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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Simyl Flow
5.5Measure what ships and sticks
Simyl Flow is an outcomes measurement platform for engineering teams in which the retrospective is one of five linked ceremonies (planning poker, standups, demo prep, retros, coaching). Retro boards are pre-populated with six sprint metrics pulled from Jira, Linear, GitHub and CI, AI generates candidate cards from the data, and unfinished action items carry forward — all feeding a six-dimension team health score tracked sprint over sprint.
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.
Simyl Flow scores 5.5 overall and is best for engineering orgs that already run retros and want them wired into delivery data — teams asking whether last sprint's improvement actually moved cycle time, review latency or change-failure rate, rather than teams shopping for a better sticky-note board. It offers a free tier.
QRetro leads on ease of use, retro toolkit, value, fun factor, AI & insights and open platform. Simyl Flow leads on integrations 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 | Simyl Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | All-in-One Agile |
| Team size | Small | Mid-market |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| 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 | 1 team, 10 stakeholders, 2 retros + 2 poker sessions/month, 1 integration, 90-day retention, CSV export |
| Starting price | Free | $29/team/mo |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | Free (no paid tier) | $87/mo (Pro — flat $29 per team × 3 teams; $72/mo billed annually) |
| Enterprise | No | Yes |
| Founded | 2023 | 2024 |
| HQ | — | Toronto, Canada |
| Data residency | — | United States |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | Markdown · Email · JSON | CSV · PDF |
| Features | 38 | 28 |
| Integrations | 3 | 9 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | QRetro | Simyl Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓ |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | — |
| Health Checks | ✓note | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | ✓note |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | — |
| Icebreaker games | ✓note | — |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓note | — |
| AI action items | ✓note | — |
| AI Summaries | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Insights | ✓note | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | ✓note | ✓ |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | — | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | ✓note |
| Confluence | — | — |
| GitHub | — | ✓note |
| GitLab | — | ✓note |
| Jira | ✓note | ✓note |
| Linear | ✓note | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | — | ✓note |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | — | ✓note |
| Shortcut | — | ✓note |
| Slack | ✓note | ✓note |
| Trello | — | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | — | ✓note |
| GDPR | ✓note | ✓ |
| SSO / SAML | — | ✓note |
| SCIM provisioning | — | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | ✓note |
| On-premises | — | ✓note |
| 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
Simyl Flow — pros
- + Retro boards arrive pre-populated with six sprint metrics (velocity, cycle time, PRs merged, commits, bug rate, unplanned work) pulled from the tools the team already uses, and unfinished actions carry forward with completion-rate tracking — the discussion starts from evidence, and the six-dimension health score answers whether last sprint's change actually landed
- + Unusually broad delivery-data integration set for a tool that runs retros: Jira, Linear, Shortcut, ClickUp, Notion, GitHub/GitLab Issues, plus GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket repos and their CI pipelines for DORA metrics
- + Official remote MCP server, generally available and not tier-gated — <em>verified live</em>, with OAuth 2.1 discovery, dynamic client registration and nine read-only scopes (retros, standups, metrics, actions, poker, effectiveness, coaching), so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Windsurf can query sprint data directly
- + Flat per-team pricing ($29–49/team/mo) rather than per-seat, so a 24-person org on three teams pays $87/mo regardless of headcount inside each team
- + Deliberate privacy architecture — scores are team-level not individual, coaching notes are visible only to the developer and their manager, source code is never stored, and AI runs on Amazon Bedrock with no data retention
- + Standups are the most complete module: async auto-generation, a facilitated live mode with per-person timers and presenter rotation, built-in video with smart auto-mute (1,500 min/mo on Growth), six blocker categories and AI blocker-pattern analysis
Simyl Flow — cons
- − <strong>Access is gated behind a waitlist.</strong> The header CTA across every page is now 'Join Waitlist', and the waitlist page itself redirects to sign-in — while the pricing page still sells three plans and a 30-day trial
- − Retro toolkit is thin on facilitator staples: no anonymous submission, no drag-and-drop grouping, no presentation mode, no recurring or scheduled retros, no retro-board timer, and only 5 built-in templates against 50+ at retro-native tools — and almost no engagement layer (no icebreakers, GIFs, reactions, music or kudos wall), which makes it a poor fit for teams whose retro problem is participation rather than measurement
- − The health score is computed from delivery signals, not from the team — the vendor is explicit that there are <em>"no surveys, just outcomes"</em>, so there is no survey-based health check, no sentiment analysis and no ROTI; the only mood signal is an emoji check in standups, not on the retro board
- − Enterprise claims are self-attested: 'SOC 2 aligned, not certified' and 'ISO 27001 aligned, not certified', inheriting AWS's certifications rather than holding its own; SSO/SAML sits behind a quote-only tier, there is no SCIM, and audit logs appear only as a sales-page offer rather than a plan feature
- − Export is CSV plus PDF reports, and the PDF report download is Growth-tier only; there is no public REST API and no webhooks, and the MCP server is read-only, so nothing can push data back in programmatically
- − Young vendor (Simyl AI, Inc., founded 2024, Toronto) that self-describes as 'a small team of engineers', with no named founders and still no third-party reviews, G2/Capterra listing or press coverage two years on — a real durability question for procurement
- − Free tier is genuinely small (1 team, 10 stakeholders, 2 retros/month, 1 integration, 90-day retention), and Azure DevOps is still 'coming soon' rather than shipped
Keep comparing
Other QRetro comparisons
Other Simyl Flow comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.