Spreo
5.9Playful 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. An official MCP server (beta) and a signed-in HTTP API landed during 2026, but Jira, SSO and PDF export all require the $6/user Business plan, and in-product AI stops at beta sticky-note clustering.
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
Spreo scores 5.9 overall and is best for agile teams who want retros, planning and workshops to feel visual and fun on a Jira backlog, and who would get real value from driving boards with an AI assistant over MCP — budget for the Business plan, which is where Jira, SSO and PDF export actually live. It offers paid plans from $4/user/mo billed annually ($5 monthly).
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.
Spreo leads on fun factor, open platform and enterprise-grade. QRetro leads on retro toolkit, value, AI & insights and integrations.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, QRetro edges ahead with an overall score of 6.3. 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 | 2019 | 2023 |
| HQ | UK | — |
| Data residency | European Union | — |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | PDF · CSV · HTML · Markdown · JSON · Jira | Markdown · Email · JSON |
| Features | 44 | 38 |
| Integrations | 1 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | Spreo | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓ | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | — |
| Whiteboard | ✓ | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | ✓note |
| Icebreaker games | — | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | ✓ | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI action items | — | ✓note |
| AI Summaries | ✓note | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | ✓note | ✓note |
| 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 | ✓note | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | ✓note | ✓ |
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
- + Official MCP server (beta) lets Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot read, build and edit boards under your own permissions, with an account-level kill switch and a connected-members list for admins
- + 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
- + Hide Identities host control makes writing <em>and</em> voting permanently anonymous, toggleable per activity
- + 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, SSO and PDF export all start at the $6/user Business plan</strong>, so the $4 Starter headline is misleading past a single team space
- − In-product AI limited to beta sticky-note clustering — no summaries, action-item extraction, sentiment or coaching; MCP moves the AI into your own assistant rather than the board
- − The HTTP API has no public reference — you need a Spreo login to see what it does, which makes it hard to evaluate before buying
- − 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, 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
Other Spreo comparisons
Other QRetro comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.