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Effectively and intelligently navigating change has long been an essential component of smart business management, empowering teams of all sizes to reliably address evolving customer needs. However, for professionals to implement new tools fine-tuned to benefit clients, they must be given intuitive, adaptive and user-friendly ways to share great ideas.
Idea management solutions, AKA idea management software or tools, provide an all-in-one platform for businesses aiming to manage change from inception to delivery, enabling teams to collect, organise and evaluate great ideas within a single, centralised, intuitive interface.
As innovation management tools have become more advanced, the feature pool they draw from has grown, spanning in-depth analytics, reporting tools, performance tracking models and team collaboration tools. But with so many potentially beneficial features to consider, choosing the right tool for any given business can be challenging.
At Sideways 6, we've worked hard to develop what we believe to be the most intuitive, adaptive and supportive idea management platform on the market, but we also understand that our tools may not be the perfect fit for every team.
While we'd be thrilled to work with you, we understand the value in evaluating your options, so below we'll help you weigh up nine Sideways 6 competitors and alternatives for 2025.
Before looking into which other tools do a great job of supporting professional change management, it's wise to define the key features of idea management solutions that businesses should look out for. While the way these features are presented may differ depending on the tool in question, each of these functions will be present in an ideal solution, so they'll help to form the basis of our competitor analysis.
Read More: Top 10 Change Management Tools for 2025
While the main purpose of this article is to walk you through some great alternatives to Sideways 6, learning about the key features of our tools will help you evaluate your options.
Sideways 6 centres on the principle of integrated idea management, the belief that the best ideas are collected efficiently at their source. Our ‘Ideas From Anywhere’ ideology combats the fact that over 80% of collaboration efforts fail due to a lack of adoption by empowering businesses to freely integrate our tools into the enterprise social networks they already use.
Our ‘Enterprise’ solutions support bespoke integrations with Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage and Interact Software, while our free (up to 10 users) ‘Lite’ solution is our leading employee ideas app run on Microsoft Teams. This emphasis on highly-integratable tools enables teams of all sizes to benefit from straightforward and sophisticated change management initiatives.
Sideways 6 also boasts powerful efficiency-boosting and organisational features to support agile workflows. For example, our ‘Similar Ideas AI’ tool analyses the context of submissions to identify potential matches from existing ideas, grouping propositions together to enhance collaboration and (unlike other tools) preventing duplicate ideas at the point of submission.
We also leverage powerful AI technologies to aid professionals in building on foundational ideas, automatically and intuitively accounting for key contextual information. Our ‘Improve with AI’ tool intelligently reviews submissions to offer tailored enhancement advice, aiding users in improving their ideation abilities rather than simply re-writing ideas with AI support. Our AI Auto-Populate tool categorizes ideas in seconds, allowing for faster insights and saving substantial time on idea management admin.
Whether you’re a small business owner just starting out, or the head of a global organisation, Sideways 6 can be simply, efficiently and intelligently adapted to meet the unique needs of your teams. Not convinced? Find out what brands like M&S and Nestlé think of our solutions.
If you're unsure whether Sideways 6 is the right platform for your business, or simply wish to see which additional features, analytics capabilities or performance metrics may be available elsewhere, below we look into nine popular competitors and alternatives to Sideways 6.
Brightidea is among the most popular platforms used to capture and implement ideas globally, and for good reason, with both large and small businesses praising the service for its straightforward user interface and advanced features. Brightidea's task management and real-time project tracking tools are popular among users, providing great visibility into ongoing initiatives across most aspects of the development cycle, with the service's Whiteboard features supporting remote team collaboration efforts via responsive digital tools.
While users often praise the Brightidea ecosystem for its ability to generate actionable insights into live projects, some users claim the service's reporting tools aren't quite as customisable as they'd like. All in all, Brightidea is a powerful, collaborative and data-driven platform that offers advanced features in an easy-to-adopt package, though some users may find getting the most out of the service follows quite a steep learning curve, in particular if they have little experience navigating idea management tools.
Aha! provides a comprehensive suite of product development software designed to help professionals improve customer interactions across various business processes. From standalone idea management, software development, product information hub and team collaboration tools, to full task management suites, Aha!'s user-friendly solutions help teams to compile and analyse vital information more efficiently.
