Internal feedback or public boards.

The question of whether to run a public or private feedback board is not actually a question, most mature product teams need both. A public board signals confidence, invites the broader community into your roadmap, and turns your most engaged users into advocates. A private board protects sensitive feedback from enterprise customers, keeps unreleased features under wraps, and gives internal teams a candid place to file requests. Upvoty's visibility system lets you run any combination of the two in a single workspace.

Visibility in Upvoty is set per board, not per workspace. That means one organization can host an open public roadmap, an invite-only beta board, a private enterprise customer board, and an internal employee feedback board, each with its own audience and its own rules. You decide who can view, vote, comment, and post on every board independently.

What public feedback boards do well

A well-run public board is one of the most under-rated marketing assets a SaaS product can have. It tells prospective customers what you are building, what your existing customers care about, and how transparent your team is about its priorities. Combined with a public roadmap and a regularly updated changelog, it forms a trust signal that competing closed products simply cannot match.

Public boards work especially well for consumer products, developer tools, and any product where bottom-up adoption matters. Users who vote on a request feel ownership of the outcome and tend to stick around long enough to see it shipped. Pair that with moderation and structured feedback boards and the public surface stays high-signal even at scale.

Why private boards are non-negotiable for B2B

Once you start selling into enterprise, public boards alone stop being enough. Enterprise customers want a channel where they can file feedback without exposing their roadmap thinking to competitors, and where their requests are prioritized differently than the broader community. A private board, gated by User SSO against your existing customer database, is the canonical solution.

Private boards also serve internal teams. A product-and-engineering-only board is the right home for technical debt, infrastructure requests, and feedback that shouldn't be visible to customers. An employee-feedback board hosted on your own domain via custom domain becomes the official channel for any internal request, HR, operations, IT. Same Upvoty, completely different audience.

Granular permissions, not just on or off

Visibility in Upvoty is more nuanced than a simple public-private toggle. You can run a board that is publicly readable but accepts posts only from authenticated users. You can run a board that is invite-only for posts but allows logged-in customers to view and vote. You can hide a board from the public index entirely and surface it only via a direct link or SSO-gated portal. Each combination unlocks a different feedback strategy.

For most teams, the right starting point is two boards: one fully public for the broader community, one private gated by SSO for paying customers. From there you add internal boards, beta boards, and team-specific boards as the organization scales. Upvoty's visibility system is built to grow with that complexity rather than against it, so you never end up running three separate tools to cover three different audiences.