Mural
6.6Visual collaboration whiteboard with a mature facilitation toolkit and AI-assisted sessions
Mural is a long-established visual collaboration platform — an infinite canvas with sticky notes, anonymous voting, timers, Private Mode, 250+ workshop templates (eight of them retro-specific), Mural AI (cluster, summarise, mind-map, Classify by emotional tone), and a Facilitation Superpowers toolkit (Outline, Timer, Voting, Private Mode, Summon, Celebrate) refined for over a decade. Best-in-class enterprise posture: SSO/SAML with multi-IdP support, SCIM, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR and NA/EU/APAC data residency.
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
Mural scores 6.6 overall and is best for workshop-heavy teams (design, product, agile coaching) that want a polished facilitation canvas with strong retro templates and enterprise-grade controls. 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.
Mural leads on integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade. QRetro leads on ease of use, retro toolkit, value, fun factor and AI & insights.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, Mural edges ahead with an overall score of 6.6. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | Mural | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Whiteboard | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Mid-market | Small |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Unlimited murals but only the 3 most recently created stay editable (older go view-only); unlimited members and visitors; no Mural AI | 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 | $9.99/user/mo | Free |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | $240/mo billed annually | Free (no paid tier) |
| Enterprise | Yes | No |
| Founded | 2011 | 2023 |
| HQ | San Francisco, US | — |
| Data residency | United States · European Union · Asia-Pacific | — |
| Languages | 9 (English, Spanish, German, …) | English only |
| Export formats | Image · PDF · PowerPoint · HTML · CSV | Markdown · Email · JSON |
| Features | 40 | 38 |
| Integrations | 8 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | Mural | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓ | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓note | ✓ |
| Async mode | ✓ | — |
| Whiteboard | ✓ | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | ✓note |
| Icebreaker games | — | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | — | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓ | ✓note |
| AI action items | — | ✓note |
| AI Summaries | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | ✓ | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓note |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | ✓note | — |
| Azure DevOps | ✓note | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | — |
| Confluence | ✓ | — |
| GitHub | ✓note | — |
| GitLab | — | — |
| Jira | ✓note | ✓note |
| Linear | — | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | ✓ | — |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | ✓note | — |
| Shortcut | — | — |
| Slack | ✓ | ✓note |
| Trello | — | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | — |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓note |
| SSO / SAML | ✓note | — |
| SCIM provisioning | ✓note | — |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | — |
| On-premises | — | — |
| Public API | ✓ | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | ✓note | ✓ |
Mural — pros
- + Mature facilitation toolkit — Outline, Timer, Voting, Private Mode, Summon, Celebrate — refined over 10+ years
- + Anonymous where it counts: votes hide who voted, and Private Mode can keep sticky authors hidden even after reveal
- + Best-in-class enterprise posture: SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, SSO/SAML (multi-IdP), SCIM, NA/EU/APAC residency
- + Jira and Azure DevOps work-item cards now carry configurable and custom fields and can be edited inside the mural
- + Five export formats (PDF, PNG, PPT, HTML bundle, CSV of stickies) — unusually broad for a canvas tool
Mural — cons
- − Per-seat pricing: a 24-person org pays ~$240/mo on the Team+ tier (annual), well above retro-native tools at that headcount
- − No native health checks, mood tracking or longitudinal team-pulse
- − No recurring retros, action carryover or cross-team rollup — facilitators rebuild structure each sprint
- − AI (clustering, summary, tone Classify) helps inside a session but doesn't track trends across retros
- − SSO/SAML needs the $17.99/user/mo Business tier; SCIM, audit logs and data residency are Enterprise-only
- − Public API has no webhooks, and the MCP server is still early-access beta
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 Mural comparisons
Other QRetro comparisons
See alternatives
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.