The company's full product management solution (Aha! Roadmaps) is well-reviewed, with professionals finding the ability to centralise data drawn from multiple channels in the same dashboard helps to save time and support maximum engagement in the implementation of transformations. Aha!'s tools are fairly-priced, easy-to-use and supported by an attentive customer service team. However, some users have reported integration issues with select developer tools which could cause issues in specific workflows.
Ideanote offers a wide range of idea management tools positioned to help businesses optimise transformation and innovation processes by supporting team collaboration across multiple accounts and channels. From easy-to-adopt and scale employee innovative ideas and idea management solutions with intuitive content creation and collaboration tools, to elements of gamification through the brand's Shark Tank Challenge program, Ideanote promotes audience engagement via fun and adaptive software solutions.
While Ideanote's ideation, team management and content creation tools are easy-to-implement and explore on a foundational level, some users have noted that mastering the suite to the point of creating customised workflows can be a little challenging. Some users have also mentioned a lack of integration options, though popular commercial solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Zapier are fully supported.
Ideascale provides businesses, government agencies, educational institutions and healthcare facilities with award-winning idea management software tailored to address bespoke needs. Companies across various industries benefit from specially developed solutions capable of capturing ideas across existing collaboration channels, enabling multiple team members to combine efforts in a single centralised space.
Ideascale's users praise the platform's easy-to-use collaboration panel and insightful feedback tools, with the service's wide range of integrations with popular communication channels like LinkedIn, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Trello supporting quick and easy user-adoption. However, Ideascale's flexible pricing structure may not suit every business plan, with outcomes dependent on unique requirements.
Viima promises to simplify innovation initiatives across organisations of all sizes, and through teams of all skill levels, supported by advanced automation features and ready-to-use templates. Businesses with little experience navigating idea management platforms stand to benefit the most from Viima's platform, with the service's management boards tailored to support agile workflows and continuous scaling, allowing teams to replicate successful projects quickly and easily using standardised templates.
While Viima's template-based approach can be incredibly helpful for some companies, the downside is that experienced professionals may find the platform's customisation options to be a little limited. The only other fairly common gripe among Viima's user-base is a lack of enthusiasm for the software's UI, but for teams that want a quick, easy and user-friendly innovation platform, Viima can be a great option.
Wazoku sets out to help organisations with limited idea management experience centralise key data associated with change initiatives within one interconnected, intelligent and dynamic ecosystem. The main draw to Wazoku's platform is the ability to consolidate information from multiple sources into a central hub from which bespoke AI tools are leveraged to analyse data and produce actionable insights.
Users are quick to praise the wide range of customisation options offered by the Wazoku platform, with fairly straightforward analytics and reporting functions that enable teams to track employee ideas from inception to implementation, as well as measure key engagement metrics across entire organisations. However, while these tools can provide great benefits, some users feel presented dashboards can be a little too complex for the average professional, potentially leading to challenges for inexperienced users.
Qmarkets combines a user-friendly interface with well-implemented AI tools to streamline ideation and project planning tasks from inception to delivery. The platform allows innovation managers to set a clear objective to be shared among relevant teams, with users able to suggest and build upon ideas in central portals. AI tools then sort insights by relevance and engagement to help leaders find high-quality ideas.
Through easily-understood crowd voting features and adjustable data filters, Qmarkets can help teams to pursue ideation tasks incredibly efficiently, though setting the platform up to achieve optimal results can be a little time-consuming. Provided teams have the time to adjust Qmarkets to meet unique needs, and that the platform's many customisation options don't become too overwhelming, organisations will likely find the streamlined and intelligent nature of this platform to support long-term projects very well.
Arguably, Edison365's biggest strength is its usability, with every aspect of the platform benefitting from straightforward controls and an easy-to-understand, visually appealing user interface. Users can create streamlined workflows with simple drag-and-drop controls, making it easy to submit ideas and leave feedback, with the platform's Microsoft build supporting simple integration with apps like Teams.
