RICE Prioritization Calculator
Score and rank a product backlog with the RICE framework, compare items side by side, and see which inputs are actually driving the ranking rather than accepting the number.
Last reviewed by the Radiatus Cloud team
Want this done for your business?
Radiatus delivers cloud, security & automation for growing teams.
A prioritisation framework that shows its working
RICE multiplies reach by impact by confidence, then divides by effort. Reach is how many people the change affects in a period, impact is how much it moves the needle for each of them, confidence is how sure you are of the first two, and effort is person months. The output is a score, but the value is not the score. It is that four people arguing about a roadmap now argue about four specific numbers instead of about which feature feels more important.
The inputs that get gamed
Impact and confidence are the soft ones and they are where the framework is most often bent. Impact is meant to be a small fixed scale, commonly three for massive down to a quarter for minimal, precisely so it cannot be inflated arbitrarily. Confidence is a percentage that should reflect evidence: a hundred percent means you have data, eighty percent means you have some, fifty percent means you are guessing. A backlog where every item is scored at a hundred percent confidence is not using the framework, it is decorating a preexisting opinion.
Effort is the honest denominator
Effort in person months is the input teams underestimate most consistently, and because it is a divisor an underestimate inflates the score disproportionately. Halving the effort estimate doubles the score. The comparison view here shows how each item's rank would change under a different effort estimate, which surfaces the items whose position depends entirely on an optimistic guess.
Related tools
- Incident Impact Calculator — Estimate the cost of a security incident from severity, affected users and downtime hours, with a compliance and trust rating and the response actions each severity level demands.
- Third-Party Risk Assessor — Assess vendor risk based on data access and type.
- Data Breach Cost Estimator — Estimate what a data breach would cost from records exposed, cost per record, days to detect and hours of downtime, split into direct and indirect costs.
- SaaS Risk Heatmap — Pick the SaaS apps your company runs, add your own, and get a heatmap ranking each by data criticality times access scope, with the risk each carries.
Frequently Asked Questions
What scale should impact use?
The standard scale is 3 for massive, 2 for high, 1 for medium, 0.5 for low and 0.25 for minimal. Keeping it to five fixed values is deliberate: a free numeric field invites inflation and destroys comparability across items.
What does reach actually mean?
The number of people or events affected within a defined period, usually a quarter. It must be the same period for every item or the scores are not comparable. Use real numbers from analytics where you have them rather than estimates.
How should I set confidence?
100 percent when you have quantitative evidence, 80 percent when you have some data and reasonable logic, 50 percent when it is a considered guess. Anything below 50 percent is a signal that the item needs research rather than a place in the ranking.
Why is effort so influential?
Because it is the denominator, so an error in it moves the score more than the same proportional error anywhere else. The tool shows how the ranking shifts if effort turns out to be higher, which identifies items that only rank well because they were estimated optimistically.
Should RICE decide the roadmap?
No. It ranks items on expected value per unit of work, which ignores dependencies, strategic commitments, technical foundations and anything whose value is not proportional to reach. Use it to structure the argument, not to end it.
Privacy & Security
Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
How to Use
Add each initiative with its reach, impact, confidence and effort to get a ranked RICE score list.
Disclaimer: This tool is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. Results are for educational and utility purposes.
Related Tools
Incident Impact Calculator
BusinessEstimate the cost of a security incident from severity, affected users and downtime hours, with a compliance and trust rating and the response actions each severity level demands.
Third-Party Risk Assessor
BusinessAssess vendor risk based on data access and type.
Data Breach Cost Estimator
BusinessEstimate what a data breach would cost from records exposed, cost per record, days to detect and hours of downtime, split into direct and indirect costs.