FigJam
7.3Figma's whiteboard with AI sticky clustering, an official MCP server that reaches FigJam boards, and a $3 Collab seat — free tier caps at 3 boards
FigJam is the whiteboard product inside Figma — sticky notes, timer, music, expressive cursor stamps, voting sessions, an AI co-pilot that sorts and summarises stickies, and 300+ ready-made templates including community retro boards. Design and product teams already living in Figma get retros without buying a second tool, backed by Figma's SAML/SCIM, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and Enterprise data residency in the EU, Australia, India and Brazil. Figma's official MCP server reads and writes FigJam boards on every plan, including free. Voting sessions, open guest sessions, audio chat and webhooks all require a paid team; publishing custom templates requires Organization.
Full review →
QRetro
6.3Manage team health, not sticky notes
QRetro is a completely free retrospective tool with no seat or team caps, built by solo developer Roman Ermilov and shipping since January 2023. It runs a fixed seven-stage session — optional health check, optional icebreaker game, cards, grouping, voting, discussion, results — and closes with an OpenAI-generated summary, a ROTI score, suggested next steps and an analysis layer that clusters the cards by topic, sentiment and urgency. An official, open-source MCP server exposes 29 read/write tools so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can query boards, health trends and actions directly.
Full review →Summary
FigJam scores 7.3 overall and is best for design and product teams already on Figma who want retros on the same platform as their design files, with playful engagement, AI sticky clustering and an agent-accessible canvas. It offers a free tier.
QRetro scores 6.3 overall and is best for small agile teams and independent squads that want a genuinely well-equipped retro — 52 templates, health checks, ROTI, timer, in-board surveys, icebreaker games and MCP access — at zero cost, and can accept a solo-maintainer vendor with no SSO, no PDF or spreadsheet export and no certifications. It offers a free tier.
FigJam leads on fun factor, integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade. QRetro leads on ease of use, retro toolkit, value and AI & insights.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, FigJam edges ahead with an overall score of 7.3. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | FigJam | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Whiteboard | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Mid-market | Small |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Starter: 3 FigJam files per team (unlimited personal drafts), 150 AI credits/day up to 500/month, 300+ templates, timer, music, AI Sort/Summarize/Generate, REST API and 20 MCP tool calls/month, 30-day version history — no voting sessions, audio chat, open (no-account) sessions or webhooks | Everything is free with no seat or team caps — 52 templates, unlimited public and team boards, planning poker, team games, health checks, ROTI, summaries and MCP access |
| Starting price | $3/user/mo | Free |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | $72/mo (24 Collab seats × $3, billed annually; $120/mo billed monthly at $5) — more if facilitators need $16 Full seats | Free (no paid tier) |
| Enterprise | Yes | No |
| Founded | 2012 | 2023 |
| HQ | San Francisco, US | — |
| Data residency | United States · European Union · Australia · IN · BR | — |
| Languages | 7 (English, Japanese, Korean, …) | English only |
| Export formats | PDF · Image · CSV | Markdown · Email · JSON |
| Features | 40 | 38 |
| Integrations | 10 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | FigJam | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | — | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | — | ✓ |
| Async mode | ✓ | — |
| Whiteboard | ✓ | — |
| Independent voting | ✓note | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓ | ✓note |
| Icebreaker games | — | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓ | ✓note |
| AI action items | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI Summaries | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | ✓ | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓note |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | ✓note | — |
| Azure DevOps | — | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | — |
| Confluence | ✓note | — |
| GitHub | ✓note | — |
| GitLab | — | — |
| Jira | ✓note | ✓note |
| Linear | ✓note | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | ✓note | — |
| Monday.com | ✓note | — |
| Notion | ✓note | — |
| Shortcut | — | — |
| Slack | ✓note | ✓note |
