Spreo
5.3Playful collaborative whiteboard for agile teams
Spreo (formerly Metro Retro, then Ludi — renamed Spreo on 1 July 2026 after a US trademark cease-and-desist) is a visual agile collaboration whiteboard with 100+ templates spanning retros, planning poker, icebreakers and futurespectives. Its illustrated canvas and board gadgets — a shared Jukebox music player, timers, spinners, buzzers, confetti, throwable hats — make ceremonies feel engaging. Both the Jira integration and SSO require the $6/user Business plan, and AI stops at beta sticky-note clustering.
Full review →
QRetro
5.8Manage 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 continuously 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 auto-generated summary, ROTI score and action items. An official MCP server exposes 29 read/write tools so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can query boards, health trends and actions directly.
Full review →Summary
Spreo scores 5.3 overall and is best for agile teams who want retros, planning and workshops to feel visual and fun, with a solid Jira-backed delivery loop — budget for the Business plan, which is where Jira and SSO actually live. It offers paid plans from $4/user/mo billed annually ($5 monthly).
QRetro scores 5.8 overall and is best for small agile teams and independent squads that want a genuinely well-equipped retro — 52 templates, health checks, ROTI, timer, icebreaker games and MCP access — at zero cost, and can accept a solo-maintainer vendor with no SSO, no export files and no certifications. It offers a free tier.
Spreo leads on fun factor and enterprise-grade. QRetro leads on value, AI & insights, integrations and open platform.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, QRetro edges ahead with an overall score of 5.8. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | Spreo | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Small | Small |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Free limit | 30-day free trial; boards become read-only when the trial expires | 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 | $4/user/mo billed annually ($5 monthly) | Free |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | $144/mo billed annually (Business — 24 x $6; Starter's $96/mo covers only one shared team space) | Free (no paid tier) |
| Enterprise | Yes | No |
| Founded | 2020 | 2023 |
| HQ | UK | — |
| Data residency | European Union | — |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | PDF · CSV · HTML · Markdown · JSON · Jira | — |
| Features | 40 | 32 |
| Integrations | 1 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | Spreo | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| AI Summaries | — | ✓ |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓note | — |
| AI action items | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| Polling | ✓note | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓note |
| Custom templates | ✓ | — |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | ✓note |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | — |
| Agile Estimations | ✓ | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | ✓note |
| Whiteboard | ✓ | — |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | — | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | — |
| Confluence | — | — |
| GitHub | — | — |
| GitLab | — | — |
| Jira | ✓note | ✓note |
| Linear | — | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | — | — |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | — | — |
| Shortcut | — | — |
| Slack | — | ✓note |
| Trello | — | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓note | — |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓note |
| SSO / SAML | ✓note | — |
| SCIM provisioning | — | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | — |
| On-premises | ✓note | — |
| Public API | — | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | — | ✓ |
Spreo — pros
- + Genuinely delightful, illustrated UI that energises in-person and remote retros
- + Broad template library (100+) covering retros, icebreakers, planning poker, futurespectives, planning and estimation
- + Deep gadget shelf that actually serves the session: shared Jukebox music player, timers, spinners, buzzers, confetti, throwable hats
- + Fully configurable voting rounds — votes per person, duplicate votes, and voting on topics as well as individual stickies
- + Solid two-way Jira integration: backlog refinement, story points and issue creation in-board
- + @mentions and a notification centre across stickies, cards, text blocks and comments
- + EU-hosted (Amsterdam) and GDPR-aligned (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 sit at the Digital Ocean infrastructure layer, not Spreo)
Spreo — cons
- − No async retro mode, no recurring or scheduled retros
- − No team health check or longitudinal pulse product; mood/radar work via whiteboard templates only
- − Integrations limited to Jira — no Slack, Teams, Confluence, GitHub, Linear or Azure DevOps
- − <strong>Jira and SSO both start at the $6/user Business plan</strong>, so the $4 Starter headline is misleading past a single team space
- − AI limited to beta sticky-note clustering — no summaries, action-item extraction, sentiment or coaching
- − No ongoing free plan; expired trials pause to read-only
- − Desktop and laptop only — the vendor states Spreo runs on <em>"all desktop and laptop devices"</em>, with no mobile or tablet support
- − Two renames in under a year leave the review trail split across three names — G2 files it under <em>Ludi</em>, Capterra and Product Hunt under <em>Metro Retro</em>
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, private-mode submission, timer, drag-and-drop grouping with auto-named groups, action items, team agreements, ROTI and a radar-charted health check stage
- + 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 and OAuth sign-in, so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can pull board summaries, health trends and action items with nothing to paste
- + Guest access with no account or password, and guest contributions now persist permanently rather than expiring after a day
- + Visibly active despite being a solo project — 15+ dated changelog entries across 2026, including the v4 relaunch, MCP OAuth, poker over MCP and two new games in July–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 at all: no SSO or SAML, no SCIM, no audit logs, no SOC 2 or ISO 27001; a DPA and sub-processor list are published but there is no explicit GDPR compliance claim
- − No file export — results share to Slack or Telegram as a recap message, but there is no documented PDF, CSV, Excel, Markdown or email export, so the retro record cannot be filed anywhere outside those two channels
- − 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, and the stage order itself cannot be customised
- − AI is deliberately limited — summaries, recommended next steps and health trends, but no clustering, sentiment analysis or coaching; the vendor pitches this as avoiding 'intrusive chatbots'
- − No cross-team or org-level reporting, so health and action data stays inside a single team's boards
Keep comparing
Other Spreo comparisons
Other QRetro comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.