Parabol
7.4Open-source agile meetings for retros, poker, standups and check-ins
Parabol is an open-source agile meeting platform spanning retrospectives, sprint poker, async standups, team check-ins and lightweight team health, with deep backlog sync to Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Linear, recurring meeting series, Zoom and Google Meet transcript capture, a scoped GraphQL API, and a built-in knowledge base (Pages) that auto-publishes every meeting summary and runs AI queries across past retros.
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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
Parabol scores 7.4 overall and is best for distributed agile teams that want one open-source tool for retros, poker, standups and lightweight team health. 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.
Parabol leads on retro toolkit, AI & insights, integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade. QRetro leads on value.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, Parabol edges ahead with an overall score of 7.4. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | Parabol | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | All-in-One Agile | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Any | Small |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Unlimited users, 2 teams, 10 meetings/month, 30-day history, 2 custom templates, 3 AI retro summaries/month | 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 | $8/active user/mo | Free |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | $192/mo | Free (no paid tier) |
| Enterprise | Yes | No |
| Founded | 2015 | 2023 |
| HQ | Remote (San Diego, CA) | — |
| Data residency | United States · European Union · Self-hosted | — |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | CSV · Email | Markdown · Email · JSON |
| Features | 48 | 38 |
| Integrations | 8 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | Parabol | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | ✓ | ✓note |
| Health Checks | ✓note | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | ✓ | — |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | ✓note |
| Icebreaker games | — | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | ✓ | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | — | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI action items | — | ✓note |
| AI Summaries | ✓note | ✓ |
| Team Insights | ✓note | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | ✓ | ✓note |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | ✓ | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | — |
| Confluence | ✓note | — |
| GitHub | ✓ | — |
| GitLab | ✓ | — |
| Jira | ✓ | ✓note |
| Linear | ✓ | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | ✓ | — |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | — | — |
| Shortcut | — | — |
| Slack | ✓ | ✓note |
| Trello | — | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | — |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓note |
| SSO / SAML | ✓note | — |
| SCIM provisioning | ✓note | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | — |
| On-premises | ✓note | — |
| Public API | ✓ | — |
| Webhooks | ✓note | — |
| MCP server | — | ✓ |
Parabol — pros
- + Open source (AGPL-3.0) with Docker/Kubernetes self-host, on-prem and air-gapped deployment
- + 40+ meeting templates plus poker, standups, check-ins and team health in one tool
- + Strong backlog write-back to Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Linear
- + CSV export of reflections, groups, votes and discussion threads on <em>every</em> tier
- + Public GraphQL API with published schema, a GraphiQL explorer and scoped personal access tokens
- + Recurring retro series with a real recurrence rule, Google Calendar sync and automatic facilitator rotation
- + DoD Iron Bank hardened container — IL4 via Platform One, IL5 via Arcus
Parabol — cons
- − Free tier capped at 2 teams, 10 meetings/month, 30-day history and 3 AI summaries
- − No native whiteboard, presentation mode or screen-share mode
- − Health checks are still an emoji poll for most accounts — editable question packs and the standalone Team Health meeting sit behind an org feature flag
- − AI grouping and team health need the paid Team tier; Pages Insights and Confluence export need org-level enablement
- − Webhooks stop at Mattermost/MS Teams notification URLs — no general event subscriptions and no MCP server
- − English-only UI; no Trello, Asana, ClickUp or Notion integration
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 Parabol comparisons
Other QRetro comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.