Forem: Kelly

Kollabe vs EasyRetro: two free retro tools, very different bets 🏆

Kelly — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:21:08 +0000

Both Kollabe and EasyRetro have free plans. Both run sprint retrospectives. That's roughly where the similarities end.

I've been facilitating retros for six years across different team sizes and industries. These two tools have opposite philosophies about what a retro tool should be, and the choice between them says a lot about what your team actually needs.

I maintain detailed reviews of both tools (and about a dozen others) at RetroTools.io.

The pitch

EasyRetro has been around since 2015. Originally called FunRetro, it does one thing: retro boards. No planning poker. No standups. No health checks. Just boards with sticky notes, voting, and action items. It's been quietly doing this while other tools rebrand every year and bolt on features nobody asked for.

Kollabe launched in 2022 and went the opposite direction. Retros, planning poker, and async standups in one platform. AI grouping, AI summaries, inline polls, a drawing tool. It's trying to be the single tool your team opens for every ceremony.

Two different bets. EasyRetro bets you want one thing done well. Kollabe bets you're tired of paying for three separate tools.

Free plan: the part that actually matters

If you're reading a comparison post, there's a decent chance you're evaluating free tiers. So let's start there.

	Kollabe Free	EasyRetro Free
Boards/meetings	Limited per month	1 board on dashboard at a time
Participants	Up to 10 per room	Unlimited per board
History	7 days	None (must delete to create new)
Templates	All 1,000+	All 200+
AI grouping	Yes	No
AI summaries	Yes	No
Anonymous mode	Yes	Yes
Voting	Yes	Yes
Planning poker	Yes (10 issues/session)	No
Standups	Yes	No
Exports	No	No
Integrations	No	No
Surveys	No	1 per month

Neither free plan is generous. They're not supposed to be. But the constraints are different in ways that matter.

EasyRetro lets unlimited people join a board. That's great for large workshops or cross-team retros. But you get one board. One. And archived boards count against that limit — you have to delete your previous retro before creating a new one. For a team running biweekly sprints, that means your retro data disappears every two weeks. There's no history to look back on.

Kollabe caps you at 10 participants but gives you AI grouping and summaries on the free plan. That's unusual. Most tools gate AI behind their mid-tier paid plan. The 7-day history window is tight, but at least you have some window to reference past discussions. And you get planning poker and standups included, which is three tools for the price of zero.

Short version: EasyRetro's free plan is better for occasional, large-group retros. Kollabe's free plan is better for small teams running recurring ceremonies.

Retro board experience

This is where you'll spend 90% of your time, so it matters more than any feature table.

EasyRetro

EasyRetro's board is clean. Deliberately simple. You create columns, people add cards, you vote, you discuss. The presentation mode (revealing columns one at a time) is genuinely useful for controlling the flow of a retro without a formal guided workflow. Password-protected boards mean you can share a link without worrying about random people wandering in.

The anonymity model is worth calling out. Participants don't need accounts. They don't even need to sign up. Only the board creator needs an EasyRetro account. For ad-hoc retros or workshops where you're bringing in people from outside your org, this removes a real friction point that most tools ignore.

Card merging works well. Drag one card onto another, they combine. You can unmerge later if you grouped wrong. But this is manual. With 15 cards, fine. With 50 cards from a team of 12, you're spending ten minutes dragging and dropping before the actual discussion starts.

Kollabe

Kollabe's AI grouping is the headline feature and it earns it. It uses semantic similarity, not keyword matching. "Our deployments are slow" and "CI/CD pipeline needs attention" end up in the same group without you touching anything. After running retros with both tools back to back, the time saved on grouping alone is 5-10 minutes per session. Over a year of biweekly sprints, that's roughly three hours of meeting time you get back. Not transformative, but not nothing.

The guided facilitation flow walks your team through phases: brainstorm, group, vote, discuss, action items. Good for newer facilitators or teams that tend to go off the rails. EasyRetro doesn't have this. Presentation mode gives you some control, but it's not the same as a structured workflow.

Kollabe also has a drawing tool, inline polls on retro items, and GIF support. Whether those matter depends on your team's culture. Some teams communicate better with sketches. Most don't need them.

Templates

EasyRetro has 200+ templates across multiple languages with an AI template generator. Kollabe claims 1,000+ with its own AI generator. Both numbers are high enough that the count doesn't really matter. What matters is whether the templates are good.

