IdeaBoardz
2.9Free shared brainstorming boards
IdeaBoardz is a long-standing free brainstorming and retrospective board: pick 1-10 sections, name them yourself, share the URL, add ideas anonymously, upvote, and export to PDF or Excel. The app still works and is still in daily use, but development stopped years ago — the public source repository's last feature commits date to April 2020 and the Terms have not been revised since.
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Simyl Flow
5.4Measure what ships and sticks
Simyl Flow is an outcomes measurement platform for engineering teams in which the retrospective is one of five linked ceremonies (planning poker, standups, demo prep, retros, coaching). Retro boards are pre-populated with six sprint metrics pulled from Jira, Linear, GitHub and CI, AI generates candidate cards from the data, and unfinished action items carry forward — all feeding a six-dimension team health score tracked sprint over sprint.
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IdeaBoardz scores 2.9 overall and is best for throwaway retros and quick distributed brainstorms when nobody wants to sign up. It offers a free tier.
Simyl Flow scores 5.4 overall and is best for engineering orgs that already run retros and want them wired into delivery data — teams asking whether last sprint's improvement actually moved cycle time, review latency or change-failure rate, rather than teams shopping for a better sticky-note board. It offers a free tier.
IdeaBoardz leads on value. Simyl Flow leads on ease of use, retro toolkit, AI & insights, integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, Simyl Flow edges ahead with an overall score of 5.4. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | IdeaBoardz | Simyl Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | All-in-One Agile |
| Team size | Small | Mid-market |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Fully free, no paid tier | 1 team, 10 stakeholders, 2 retros + 2 poker sessions/month, 1 integration, 90-day retention, CSV export |
| Starting price | Free | $29/team/mo |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | Free (no paid tier) | $87/mo (Pro — flat $29 per team × 3 teams; $72/mo billed annually) |
| Enterprise | No | Yes |
| Founded | 2010 | 2024 |
| HQ | Pune, India | — |
| Data residency | — | United States |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | PDF · Excel | CSV |
| Features | 9 | 24 |
| Integrations | 0 | 9 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | IdeaBoardz | Simyl Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| AI Summaries | — | ✓ |
| AI grouping/clustering | — | — |
| AI action items | — | — |
| Action tracking | — | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| Polling | — | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓ |
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓ |
| Anonymous input | ✓ | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | ✓ | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | — | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | — | ✓note |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | — | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | ✓note |
| Confluence | — | — |
| GitHub | — | ✓note |
| GitLab | — | ✓note |
| Jira | — | ✓note |
| Linear | — | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | — | ✓note |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | — | ✓note |
| Shortcut | — | ✓note |
| Slack | — | ✓note |
| Trello | — | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | — | ✓note |
| GDPR | — | ✓ |
| SSO / SAML | — | ✓note |
| SCIM provisioning | — | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | ✓note |
| On-premises | — | ✓note |
| Public API | ✓note | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | — | ✓ |
IdeaBoardz — pros
- + Genuinely free — no paywall, no paid tier, no trial clock
- + No signup required to participate — just share the URL
- + 1-10 free-text sections build Start/Stop/Continue, 4Ls or Six Thinking Hats by hand
- + Drag one sticky onto another to merge them; the votes are added together
- + PDF and Excel export on every board, plus a working phone view
IdeaBoardz — cons
- − No templates at all — the only format choice is how many sections you want
- − No timer, no phases, no action items, no grouping beyond merging two stickies into one
- − Unlimited anonymous upvotes with no per-person vote budget
- − Zero integrations, no SSO, no SOC 2 and no published privacy policy — the URL is the only access control
- − No product work since April 2020; support is a Gmail address and a Twitter handle
Simyl Flow — pros
- + Retro boards arrive pre-populated with six sprint metrics (velocity, cycle time, PRs merged, commits, bug rate, unplanned work) pulled from the tools the team already uses — the discussion starts from evidence rather than recall
- + Unusually broad delivery-data integration set for a tool that runs retros: Jira, Linear, Shortcut, ClickUp, Notion, GitHub/GitLab Issues, plus GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket repos and their CI pipelines for DORA metrics
- + Official MCP server with 17 read-only tools, generally available and not tier-gated, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Windsurf can query sprint metrics, health scores and blocker summaries directly
- + Action items carry forward across sprints with completion-rate tracking, and the six-dimension health score answers whether last sprint's change actually landed
- + Flat per-team pricing ($29–49/team/mo) rather than per-seat, so a 24-person org on three teams pays $87/mo regardless of headcount inside each team
- + Deliberate privacy architecture — scores are team-level not individual, coaching notes are visible only to the developer and their manager, source code is never stored, and AI runs on Amazon Bedrock with no data retention
Simyl Flow — cons
- − Retro toolkit is thin on facilitator staples: no documented timer or timeboxed phases, no anonymous submission, no drag-and-drop grouping, no presentation mode, no recurring or scheduled retros, and only 5 built-in templates against 50+ at retro-native tools
- − Almost no engagement layer — no icebreakers, GIFs, reactions, music or kudos wall; the product is deliberately metrics-serious, which makes it a poor fit for teams whose retro problem is participation rather than measurement
- − The health score is computed from delivery signals, not from the team — there is no survey-based health check, mood tracking, sentiment analysis or ROTI, so how the team <em>feels</em> is never captured
- − Enterprise claims are self-attested: 'SOC 2 aligned, not certified' and 'ISO 27001 aligned, not certified', inheriting AWS's certifications rather than holding its own; SSO/SAML sits behind a quote-only tier, and there is no SCIM or audit log
- − Export is CSV only, and there is no public REST API or webhooks — the MCP server is read-only, so nothing can push data back in programmatically
- − Young vendor (Simyl AI, Inc., founded 2024) that self-describes as 'a small team of engineers', with no published HQ, named founders, third-party reviews or G2/Capterra presence — a real durability question for procurement
- − Free tier is genuinely small (1 team, 10 stakeholders, 2 retros/month, 1 integration, 90-day retention), and Azure DevOps is still 'coming soon' rather than shipped
Keep comparing
Other IdeaBoardz comparisons
Other Simyl Flow comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.