Most SaaS teams say they want a public roadmap. Fewer publish one that customers can trust. This report codes 20 well-known public product surfaces (roadmaps, changelogs, and mixed portals) as they appeared in September 2026.

This is a convenience sample, not a census of every Canny or Featurebase board. The goal is a citeable snapshot: what high-visibility products actually show customers, and which habits look like transparency versus theater.

Headline findings

14 of 20 showed upcoming work (planned or in progress), not only a changelog of what already shipped.
6 of 20 were changelog-only. Visitors could see the past, not the bet.
4 of 20 put calendar dates or quarters on customer-facing planned items.
8 of 20 let customers vote, subscribe, or follow an item.
17 of 20 published a changelog or release feed.
12 of 20 used status columns (Planned, In progress, Shipped) rather than a timeline.

The pattern is blunt. Changelogs are common. Dated promises are rare. Voting is concentrated in feedback portals, not on Linear-style marketing changelogs.

How we coded the sample

Each public URL was scored on five binaries:

Upcoming work: visitors can see at least one planned or in-progress item, not only shipped notes.
Dates: planned items show a quarter, month, or day. "Soon" and "coming later" do not count.
Changelog: a reverse-chronological feed of shipped work exists on the same brand.
Customer signal: vote, subscribe, or follow on an item.
Status columns: the primary view is Planned / In progress / Shipped (or equivalent), not a Gantt or calendar.

We looked at public pages only. Internal Notion docs, private Productboard views, and logged-in-only portals were out of scope. Selection favored products that PMs already cite: Linear, GitHub, Buffer, Featurebase, Canny, Notion, Vercel, Stripe, Figma, Loom, Monzo, Cal.com, n8n, Raycast, Intercom, HubSpot, Microsoft 365, Atlassian Cloud, Framer, and Webflow.

The coded table

Product	Upcoming work	Dates on planned items	Changelog	Vote or subscribe	Status columns
Linear	Yes	No	Yes	No	Partial
GitHub	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Buffer	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Featurebase	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Canny	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Notion	No	No	Yes	No	No
Vercel	No	No	Yes	No	No
Stripe	No	No	Yes	No	No
Figma	Partial	No	Yes	No	No
Loom	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
Monzo	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
Cal.com	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
n8n	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Raycast	No	No	Yes	No	No
Intercom	Partial	No	Yes	No	No
HubSpot	Yes	No	Yes	No	Partial
Microsoft 365	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Atlassian Cloud	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Framer	No	No	Yes	No	No
Webflow	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Partial means a "coming soon" strip or mixed marketing page, not a maintained board. For counts above, Partial counts as upcoming work = yes and status columns = no, except Linear and HubSpot status columns, which we marked Partial and excluded from the 12.

What the numbers actually say

Changelogs are the default trust surface

Seventeen products shipped a public trail of completed work. That is the cheap half of transparency. A changelog does not tell a buyer whether SSO is on the table. It only proves you can write release notes.

If you have capacity for one public artifact, ship the changelog first. Then add a short Planned / In progress / Shipped board. Do not start with dates.

Dates are a large-company habit

The four dated roadmaps in this sample are GitHub, Microsoft 365, Atlassian Cloud, and Webflow. Three of those are platform vendors with analyst and IT-admin audiences. Startups that copy Microsoft's dated roadmap usually create a backlog of missed quarters.

Linear, Featurebase, Canny, Buffer, Cal.com, and n8n show direction without pinning a Friday. That is the pattern worth copying if you sell to other software teams.

Voting lives on feedback portals, not on marketing changelogs

Vote or subscribe showed up on Buffer, Featurebase, Canny, Cal.com, n8n, and Webflow. Stripe, Vercel, Notion, and Linear do not run a public popularity contest on the same page as the changelog.

That split matters. If you collect votes, unique voters beat raw upvotes, and duplicates should be merged before anything hits Planned. Otherwise the roadmap is a ranking of who yelled twice.

A working definition of a trustworthy public roadmap

From the sample, the boards that look honest share four traits:

Statuses a customer can scan in one pass: Planned, In progress, Shipped.
No fake ETAs. Time shows up as a quarter only when the org can defend it.
A changelog that closes the loop when an item leaves In progress.
If voting exists, it is unique people, not a scoreboard of power users.

You can generate the status copy with the public roadmap status template, write the shipped notes with the changelog generator, and score requests with the RICE calculator before they move columns. Check voting bias and duplicate themes if the board is already noisy.

Limits

Twenty products is small. English-language, high-visibility SaaS is not the long tail of Canny boards. Pages change. Featurebase's own universal roadmap, GitHub's public roadmap repo, and Linear's changelog were checked in September 2026. Treat the table as a snapshot, not a ranking of vendors.

We did not score private roadmaps, sales-only slide decks, or "coming soon" landing-page lists with no status history.

How to cite this

Featul, "Public Roadmap Transparency Report 2026," 4 September 2026, https://www.featul.com/blog/public-roadmap-transparency-report-2026.

Suggested line: In a September 2026 coded sample of 20 public SaaS roadmaps and changelogs, 17 published a changelog, 14 showed upcoming work, and only 4 put dates on planned items.

What Featul takes from this

Featul is built around that workflow: boards for requests, a roadmap you move on purpose, and a changelog when work ships. Open source, EU-hosted. If you want the portal on your own domain, keep the attribution badge visible so other teams can find the same workflow.

Public Roadmap Transparency Report 2026

Featul, Simplified