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.
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Retrium
5.0Guided retrospectives and Team Radars for scrum and agile teams
Retrium is a long-running, retrospectives-only tool built around a guided five-phase facilitation flow, anonymous brainstorming, dot voting, a persistent action plan, and Team Radar health checks. Since August 2026 the vendor has also run Retrium Next, a separate free open beta that rebuilds the retro around an AI co-facilitator.
Full review →Summary
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.
Retrium scores 5.0 overall and is best for scrum masters and agile coaches who want a focused, retro-only tool with strong facilitation guardrails and a built-in Team Radar. It offers paid plans from $39/mo.
QRetro leads on value, fun factor, AI & insights, integrations and open platform. Retrium leads on retro toolkit and enterprise-grade.
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 | QRetro | Retrium |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Small | Mid-market |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
| Free limit | 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 | No free plan — 30-day trial of column-based techniques and Team Radar |
| Starting price | Free | $39/mo |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | Free (no paid tier) | $117/mo |
| Enterprise | No | Yes |
| Founded | 2023 | 2014 |
| HQ | — | Washington, D.C., USA |
| Data residency | — | — |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | Markdown · Email · JSON | CSV · Jira |
| Features | 38 | 30 |
| Integrations | 3 | 2 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | QRetro | Retrium |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓ |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | ✓ |
| Health Checks | ✓note | ✓ |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | ✓note |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | — |
| Icebreaker games | ✓note | — |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | — |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | — |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI action items | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI Summaries | ✓ | — |
| 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 | ✓note |
| Trello | — | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | — | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓note | ✓ |
| SSO / SAML | — | ✓note |
| SCIM provisioning | — | ✓note |
| ISO 27001 | — | — |
| On-premises | — | — |
| Public API | — | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | ✓ | — |
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
Retrium — pros
- + Battle-tested five-phase guided facilitation flow — think, group, vote, discuss, wrap-up
- + Anonymous brainstorming and grouping by design, with a documented Fishbone root-cause format
- + Persistent team-room action plan that carries forward between retros
- + Team Radar health check — ten prebuilt radars plus a custom-spoke template, anonymous 1–5 scoring
- + Per-team-room pricing at <strong>$39/mo</strong> with unlimited users on every plan
Retrium — cons
- − No free plan — 30-day trial only, and the Fishbone technique and SSO are excluded from it
- − Integrations stop at Jira Cloud and a <em>still-beta</em> Slack app — no Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Linear or Confluence
- − AI exists only in <strong>Retrium Next</strong>, a separate free open beta with no data migration, no uptime commitment and no pricing yet — the product you actually pay for has none
- − The only API is an Enterprise-gated SCIM 2.0 user-provisioning endpoint; no webhooks, and export stops at CSV, TXT and send-to-Jira
- − The shipping product has published no release notes since <strong>August 2024</strong>, and the Continuous Improvement Journey beta closed in December 2023
Keep comparing
Other QRetro comparisons
Other Retrium comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.