QRetro
5.8Manage 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 continuously 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 auto-generated summary, ROTI score and action items. An official 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
5.4Measure 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.
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QRetro scores 5.8 overall and is best for small agile teams and independent squads that want a genuinely well-equipped retro — 52 templates, health checks, ROTI, timer, icebreaker games and MCP access — at zero cost, and can accept a solo-maintainer vendor with no SSO, no export files and no certifications. It offers a free tier.
Simyl Flow scores 5.4 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 and fun factor. Simyl Flow leads on AI & insights, integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, QRetro edges ahead with an overall score of 5.8. 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 | — | — |
| Data residency | — | United States |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | — | CSV |
| Features | 32 | 24 |
| 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 | ||
| AI Summaries | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI grouping/clustering | — | — |
| AI action items | ✓note | — |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Insights | ✓note | ✓note |
| Polling | — | — |
| Action dashboard | ✓note | ✓ |
| Custom templates | — | ✓ |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | ✓note |
| Health Checks | ✓note | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | ✓note |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| 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, private-mode submission, timer, drag-and-drop grouping with auto-named groups, action items, team agreements, ROTI and a radar-charted health check stage
- + 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 and OAuth sign-in, so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can pull board summaries, health trends and action items with nothing to paste
- + Guest access with no account or password, and guest contributions now persist permanently rather than expiring after a day
- + Visibly active despite being a solo project — 15+ dated changelog entries across 2026, including the v4 relaunch, MCP OAuth, poker over MCP and two new games in July–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 at all: no SSO or SAML, no SCIM, no audit logs, no SOC 2 or ISO 27001; a DPA and sub-processor list are published but there is no explicit GDPR compliance claim
- − No file export — results share to Slack or Telegram as a recap message, but there is no documented PDF, CSV, Excel, Markdown or email export, so the retro record cannot be filed anywhere outside those two channels
- − 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, and the stage order itself cannot be customised
- − AI is deliberately limited — summaries, recommended next steps and health trends, but no clustering, sentiment analysis or coaching; the vendor pitches this as avoiding 'intrusive chatbots'
- − No cross-team or org-level reporting, 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 — the discussion starts from evidence rather than recall
- + 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 MCP server with 17 read-only tools, generally available and not tier-gated, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Windsurf can query sprint metrics, health scores and blocker summaries directly
- + Action items carry forward across sprints with completion-rate tracking, and the six-dimension health score answers whether last sprint's change actually landed
- + 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
Simyl Flow — cons
- − Retro toolkit is thin on facilitator staples: no documented timer or timeboxed phases, no anonymous submission, no drag-and-drop grouping, no presentation mode, no recurring or scheduled retros, and only 5 built-in templates against 50+ at retro-native tools
- − Almost no engagement layer — no icebreakers, GIFs, reactions, music or kudos wall; the product is deliberately metrics-serious, 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 — there is no survey-based health check, mood tracking, sentiment analysis or ROTI, so how the team <em>feels</em> is never captured
- − 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, and there is no SCIM or audit log
- − Export is CSV only, and there is no public REST API or webhooks — the MCP server is read-only, so nothing can push data back in programmatically
- − Young vendor (Simyl AI, Inc., founded 2024) that self-describes as 'a small team of engineers', with no published HQ, named founders, third-party reviews or G2/Capterra presence — 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.