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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SprintRetro
5.9Jira-native retros with real sprint data
SprintRetro is an Atlassian Forge app from Agile Pulse that runs sprint retrospectives inside Jira Cloud. It pulls live sprint metrics (velocity and predictability, scope change, carryover, cycle time, second-by-second burndown) into the retro board itself. A major June 2026 release widened it into a continuous-improvement workspace: an infinite whiteboard with visual templates, anonymous team-health pulse checks with cross-sprint trends, an on-demand AI facilitator, and an action dashboard that quality-scores every action. Both Marketplace listings are Cloud Fortified. The free app still covers unlimited users, but a paid Pro app now carries custom templates, unlimited grouping and AI sprint summaries.
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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.
SprintRetro scores 5.9 overall and is best for scrum teams already living in Jira Cloud who want retros, a whiteboard and real sprint metrics on one board — and are happy for everything to stay inside Jira's walls. It offers a free tier.
QRetro leads on ease of use, AI & insights, integrations and open platform. SprintRetro leads on retro toolkit, fun factor 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 | SprintRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Small | Small |
| 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 | Unlimited users on a Jira site, but capped: 3 basic templates, no custom template creation, limited polls and card grouping, no AI sprint summary. Vendor has published planned caps of ~3–5 sessions/month and under 8 participants per session. |
| Starting price | Free | $8.40/user/yr (SprintRetro Pro, annual only; free on Jira sites of 10 or fewer users) |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | Free (no paid tier) | $17.50/mo (Pro, $210/yr at the 25-user Jira tier) — the free app also still covers 24 users |
| Enterprise | No | No |
| Founded | 2023 | — |
| HQ | — | Waterlooville, United Kingdom |
| Data residency | — | — |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | Markdown · Email · JSON | Image · PDF · Jira |
| Features | 38 | 35 |
| Integrations | 3 | 1 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | QRetro | SprintRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | ✓ |
| Health Checks | ✓note | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | — |
| Whiteboard | — | ✓ |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | ✓ |
| Icebreaker games | ✓note | — |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | — |
| Team Kudos | ✓note | ✓ |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓note | ✓ |
| AI action items | ✓note | ✓ |
| AI Summaries | ✓ | ✓note |
| Team Insights | ✓note | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | ✓note | ✓note |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | — | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | — |
| Confluence | — | — |
| 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 | — | — |
| 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
SprintRetro — pros
- + <strong>Real Jira sprint data inside the retro</strong> — velocity and predictability over five sprints, scope change, carryover tagged with how many sprints an issue has slipped, cycle time per status, and a burndown that records every individual point change
- + The action loop is the best part: actions link back to the idea that triggered them, carry forward with duplicate protection, get an AI SMART quality score with a one-tap rewrite, and can be pushed into Jira as issues
- + June 2026 added a genuine infinite whiteboard — stickies, shapes, frames, tables, connectors, live cursors, follow-a-teammate, Tenor GIFs, private mode, a synced board timer, PNG/print-PDF export, and <em>board import from Miro or Mural</em>
- + Anonymous Team Health pulses across seven dimensions, with cross-sprint trends overlaid against committed-vs-delivered and carryover — the health-vs-delivery view is rare at this price
- + <strong>Cloud Fortified</strong> and Bugcrowd bug-bounty on both listings, and the free app still covers unlimited users on a Jira site
SprintRetro — cons
- − Jira Cloud only — every participant needs a Jira licence, and there is no Slack, Teams, Confluence or standalone web app, nor any public API, webhooks or MCP server
- − <em>The free tier is narrowing.</em> Today: 3 basic templates, no custom template creation, limited polls and grouping, no AI sprint summary. Published as planned: ~3–5 sessions/month and under 8 participants per session
- − No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 of its own — the trust centre's own entries attribute both to AWS, Atlassian Cloud and Render, not to an Agile Pulse audit. No SCIM, audit logs or data residency, and the app is not "Runs on Atlassian" certified
- − No async mode, no recurring or scheduled retros, and no cross-team or org-level health rollup — the Pro usage report covers adoption, not outcomes
- − Export is whiteboard-only (PNG or print-to-PDF); column-mode retros still have no board export beyond pushing an action into Jira
Keep comparing
Other QRetro comparisons
Other SprintRetro comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.