Hamster vs ChatPRD
ChatPRD turns a chat into a PRD and hands it to Linear, Notion or your coding agent, and it’s very good at that. Hamster keeps going after the document. Your team agrees on the Brief, a Plan comes out of it, and your agents build from that Plan.
Free for 10 Briefs a month, and viewers are always free.
The short version
ChatPRD gives you a first draft of a PRD, a one-pager or a technical spec from a chat and a template. It pushes the document to Linear, Notion or Confluence, and your coding agent can read it over MCP.
Hamster gives you a Brief drafted from your code, your tickets and your calls, a Plan with acceptance criteria on every task, and a review of the pull request against them. It works when you’re the only one writing, and it keeps working when your designer and your engineers need to agree first.
You can also bring your PRDs with you. The setup prompt turns your last one into your first Brief.
What ChatPRD is good at
ChatPRD gets a product manager from a blank page to a draft. You pick a template, describe the work, and it drafts a PRD, a one-pager, user stories or a technical spec, with acceptance criteria and edge cases, and then coaches you on the draft. Projects hold your saved knowledge, your uploaded files, Google Drive and Notion. From there it pushes the document to Linear, Notion, Confluence or Google Docs. Its MCP server lets an agent in Cursor, Claude Desktop or VS Code read and update the document. Pricing starts free, with Pro at $15 a month and Teams at $29 per seat a month.
ChatPRD drafting from a template and its connected sources, from the ChatPRD site. chatprd.ai, September 15, 2026
Where it gets hard with a team
Say three enterprise customers are asking for an audit log export. You’re the PM, your designer owns the admin screens, and two engineers will build it across the API and the admin app.
You open a Project, pick the PRD template, describe the export and attach one customer’s email. ChatPRD drafts the PRD with acceptance criteria. On the Teams plan your designer and your engineers can comment and edit in real time, and you fold in the comments you agree with. Then you push the PRD to Linear, and an engineer breaks it into issues by hand.
Each engineer’s agent can pull the PRD over MCP with get_document as context for the build. Nothing checks the pull request against the acceptance criteria you wrote, so review is a judgment call from memory of the document. Your engineers read the PRD, and they never signed off on it.
What Hamster does instead
Your team agrees on the Brief
You describe the export in chat, and Hamster drafts one Brief from the three customers’ tickets, the audit-log code in the API and the call where compliance came up, with each source cited. Your designer and both engineers edit that same Brief and suggest changes. When it’s right, each of them marks it ready, and none of them needs a paid seat to do it.
The Plan comes out of the Brief
Hamster turns the agreed Brief into one Plan, with tasks across the API and the admin app, their dependencies, and acceptance criteria on every task. The tasks sync to Linear or Jira, so nobody rebuilds the list by hand. Each engineer runs hamster sync, and Claude Code, Cursor or Codex picks the Brief and the Plan up from the repo.
Review checks what you agreed
When the work comes back, you review the pull request in Hamster against the acceptance criteria in the Brief. A Cloud Agent can also work the Plan and open that pull request for you. The next Brief about audit logs can cite this one.
Bring your PRDs with you
Nothing you’ve written gets thrown away. Paste a ChatPRD document into a new Brief, or have your agent read it over MCP with get_document and create the Brief through the Hamster MCP. The setup prompt does the second one with the last PRD you wrote, so the first thing your team agrees on in Hamster is work you already started.
If you like drafting in ChatPRD, keep doing it. Bring the draft into a Brief when it’s time for your team to agree and your agents to build.
Set up Hamster and start from your last PRD
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your repo, with the path to a PRD you already have. You sign in once in the browser, and your agent does the rest.
Set up Hamster in this repo: follow https://tryhamster.com/plugin/install, then run hamster init and hamster sync. Then read the PRD at <path to your PRD> and create a Brief from it in my Hamster workspace through the Hamster MCP, keeping its requirements and acceptance criteria. Stop when you need me to sign in.
ChatPRD costs less. Why pay for Hamster?
ChatPRD is free to start, $15 a month for Pro and $29 per seat a month for Teams. Per writer, that’s less than Hamster.
Hamster is free for 10 Briefs a month, and viewers are always free. After that it’s $40 per creator a month, so you pay for the people who write Briefs and not for everyone who reads them and marks them ready.
The $40 pays for what happens after the document. Hamster turns the agreed Brief into a Plan, gets it to every agent on your team, and checks the pull request against what you agreed.
| What is compared | ChatPRD | Hamster |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free to start, Pro $15 a month, Teams $29 per seat a month. pricing | Free for 10 Briefs a month with viewers free, then $40 per creator a month. |
| Document templates | PRDs, one-pagers, user stories and technical specs, with custom templates. write a PRD | Briefs, technical specs and notes. |
| What you leave with | A document, pushed to Linear, Notion, Confluence or Google Docs. | A Brief, a Plan of tasks with acceptance criteria, and a reviewed pull request. |
| How your agent gets it | Over MCP, with get_document and update_document. MCP server | hamster sync writes it into your repo, and there’s an MCP server too. |
| Who signs it off | Comments and real-time edits, on the Teams plan. collaborate with your team | Each teammate marks the Brief ready. |
Questions
- Can I bring my ChatPRD documents into Hamster?
- Yes. Paste a document into a new Brief, or have your coding agent read it over the ChatPRD MCP server and create the Brief through the Hamster MCP. The setup prompt on this page does the second one with the last PRD you wrote.
- I’m the only PM. Is Hamster for me?
- Yes. You can write a Brief, generate a Plan and hand it to your own coding agent or a Cloud Agent without anyone else signing up. Viewers are free, so your engineers can read the Brief and mark it ready before you pay for a second creator.
- Does Hamster write the document for me, like ChatPRD does?
- Yes. You describe the work in chat and a Brief comes back, drafted from your code, your docs, your tickets, Slack and your calls, with the sources cited.
- Does it work with Claude Code and Cursor?
- Yes. hamster sync writes the Brief and the Plan into .hamster/ in your repo as markdown, and any agent that reads your repo can use them. There’s an MCP server too.
- Is there a free plan?
- Yes. Hamster is free for 10 Briefs a month, and viewers are always free. After that it’s $40 per creator a month. ChatPRD is free to start too, with Pro at $15 a month and Teams at $29 per seat a month. ChatPRD pricing
Agree on the PRD before anyone’s agent builds it
Free for 10 Briefs a month, and viewers are always free. Bring your last PRD and start from there.
More reading: how Briefs work, Hamster for product managers and spec-driven development for a team.
Sources, checked September 15, 2026: ChatPRD pricing, MCP server, write a PRD, collaborate with your team. Seen something out of date? Tell us at hello@tryhamster.com.