While Edison365 is very user-friendly once set up, some users claim getting to that point can be a little challenging, with the process itself being quite lengthy and requiring some technical knowledge that the average professional may lack. Provided businesses are able to navigate this initial set up, however, Edison365 can offer a very open and accessible platform geared towards straightforward collaboration.
Power Apps is a low-code app development software solution created by Microsoft, with its main draw being the ability for users to design and implement bespoke applications for team, personal and enterprise use. Power Apps can provide a great platform for teams to develop custom idea management solutions that can be freely integrated into existing Microsoft apps like Teams and Azure, even if those developing the app have limited coding experience.
While the highly-customisable nature of Power Apps can prove beneficial, some users claim successfully developing effective tools can be a little complicated. With the ability to connect professional developer tools to Power Apps, this platform may actually be more attractive to those with coding knowledge, while the simplified interfaces of alternative solutions will likely be easier to navigate for the average professional.
Whether a platform mentioned above has caught your attention, or you're still considering the benefits of deploying Sideways 6, it's important to carefully consider how a specific idea management solution may benefit your unique organisation. When weighing up your options, taking a structured approach to evaluations is wise, so below are a few tips for choosing the right idea management tool for your team.
How idea management tools are leveraged within an organisation will depend on the unique needs of different teams, meaning features that benefit one business might represent a waste of resources for another. Before whittling down your list of options to one or two solutions to explore in more depth, it's wise to draw up a list of requirements that best-address the specific wants and needs of your workers.
For example, if many of your teams operate within hybrid structures, a tool with real-time collaboration features and a great mobile UI may be a top priority. The clearer an idea you have about what your staff are looking for in a great idea management tool, the easier it will be to locate appropriate vendors.
No matter how great a certain feature looks, it wont actually be able to provide much benefit to your teams if nobody makes use of it. Choosing to prioritise tools that support native integrations with the solutions your employees already use on a daily basis will help to improve adoption rates, enabling professionals to seamlessly work ideation processes into existing workflows without much extra work.
To help ensure a smooth adoption, it can be wise to look into enterprise packages that enable you to build custom idea management solutions within existing communication and collaboration tools. If you already use Microsoft Teams or Slack to navigate multiple daily processes, for example, the presence of a bespoke idea management tool in these programs will help you collect great ideas as they're formed.
Employee ideas initiatives are most effective when engagement levels are high, so it's important to prioritise tools with great communication and collaboration features. If staff can quickly and easily add comments, feedback and sketches to proposed ideas from multiple devices, it's more likely they'll see the benefit in adopting new tools into their workflows, helping to promote collaboration between teams.
The actual act of leaving feedback should also feel simple and rewarding, so look for a solution with an intuitive interface and straightforward controls. Extra features that aid content creation and monitor engagement metrics can also be beneficial to help leaders optimise tools to best meet evolving needs.
Integrating idea management tools into existing workflows should be viewed as a long-term business strategy, with the benefits of improving internal communication and collaboration intended to optimise the way tasks are performed continuously. With this in mind, an ideal idea management solution will be easy to scale and adjust to meet changing needs, with new users and touch-points added as required.
Choosing to work with a vendor that has a good track record of addressing customer requests is also a smart idea, providing peace of mind that any potential issues uncovered during scaling will be promptly addressed. A great customer support team can end up feeling like an extension of your own workforce, helping teams to troubleshoot slight issues and optimise bespoke tools continuously for years to come.
Well-implemented and bespoke idea management solutions can help businesses of all sizes get the most out of their teams, empowering employees to think boldly and make their voices heard with an eye to fostering a stronger sense of organisational community. However, tools must be adjusted to meet the unique needs of different business environments to help ensure new processes are adopted smoothly.
At Sideways 6, we're committed to developing bespoke idea management solutions optimised to drive transformative change and help businesses achieve strategic objectives, offering fully customisable solutions tailor-made to meet unique requirements. While we firmly believe our services are a great fit for most teams, that's not to say we’ll be offended if you choose to evaluate options from other vendors and providers before making a final call.
We hope the insights covered in this guide help you to find the perfect idea management system for your team, accounting for key factors like usability, integration, collaboration and scalability.
If you feel Sideways 6 may be the right choice for your business, feel free to request a demo by following this link.
You can also download our free playbook for running successful Idea Programs in 2025.
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