Both cover the basics: Start/Stop/Continue, Mad/Sad/Glad, 4Ls, Sailboat, Starfish. EasyRetro's templates are straightforward. Pick one, it creates the columns. Kollabe's templates include themed backgrounds (30+ options), which is a nice touch if your team responds to visual variety. After a year of the same white board, even a small visual change can reset the "retro fatigue" clock.

Neither tool's template library is a differentiator. Pick either one and you'll find what you need in under a minute.

Beyond retros

This is where the comparison gets lopsided.

EasyRetro is retros. That's it. If you need planning poker, you're opening a second tool. Standups? Third tool. Health checks? Find a template or use a spreadsheet.

Kollabe covers three ceremonies:

Planning poker with Fibonacci, T-shirt, and custom decks. Import tickets from Jira (JQL), GitHub, Azure DevOps, or Linear. Estimates sync back automatically.
Async standups with persistent daily rooms, customizable questions, and AI-generated daily/weekly summaries.
Retros with everything discussed above.

If your team runs all three, that's one login instead of three. One subscription. One place where data lives. If your team only runs retros, Kollabe's extra features are irrelevant and EasyRetro's simplicity is an advantage.

Integrations

Integration	Kollabe	EasyRetro
Jira	Import + Export	Export only
GitHub	Import + Export	No
Azure DevOps	Import + Export	No
Linear	Import + Export	No
Confluence	Export	Export
Trello	No	Export
Slack	No	Notifications only
MS Teams	No	Board embedding

EasyRetro's Jira integration is mature. Bulk export to Jira landed in September 2024, and the action item export has been solid since 2022. If your workflow is "run retro, push action items to Jira, track them there," EasyRetro handles that well.

Kollabe goes deeper on the import side. Pull tickets from Jira via JQL, import GitHub issues, bring in Azure DevOps work items with WIQL queries. Estimates sync back to your project management tool automatically. But no Slack integration on any plan. That's a real gap.

EasyRetro has basic Slack notifications and Teams embedding. Nothing deep, you won't be creating cards from Slack, but it exists. Neither tool has Zapier or webhook support, though Kollabe launched a public API in February 2026 that might partially fill that gap.

Pricing (when you outgrow free)

This is where your finance team gets involved.

	Kollabe Premium	EasyRetro Team
Price	$29/month flat	$38/month flat
What you get	All ceremonies, unlimited participants, unlimited history, all AI features, all integrations, exports, analytics	5 boards/month, 1 team, unlimited participants, integrations, exports, analytics

Both use flat pricing, not per user. But the value at each tier is different.

Kollabe's $29/month gets you everything. Retros, poker, standups, unlimited participants, unlimited history, the works. One price, one team.

EasyRetro's $38/month gets you retro boards. Five per month. Just retros. If you need more boards, the Business tier is $60/month for 15 boards, or $90/month for 30.

There's a catch on Kollabe's side though. Each "Space" is one team. If you have three teams, that's $87/month. EasyRetro's Business plan at $60/month gives you 3 teams with 15 boards. For multi-team organizations, run the math on your specific structure before deciding.

For a single team, Kollabe is cheaper and gives you more. For three or more teams, it depends on how many boards you create per month.

The stuff nobody mentions

A few things that don't show up in feature comparison tables but affect your daily experience.

Kollabe participants don't need accounts. Send a link, they're in. EasyRetro requires participants to create a free account. For your regular team, that's a one-time friction. For workshops or cross-org retros with external stakeholders, Kollabe wins on access speed.

Both are web-only with no native apps. EasyRetro added mobile card dragging in April 2024. Both work on mobile browsers but are clearly built for desktop. Don't expect anyone to run a retro from their phone.

EasyRetro stores data in US Central (Firebase/GCP). Kollabe stores data in Australia (DigitalOcean). Neither offers data residency options. If you have data sovereignty requirements, this might matter.

Neither has SOC 2 certification. EasyRetro relies on GCP's certifications. Kollabe runs monthly penetration testing through Intruder. Both encrypt data in transit and at rest. Neither has audit logs. If your procurement team needs SOC 2 paperwork, look at TeamRetro instead.

