IdeaBoardz

IdeaBoardz is a long-standing free brainstorming and retrospective board: pick 1-10 sections, name them yourself, share the URL, add ideas anonymously, upvote, and export to PDF or Excel. The app still works and is still in daily use, but development stopped years ago — the public source repository's last feature commits date to April 2020 and the Terms have not been revised since.

IdeaBoardz fits its whole pitch into one homepage line:

"Brainstorm, Retrospect, Collaborate."

The offer underneath is deliberately small. Choose how many sections you want — one to ten, type their titles, share the URL, and let teammates add ideas from wherever they are. There is no pricing page, no enterprise pitch, no roadmap and no blog; a homepage counter (36.5 million ideas across 3.4 million boards as of August 2026) does the persuading instead of feature marketing.

The implicit argument is that a shared link, a few columns, an upvote button and an export are enough for most distributed brainstorms — and that anything beyond that is somebody else's product.

IdeaBoardz is the sticky-note wall on a public wiki: no login, no setup, no cost. Anonymous input is the only mode, anyone can upvote at any time, dragging one sticky onto another merges the pair and adds their votes together, and both PDF and Excel export work on demand. For a one-off remote brainstorm with people who will never log in twice, that is a defensible package — and the phone view, unusually for a tool this old, actually works.

Everything the agile stack needs is missing. There are no templates — the only format decision is how many sections you want — and no timer, no phases, no action items, no health checks, no Jira, no Slack, no SSO, no AI. Votes carry no per-person budget, so one determined participant can stack a board. No privacy policy is published, and the URL is the only thing standing between a board and a stranger.

Fine for a workshop or a classroom. Not something to build a sprint cadence on.