration and 10,000 tracked voters. Business, at $179/mo, removes the limits on admin seats, boards, voters and automations and adds an admin IP allowlist. Members are free on every plan.
Coming soon
These are planned for the changelog but are not available yet, so nothing on this page depends on them. Where something that ships today covers part of the need, it follows the item. This page will say when each one arrives.
An in-app widget that shows entries inside your product, with announcements you can target by page or audience. Today: place the read-only changelog embed in an iframe on the sites you allow, link to the changelog from your help menu, or point readers at its RSS feed. None of these targets by page or audience.
Scheduling an entry to publish later. Today: save it as a draft and publish it when the release goes out.
How Looph compares with other changelog tools
Standalone announcement tools such as Beamer, AnnounceKit and LaunchNotes put their effort into reach: pop-ups, push notifications and audience targeting. Looph's changelog does not do those; its strength is the link back to feedback. Feedback tools with a built-in changelog, such as Canny, Featurebase and Frill, share Looph's idea that a release should reach the people who asked. They differ mainly in how they charge and in what else they bundle. Our changelog tools roundup covers eight options, Looph included and marked as ours, with each vendor's pricing and a link to its own pages.