The 6 Best Alternatives to HeadwayApp

A changelog is a detailed account of changes that have been made to a product. It often points out the biggest changes, like bug fixes or feature updates. It’s a super useful tool that helps users keep track of what’s new and what’s been fixed.

Discovering affordable and user-friendly alternatives to Headway just got easier! We have compiled a list of 6 changelog tools that can allow you to publish product update announcements.

TL;DR: Best Headway Alternatives

• Releaselog
• Rapidr
• Notion
• GitHub
• Beamer
• AnnounceKit

Before we get into our list, let’s take a look at the features and capabilities of Headway.

What is Headway? 

Headway is a simple and effective product changelog tool. With a changelog-as-a-service and a public page, it helps keep customers informed of product updates. Boasting widgets, tags, custom domains, and many other essential features, Headway is a decent option for anyone looking to inform customers about their product updates.

What is Headway used for?

Headway simplifies the process of publishing release notes and changelogs for your products.

How much does Headway cost?

The pricing starts with a free and pro plan that costs $29/month.

What do you get with Headway?

Custom branding

You can customize your changelog to match your company branding and host it on your domain. You can contact customer support to assist with setup.

Integrations

You can connect Slack and Twitter so your team and customers are in the loop with the latest changes in your product.

Teams

Multiple users can post to your changelog if you need to.

Scheduled publishing

Set it up, choose a date, and leave it on autopilot. You sleep and it publishes. 

Privacy

Privacy is important. Your changelog can be public or private, or you can just disallow search bots from crawling it.

Eye-catching widget

A subtle widget badge animation inside of your product so that users don’t miss some important updates.

Markdown editor

The cleanest formatting imaginable, along with easy image uploading and multimedia embedding.

Now here are our 6 best alternatives

Top 6 Headway Alternatives

ReleaseLog

Releaselog.io, developed by EarlyNode, is a powerful changelog tool designed specifically for SaaS companies. It offers a convenient and efficient way to send out feature announcements and product updates to users, helping busy founders keep their user base engaged. 

With Releaselog.io, you can create beautiful and informative notifications in just minutes, ensuring that your users are always up to date with the latest changes and improvements in your product.

One of the key benefits of Releaselog.io is its flexibility. There are two main options: a standalone page with a custom domain and SEO optimization, and an embeddable widget that can be installed within your application or website. This allows you to reach your users in various contexts with your announcement regardless of where they are inside your product.

The platform’s easy-to-use content management system (CMS) enables you to write, review, and publish release notes in minutes, streamlining the entire process.

Releaselog.io also offers lots of customization options to change the changelog to match your brand identity. 

Releaselog Pricing

The monthly price is $31.50 whilst annual pricing is set at $25 with a 20% discount.

With its customizable options and affordable pricing, Releaselog.io is a valuable asset for any busy founder looking to keep their users engaged and their product evolving.

Rapidr 

Rapidr is a changelog tool that makes announcing your latest product updates a piece of cake. It allows you to create a dedicated product changelog and send notifications directly to your users and team via an in-app changelog widget, or email.

You can track feature requests and ideas, analyze and prioritize which ones to build next, and communicate new features all with their changelog.

Rapidr simplifies capturing product ideas, requests, and feedback from colleagues and customers. Users can effortlessly collect and manage valuable insights using their customer feedback portal and in-app widget.

Rapidr Pricing: Starting at $49/month.

Rapidr’s Features 

• A Rich-text editor with markdown support, and attachments 
• You can embed widgets right into your website or platform
• Create custom categories and color code them for your product
• No code required – install in 3 minutes or less
• Close the feedback loop with customer feedback boards as well as public roadmaps

Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that integrates notes, documentation, and project management. Perfect for crafting release notes, it’s a go-to solution for numerous startups that favor easy collaboration, efficient communication, and streamlined publishing workflows.

Notion Pricing & Features: Starts with a free plan. It also provides an extensive template library that includes release note templates to speed up the process of creating and publishing your changelog.

GitHub

GitHub changelog is a convenient platform for millions of developers to host and share project changelogs with internal teams. It’s used to share and organize a chronological list of all the changes made to a project on GitHub, separated into added, improved, and removed features and ordered by version and date. It’s an essential tool for streamlining communication and keeping track of a project’s updates in real-time.

GitHub Pricing

With an option for a free version, pricing starts at $4 dollars for teams and $21 for enterprises.

Creating a visually appealing and understandable GitHub changelog can be tiring since it consists solely of text in a project’s source code without any images. As a result, non-technical users may need help finding it. To ensure you’re in the know, new releases are cataloged here and require manual updates. 

The “CHANGELOG.md” file is usually in a project’s root directory or GitHub repository. Its primary goal is to inform contributors of recent code updates and is geared toward developers. 

Beamer

Beamer utilizes an intuitive newsfeed and changelog to enhance user engagement. With this platform, you can share relevant news, updates, and features and communicate with your customers. Keep your users engaged and informed about your brand with just a few clicks.

Beamer Pricing

Pricing starts at $49/ month for starter package, $99/month for pro, $249/month for scale and $499 starting price for custom packages.

Beamer has a free version with solid functionality, including a standalone changelog page and you can notify users about updates via a notification widget in your app. This no-cost plan is ideal for small businesses with fewer than 1000 visitors and limited formatting options—a perfect kickoff for any small business.

AnnounceKit

AnnounceKit provides a changelog service, delivering in-product widgets for your website. Keep your customers informed with in-app notifications, email updates, and feedback collection. AnnounceKit integrates seamlessly with a range of other tools and it’s easy to set up.

AnnounceKit Pricing

Pricing starts at $49/month.

The downside is that it cannot publish changelog updates by email, and scheduling changelog posts in the app is complicated. It supports user feedback, but it’s built into the changelog – so users can only give feedback on changelog updates.

That’s our list of top 6 alternatives to Headway. We hope this article helps you decide which changelog tool to use.