RetroTool
3.2Anonymous online retrospectives, no login required
RetroTool is a low-friction online retrospective board built by u2i, a ~60-person NY/Kraków software agency, as an internal tool it later opened up. Free anonymous retros run from a unique URL with no signup; paid tiers add private boards, team management, configurable retention and zero-knowledge encryption. The product works and is still used daily, but nothing has shipped visibly since 2024.
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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
RetroTool scores 3.2 overall and is best for small or ad-hoc teams who want a free, no-signup retro board with private drafting, secret voting and a dozen standard templates — provided you're comfortable running on a tool whose last visible build is dated May 2024. 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.
RetroTool leads on ease of use, value and fun factor. Simyl Flow leads on retro toolkit, AI & insights, integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, Simyl Flow edges ahead with an overall score of 5.5. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | RetroTool | Simyl Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | All-in-One Agile |
| Team size | Small | Mid-market |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Anonymous boards; unlimited cards, columns, action points and participants; 3 basic templates; private sections, secret voting, dot-vote limits, timer, grouping, action points with owner and due date; Markdown export; 12-month retention. A free registered 'Participant' account (not advertised on the plans page) adds access to private retros and cross-device drafts | 1 team, 10 stakeholders, 2 retros + 2 poker sessions/month, 1 integration, 90-day retention, CSV export |
| Starting price | $10/team/mo ($100/team/yr billed annually) | $29/team/mo |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | $30/mo (Individual — 3 teams x $10/team/mo, unlimited members per team; $300/yr = $25/mo billed annually) | $87/mo (Pro — flat $29 per team × 3 teams; $72/mo billed annually) |
| Enterprise | No | Yes |
| Founded | — | 2024 |
| HQ | Poland | Toronto, Canada |
| Data residency | — | United States |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | Markdown · Confluence | CSV · PDF |
| Features | 19 | 28 |
| Integrations | 0 | 9 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | RetroTool | Simyl Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓ |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | — |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Async mode | — | ✓note |
| Whiteboard | — | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | — | — |
| Icebreaker games | — | — |
| Agile Estimations | — | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | — | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | — | — |
| AI action items | — | — |
| AI Summaries | — | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | ✓note | ✓ |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | — | — |
| Azure DevOps | — | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | ✓note |
| Confluence | — | — |
| GitHub | — | ✓note |
| GitLab | — | ✓note |
| Jira | — | ✓note |
| Linear | — | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | — | ✓note |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | — | ✓note |
| Shortcut | — | ✓note |
| Slack | — | ✓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 | — | ✓ |
RetroTool — pros
- + Genuinely free anonymous retros with no account required
- + Three-click setup — unique URL, share, run
- + Per-column Private Sections keep drafting unbiased until people publish
- + Zero-knowledge encryption with custom passwords on the Company plan
- + Per-team flat pricing ($10 or $20/team/mo, 15%+ off annually) with <em>unlimited members per team</em>, not per-seat
RetroTool — cons
- − <strong>Dormant</strong>: the marketing build is dated 28 May 2024, the app still runs Meteor 2.9, the blog stopped in March 2022 and the legal pages are unchanged since August 2020
- − No native integrations with Jira, Slack, Teams or any agile-stack tool
- − No AI features (clustering, summary, action extraction, sentiment)
- − No health checks, recurring retros, async mode, or cross-team reporting
- − Export is Markdown only (plain or Confluence-flavoured), copied to the clipboard
- − Most templates, image cards, named participants, private invite-only boards and zero-knowledge encryption sit behind paid tiers
- − Not SOC 2; Google sign-in only, with no SAML SSO, SCIM or audit logs
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 RetroTool comparisons
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Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.