Votera
Self-hosted feedback board, public roadmap, and changelog you buy once and own — a Canny/Featurebase alternative with unlimited voters and no per-user monthly fee.
Self-hosted feedback board, public roadmap, and changelog you buy once and own — a Canny/Featurebase alternative with unlimited voters and no per-user monthly fee.
This page is designed to help you find out whether Votera is good and if it is the right choice for you.
Votera is a self-hosted feedback board, public roadmap and changelog - the loop between "customers ask" and "we shipped it", running on hosting you already pay for.
Customers post ideas and vote; you triage them into a public roadmap and publish a changelog when they ship. Boards are yours to shape: statuses, categories, and an admin with roles and single-use invite links for your team.
The pricing difference matters at scale. Hosted feedback tools charge per tracked user or per seat, so the more successful your board becomes, the more it costs. Votera is a one-time purchase with unlimited voters.
On identity, it starts light and escalates only if you ask: an anonymous per-browser key gives one vote per browser out of the box, an optional email gate raises the bar, and verified voting is there when a vote needs to mean something. Voters may opt in to a single notification when a specific idea ships - there is no marketing list and no bulk mail.
Version 3 added the owner layer: a REST API with revocable keys, webhooks, an MCP endpoint so an AI assistant can read the board, two-factor authentication, OIDC single sign-on, scheduled backups with a restore path, an audit log, and your own branding.
Runs on plain PHP 8 with MySQL or SQLite. No framework, no Composer, no build step, no external services, and it never phones home. A live demo opens signed in with no password and resets hourly.
Honest limits: single sign-on hand-off into your own app is still on the roadmap, and HTTPS is assumed in production as with any login-bearing app.
Listed in
Idea Voting
One vote per browser key (or per verified email), enforced by a unique database index
Public Roadmap
Ideas move through Under review, Planned, In progress, Shipped
Changelog
Public record of everything shipped, linked to the ideas that asked for it
Vote Abuse Protection
Per-IP hourly rate limit + admin vote-velocity panel
Self-Hosted
PHP 8 + MySQL or SQLite — no Composer, no Node, 2-minute web installer
Licensing
One-time purchase, unlimited voters and ideas, data stays on your server
The ownership model. Every hosted feedback tool — Canny, Featurebase, Nolt — bills by "tracked users" that never reset, so the price climbs exactly as your roadmap gets traction. Votera is a one-time purchase you install on your own server: unlimited voters, unlimited ideas, and the feedback data never leaves your infrastructure. It also treats vote integrity as a feature — unique-index-enforced one-vote-per-voter, per-IP rate limiting, and an admin vote-velocity panel that makes unusual voting spikes visible instead of silent.
If you want a feedback board as a predictable one-time cost instead of a subscription that scales against you — and you care where customer data lives — Votera is built for exactly that. It runs on ordinary PHP hosting (MySQL or SQLite, no Composer, no Docker required), installs in about two minutes, and its limitations are printed honestly on the product page. If you need SSO, multi-project, or built-in email notifications today, a hosted tool may fit better — Votera 1.x deliberately keeps a small, ownable footprint.
Indie SaaS founders, small product teams, and agencies who already self-host parts of their stack and want a public feedback board + roadmap without another per-user subscription. Typically people running their product on their own VPS or shared hosting who value data ownership.
Votera is part of Ownware (ownware.io), a catalog of self-hosted business tools built on one conviction: software you depend on should be something you own, not rent. The feedback-board category was an obvious gap — the hosted tools' "tracked users" pricing punishes success. Votera ships the core loop (ideas → votes → roadmap → changelog) as a one-time purchase with the code included.
Plain PHP 8 with PDO — no framework, no Composer dependencies. MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite for storage. Ships with a web installer, self-healing schema upgrades, and a test suite. Runs on ordinary shared hosting or any VPS.
We cannot answer this one the way it is asked, so here is why instead.
Votera is self-hosted and it never phones home — no telemetry, no licence call-back, no account on our side. Once someone buys it and installs it on their own server, we have no way of knowing they are running it unless they tell us, and that is deliberate: it is the same property that keeps their customers' feedback on their own hardware rather than ours.
So there is no list to publish. Naming anyone would mean either publishing a buyer who never agreed to be named, or inventing one. If you run Votera and would like to be listed here, tell us and we will add you.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if Votera is good.
Check the traffic stats of Votera on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of Votera on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of Votera's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of Votera on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about Votera on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
Do you know an article comparing Votera to other products?
Suggest a link to a post with product alternatives.
Is Votera good? This is an informative page that will help you find out. Moreover, you can review and discuss Votera here. The primary details have been verified within the last quarter. So they could be considered up to date. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.
