Irie, Inc.

The objective of every backlog management tool is to allow you to create, manage, and prioritize the backlog. Every one of them provides a simple Ranking mechanism for determining what work to do next. However, some are a little better than others.

Analog (3×5 card) method
Put all of the story cards together into one large pile. Move more important cards towards the top of the pile, less important cards towards the back.
Usability: Medium-High Downside: you lose the ability to view the other relationships that exist between cards. You can’t search through the stack very easily.

Ideal Digital Tool
Any time you have a list of story cards, you can drag them up or down in the list in order to set relative order. You can filter the list to include only a subset of the cards (such as for a single feature group, a single theme or epic, a single role, or a single value proposition), and then rank those relative to one another. Prioritizing a small set of closely related stories will be faster and easier than reviewing the entire backlog at once. Repeating this process with different cross-sections of the backlog will allow the product owner to gain perspective about what he or she is trying to prioritize. The ideal tool will be able to correlate all these theoretically disparate and potentially conflicting priorities and putting them together into a coherent whole, a prioritized backlog that the product owner can groom.
Usability: High

Rally
You can move stories within groups, move groups within larger groups, and reorder the groups. You can switch to the backlog view, and sort them there, as well, by dragging up and down.
Usability: High Downside: Does not readily support ranking within the various cross-sections of the backlog.

VersionOne
Add the ‘Order’ field to your view, then sort by it. Then, you can drag rows up and down in order to specify a custom order. As you move from view to view, applying various filters at different times, the overall sort order gets more and more precise, exactly as with the Ideal tool.
Usability: Medium-High Downside: You have to know you can do it, as it is not enabled by default. It tends to be a bit slow, in general, which is made worse by the fact that you can only drag one at a time to prioritize them.

AgileOnDemand
While viewing the backlog, you can create Epics and you can create stories within epics. You cannot control the order of stories within an epic, except by a naming convention. But you can drag epics up or down to prioritize them.
Usability: Medium Downside: some things are harder to do than you would expect them to be.

Excel
Highlight a row. Drag from one of the borders of the row, while holding the shift key. Where you let go, that’s where it goes to.
Usability: Medium If you don’t hold down the Shift key, you may overwrite an existing backlog item, which would be very bad. The mouse target for initiating the drag is very small, meaning you need dexterity. Though you can also do it via the keyboard pretty easily.

Mingle
From the Grid view, you can enable ranking. This lets you drag and drop cards into the desired order. However, the ordering is left to right, not top to bottom. And you can’t do this from the more compact Hierarchy or List views, which is a serious shortcoming in my opinion.
Usability: Medium-Low Downside: really doesn’t meet expectations, that is, forces me to do things their way, rather than adapting to me and the way I think or want to work.

Usability Comparison Summary on a scale of 1 to 10