When developing a business model from scratch one of the very useful tools is the Lean Canvas. As we love everything digital we searched and assessed three different online tools to fill in the Lean Canvas.

With this article we want to share our results and experiences with you: How can these online tools be useful and how much do they cost?

Leanstack

Leanstack offers you an interactive online tool to create your Lean Canvas. The free account allows you to create as many different canvases for one business idea as you like. It is very easy to use and offers you to work on a canvas as a team. Moreover, it includes useful features like a presentation-mode, a timeline and an activity stream.

• – Nice User Experience, very easy to use
• – Allows working as a team
• – Free access to creating and sharing canvas
• – PDF export and presentation-mode
• – Commenting option, activity stream to see what happened after you left
• – Timeline with additional experiments and strategy proposals (limited to one experiment and one strategy proposal as a free-user)
• – Innovation Roadmap gives you lessons on different topics (requires Bootstrapper, Startup or Pro)
• – Pricing:
  • Free: unlimited lean canvases for one business idea, unlimited collaborations, SSL security
  • 19 $ per month: Bootstrapper for validation = track experiments
  • 29$ per month: work on three business ideas
  • 79 $ per month: 10 business ideas, all features, priority support, API access

Summary: Nice and easy to use, with great features for team collaboration. But as a free user, you will pretty soon get to the limit of the possibilities.

Canvanizer

Canvanizer offers many different canvases as interactive tools for setting up your business. To start using the tool, you need to sign up. After that, it is totally free to use. The sketchy look sometimes makes it  difficult to use, but everything you need  like a presentation link, sharing possibilities and team invitation is integrated.

• – Usability is okay, but the sketchy look makes the tool rather difficult to use
• – Canvas history lets you trackback on how you filled in the canvas from the beginning
• – Presentation-mode is possible
• – Sharing option with slideshow, twitter link and direct link to the canvas
• – Allows team invitation
• – Pricing: FREE

Summary: The Lean Canvas on Canvanizer offers not the best usability, but for a free service it is really useful. We only miss an export option.

Leanmonitor

Leanmonitor is another service that offers the Lean Canvas as an interactive online tool. It requires a signup for a free trial of 30 days.

• – Nice design and good usability
• – Possibility for  validation of hypotheses and experiments
• – Step by step guidance
• – Progress and status can be added (to evaluate, in progress, validated, invalidated) – Filter option
• – Sharing and PDF export possible
• – Comment option separately and on every note
• – Activity-stream
• – Interview template included
• – Dashboard with the visualization of your iterative workflow (build, measure, learn)
• – Pricing
  • Free Trial for 30 days (starter or premium package), requires sign up with mail-address
  • Starter 9$ per month: up to 2 users, 2 canvases, hypotheses board
  • Premium 22$ per month: unlimited users, multiple canvases, pivots, experiments, interviews, results

Summary: Leanmonitor.com is a clean interactive lean canvas tool with many features. It has a nice design and very good usability. Using it for the first time, the guidance shows you the most important functions. The export option is a little bit tricky: you have to go to print canvas and save as a PDF.