What public roadmap software does
Public roadmap software gives customers a page where they can see what you are working on now, what comes next and what has shipped. It answers the questions support hears every week, such as whether a request is being built and whether anyone read it, in a place customers can check for themselves.
In Looph the roadmap is a view over your feedback boards, not a second tool. Its columns are statuses on your posts: move a post to Planned and it appears on the roadmap, move it to In progress and then Complete as the work goes, and publishing a changelog entry can mark it Complete for you. There is no separate list to keep in sync, and every card still carries the votes that put it there.
Setting up your roadmap
There is nothing to build. Your workspace site has a roadmap page with three columns, Planned, In progress and Complete, filled with the posts on your public boards that have those statuses. Customers can search it, filter it by board and switch between a board view and a list. Link it from your app's help menu so customers can find it without asking.
The columns are statuses, so you can rename and recolour them: Complete can read Shipped, and Planned can read Next. Hide a status and its column leaves the public roadmap. There are no date or quarter columns, which keeps the roadmap showing sequence rather than promising dates. The public roadmap template suggests names for each status and what belongs in each column.
Your team works from its own roadmap, which adds an Under review column and the posts on private boards. Drag a card to reorder a column or move it to another; the move notifies the post's followers, and a ticked-by-default box also posts a public 'Status changed' comment on the post. The team roadmap filters by board, by owner and by title.
Deciding what customers see
Only posts on public boards reach the public roadmap. A private board, open to your workspace members and to people you allow by email address or by whole email domain, keeps its posts on the team roadmap only. Competitive work, acquisition-driven items, enterprise requests and beta programmes under NDA usually belong there, with the same voting and statuses as any other board.
Every post also has internal notes that customers never see, for account context and the reason behind a decision. When an embargo lifts, an admin can move a post from a private board to a public one: its votes, comments and followers go with it, and its internal notes stay visible to staff only.
Closing the loop from the roadmap
Followers are notified when a post changes status, when it is merged into another post, and when a changelog entry ships it, by email, in the app and by push, and each person chooses which of those they receive. The same status announced twice within 24 hours sends one email, not two.
When you publish a changelog entry and link the posts it delivers, you can mark those posts Complete, send everyone following them one message listing what they asked for, and leave a comment on each post linking to the entry, all from the publish dialog.
Your domain and your brand
Serve the board, roadmap and changelog on a subdomain such as feedback.yourdomain.com by adding a CNAME record; certificates are issued and renewed automatically. A roadmap on your own domain builds search value for your brand rather than ours. You can upload a logo and favicon, set a brand colour, give the roadmap page its own search title, description and share image, and remove the Looph badge on Growth and Business. A custom domain is on Growth and Business too. A read-only copy of the roadmap can also be embedded on your own site.
Which plans include the public roadmap
The public roadmap and changelog are on every plan, including Free. 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 roadmap 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.
Showing the roadmap inside your product through an in-app widget. Today: place the read-only roadmap embed in an iframe on the sites you allow, or link to the public roadmap from your app's help menu; voting from the embed opens your board in a new tab.
Cards that move with Jira and GitHub
From Starter up, link a post to a Jira or GitHub issue and the roadmap follows the engineering work. A pull request or an In Progress status in Jira moves the card to In progress, and the work being done moves it to Complete, notifying its followers. Status only flows from the tracker into Looph: Looph never changes the issue's status.
Formats and examples
Most public roadmaps use one of a few formats: horizons such as Now / Next / Later, status columns fed by a feedback board, or dated columns by quarter. The practical guide covers what to publish, what to leave off and how to handle dates, and the examples post compares twelve real public roadmaps by format, voting and dates.