| Trello | ✓note | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | — |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓note |
| SSO / SAML | ✓note | — |
| SCIM provisioning | ✓note | — |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | — |
| On-premises | — | — |
| Public API | ✓ | — |
| Webhooks | ✓ | — |
| MCP server | ✓ | ✓ |
FigJam — pros
- + Cheap $3/user/mo Collab seat unlocks unlimited boards without a full Figma editor seat
- + Free Starter tier includes real AI credits (150/day, 500/month), 300+ templates, the timer, music and AI Sort/Summarize
- + Playful, engaging UX — stamps, emotes, high-fives, music, cursor chat — lifts retro fun factor
- + Best open platform of any whiteboard here: REST API on every plan, webhooks on paid, and an <strong>official MCP server that reads and writes FigJam boards</strong> on all plans
- + Strong enterprise posture inherited from Figma: SAML, SCIM, activity logs, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and Enterprise data residency in the EU, Australia, India and Brazil
FigJam — cons
- − No native action-item tracking, recurring retros or health checks
- − Anonymity is weak — votes reveal who voted once the session ends, and stickies always carry a name
- − Official connectors embed Figma files in Jira/Confluence/Linear/Notion rather than pushing action items out; GitHub-issue creation is a community widget; no Azure DevOps
- − Free Starter caps a team at 3 FigJam files and excludes voting, audio chat, no-account guest links and webhooks; publishing custom templates needs Organization
- − Built primarily for designers — the canvas paradigm is fiddly for structured retros, and large boards get sluggish
QRetro — pros
- + Genuinely free with no seat caps, team caps or paywalled features — a 24-person org across three teams pays nothing, and there is no paid tier to be upsold to
- + Retro toolkit is deep for a free product: 52 templates, editable columns, private-mode submission, a timer, drag-and-drop grouping with auto-named groups, presentation mode, up to five in-board surveys, action items with owners and due dates, ROTI and a radar-charted health check stage
- + The analysis layer is the surprise — every card gets a system-assigned sentiment, category and urgency score, and the <strong>Perception Mirror</strong> compares the system's own topic clusters against the groups the team made and names the ones that quietly hold three different problems
- + Unusually strong engagement layer for a product that charges nothing — four built-in games (Draw & Guess, Sprint in one GIF, Hangman, Decoded) usable as a switchable icebreaker stage, plus GIF cards, emoji reactions and live cursors. TeleRetro and the whiteboard tools still go further, mainly on music and ambient audio
- + Official MCP server at a single address (mcp.qretro.com) with 29 read, write and delete tools, two analysis prompts and OAuth sign-in — verified live at v1.3.0, and the server source is public on GitHub
- + Guest access with no account or password, and guest contributions persist permanently rather than expiring after a day
- + Visibly active for a solo project: 14 dated changelog entries in 2026 (MCP, OAuth, poker over MCP, two new games), legal pages rewritten in late July 2026 and a site rebuild on 15 August 2026
QRetro — cons
- − Built and maintained by a single developer (Roman Ermilov) with no support team, SLA or published company entity — the enterprise-grade cap for founder-only vendors applies regardless of how good the product is
- − No enterprise controls: no SSO or SAML, no SCIM, no audit logs, no SOC 2 or ISO 27001, and no published hosting location or data-residency option
- − Export is thin — a Markdown copy of the summary, an email to the team, a Slack or Telegram recap, and a JSON dump of your own account data. There is no PDF, CSV or Excel, so there is nothing to hand a stakeholder and nothing to drop into a spreadsheet
- − Integration set is narrow: Jira, Linear, Slack and Telegram only — nothing for Teams, Confluence, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps or any other tracker
- − No async or distributed-team support — the seven-stage flow assumes a live session, and there are no recurring or scheduled retros
- − Vote allowance is computed automatically (cards + 3, capped at 10) rather than set by the facilitator, the timer maxes out at 30 minutes, and the stage order itself cannot be customised
- − No working-agreements artifact that survives between retros — what the vendor calls an 'agreement' is an action item on a board
- − No cross-team or org-level reporting: the Analytics section of the dashboard is still labelled <em>Coming soon</em>, so health and action data stays inside a single team's boards
Keep comparing
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