How to keep the community informed about your activities

I have already reported here my search for a bulletin board for the blog. In the end, I ended up realizing that I also needed a way to interact with my communities, so it was desirable to give users a voice. Thus, I needed the famous forum, which is why I ended up choosing the Gitter .

However, there is a similar demand, boiled down to the need for disclosure without public interaction with users. I would name such use "microblog", if it did not already belong to another type of tool. This is what is known, in the developer world, as "changelog". Let's see what are the main tools in this market.

Or Headway It is a very simple changelog tool, which perfectly meets the demand for spreading news about your product (or whatever you most want to promote). The app provides options for Publish the changelog to a standalone page or directly to a widget , displayed within your blog or app.

It's what I would call a "root experience" For two reasons: the post is written in markdown and the customization of the widget is limited. The paid plan (USD 29/month) also offers: whitelabel, publication on your domain, integrations, among other features. So, overall, the free plan is more than enough to fulfill the mission of publicizing your activities.

A good alternative to Headway is Announcekit , which has many more customizations in the widget, in addition to being aimed at a wider audience. While changelog tools are originally geared toward developers, there are adaptations to serve marketing and product teams.

This is precisely the case with Announcekit, that included feedback and email notification functionalities in its solution . In terms of price, Annoucekit has a similar plan to Headway for a better price ($19/month). But to use the marketing tools, you need to choose a more expensive plan (starting at USD 49/month). That is, it is cheap for developers and expensive for marketers.

From what I could see, Announcekit is competing directly with Beamer . The biggest difference I found was that Beamer doesn't offer an affordable starter plan, but only charges in the most expensive ranges, with features very similar to those of Announcekit. In fact, even visually the competitors are very similar.

Another competitor to be mentioned is the Noticeable . Since it seems to be the only one that limits the free plan to one project, I haven't delved into the tool. Finally, there is the ReleaseNotes , which has a business model based on the number of subscribers to your changelog. Since it starts at $14/month, I also didn't thoroughly evaluate the app.

That is Competition has organized itself into an increasing line of complexity and price , in the following order: changelog, announcements (releases and announcements in general), notification center, user segmentation, feedback, push notifications, design customization, and integrations with marketing tools.

Personally, I think that if you don't need anything too complicated, Headway is a good option for small ads . But, if you're looking to expand your fulfillment of marketing demands, Announcekit seems to be the most flexible, as it has the most price ranges and features. That way, you'll only pay for what's important, when and if the need arises.