IdeaBoardz
3.1Free shared brainstorming boards
IdeaBoardz is a long-standing free brainstorming and retrospective board: pick one of five presets (Retrospective, Star Fish, Six Thinking Hats, Pros and Cons, Todos) or name your own 1-10 sections, 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
5.5Measure what ships and sticks
Simyl Flow is an outcomes measurement platform for engineering teams in which the retrospective is one of several linked ceremonies, alongside planning poker, demo prep and 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 3.1 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 5.5 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 5.5. 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 | Toronto, Canada |
| Data residency | — | United States |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | PDF · Excel | CSV · PDF |
| Features | 10 | 20 |
| 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 | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓ |
| Anonymous input | ✓ | — |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | — | ✓ |
| Async mode | ✓ | — |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | — | — |
| Icebreaker games | — | — |
| Agile Estimations | — | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | — | — |
| AI grouping/clustering | — | — |
| AI action items | — | — |
| AI Summaries | — | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓ |
| 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 | — | — |
| GDPR | — | ✓ |
| SSO / SAML | — | ✓note |
| SCIM provisioning | — | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | — |
| On-premises | — | — |
| 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
- + Five one-click presets (Retrospective, Star Fish, Six Thinking Hats, Pros and Cons, Todos), or type your own 1-10 section titles
- + 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
- − The presets only pre-fill column titles — there is no timer, no phases and no facilitator flow behind them
- − No action-item tracking, no owners, no due dates, no carry-over between boards
- − 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, and unfinished actions carry forward with completion-rate tracking — the discussion starts from evidence, and the six-dimension health score answers whether last sprint's change actually landed
- + 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 remote MCP server, generally available and not tier-gated — <em>its endpoint and OAuth 2.1 discovery answer live</em>, with dynamic client registration and 17 read-only tools across 8 data domains (including retros, metrics, actions, poker, effectiveness and coaching), so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Windsurf can query sprint data directly
- + 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 — individual effectiveness profiles and AI coaching notes are private to the developer (and optionally their manager), there are no leaderboards, source code is never stored, and AI runs on Claude via Amazon Bedrock with no data retention
Simyl Flow — cons
- − <strong>You can't sign up yet.</strong> As of October 2026 every CTA leads to 'Join Waitlist', the sign-in page accepts existing accounts only, and the parent company lists Flow as 'Private Preview' — while the pricing page still sells three plans and a 30-day trial. The vendor (Simyl AI, Inc., founded 2024, Toronto) is an unnamed 'small team of engineers' with no G2/Capterra listing, third-party reviews or press coverage
- − Retro toolkit is thin on facilitator staples: no anonymous submission or private brainstorm, no drag-and-drop grouping, no presentation mode, no recurring or scheduled retros, no retro-board timer, and only four built-in formats plus a custom template against 50+ at retro-native tools — and almost no engagement layer (no icebreakers, GIFs, reactions, music or kudos wall), 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 — the vendor is explicit that there are <em>"no surveys, just outcomes"</em>, so there is no survey-based health check, no sentiment analysis and no ROTI; there is no mood capture on the retro board either
- − 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, there is no SCIM, and audit logs appear only as a sales-page offer rather than a plan feature
- − Export is CSV plus PDF reports, and the PDF report download is Growth-tier only; there is no public REST API and no webhooks, and the MCP server is read-only, so nothing can push data back in programmatically
Keep comparing
Other IdeaBoardz comparisons
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Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.