Who should pick what

Pick EasyRetro if:

Your team only needs ultra simple retro boards, nothing else
You run large retros or workshops with external participants who shouldn't need to create accounts
You're a Jira shop and the action item export matters
You prefer simplicity over features (fewer buttons, fewer decisions)

Pick Kollabe if:

Your team runs retros and planning poker (or standups, or both)
You have 10 or fewer people and want the most capable free plan
AI grouping would actually save you time (it does if your retros regularly produce 30+ cards)
You want flat pricing that doesn't scale with headcount

Pick neither if:

You need SOC 2 compliance (TeamRetro)
You want open source and self-hosting (Parabol)
You're already paying for Miro and want to consolidate (Miro)

Both tools have real gaps. EasyRetro hasn't shipped AI grouping after two years of competitors having it. Kollabe still doesn't have Slack integration, which is table stakes for most teams. Pick the gaps you can live with.

Head-to-head comparisons for these and twelve other retro tools are at RetroTools.io. No affiliate links, no paid placements.

What's your team using for retros right now? Curious whether anyone's running Kollabe and EasyRetro side by side for different ceremonies.

5 Retrospective Tools Worth Using in 2026

Kelly — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:28:59 +0000

I've facilitated somewhere north of 300 sprint retrospectives over the past six years. Sticky notes on a wall, Google Docs with color-coded sections, that one time someone tried to run a retro in a Figma file. I've seen it all.

The retro tooling space has gotten way more competitive in the last two years. AI features actually work now. Pricing models have shifted. A few tools that were retro-only have expanded into full ceremony platforms. So I put together a breakdown of the five I'd actually recommend right now, based on running real retros with real teams — not just poking around free trials for an afternoon.

Full reviews and comparisons for all of these live on RetroTools.io if you want the deep dive.

1. Miro

Rating: 4.7/5 | Free plan available | From $8/user/month

Miro wasn't built for retros. It was built for visual collaboration, and that turns out to be an advantage. Your retro doesn't exist in isolation — before it, you're grooming a backlog. After it, action items need to land in Jira and summaries need to hit Slack. Miro keeps all of that in one workspace.

The AI features have gotten genuinely useful. Automatic clustering of sticky notes, generated summaries, suggested action items. Native planning poker means one less subscription. And 160+ integrations is a list no dedicated retro tool comes close to matching.

The catch? Miro's "private mode" hides cards during brainstorming, but author names show up once you reveal them. That's not true anonymity. And facilitators manage phase progression manually — there's no guided flow. If those matter to your team, keep reading.

Best for: Teams already in the Miro ecosystem who want to consolidate tools.

2. Parabol

Rating: 4.6/5 | Free plan available | From $8/user/month

Parabol is fully open source. The whole codebase is on GitHub. Netflix and GitHub themselves use it, which says something about whether it can handle real workloads.

It covers five meeting types — retros, sprint poker, standups, check-ins, and team health checks. The AI meeting summaries post straight to Slack, and they've gotten noticeably better at capturing actual nuance instead of just pulling keywords. Self-hosting is available if your org has data sovereignty requirements, though you'll need a DevOps engineer comfortable with Docker and PostgreSQL to set it up.

The billing model is fair in theory — you only pay for users who actually join meetings. But a 20-person team where 15 are active still runs $120/month. Per-user pricing is per-user pricing regardless of how it's dressed up.

Best for: Engineering orgs that care about open source transparency and self-hosting.

3. Kollabe

Rating: 4.5/5 | Free plan available | $29/month flat

Kollabe bundles planning poker, retrospectives, and standups into one platform. That's the pitch, and it actually delivers. The AI grouping during retros is the real standout — it handles semantic similarity well, so "our deploys are slow" and "CI/CD needs work" end up in the same cluster without you dragging cards around for ten minutes.

The pricing is what makes it interesting. $29/month flat. Not per user. A team of 5 pays the same as a team of 25. For growing teams, that math gets really attractive compared to per-seat tools.

Honest gaps: no Slack or Teams integration, no SOC 2 certification, and the mobile experience is functional but clearly desktop-first. The standup feature is also newer and not as polished as the retro and poker sides.

Best for: Teams running multiple agile ceremonies who want one tool with flat pricing.

4. EasyRetro

Rating: 4.4/5 | Free plan available | From $38/month

EasyRetro (formerly FunRetro) has been around since 2015. It does one thing — retro boards — and does it well. Over 200 templates, true anonymous feedback, unlimited participants on every plan. The Atlassian integrations are mature: Jira action item export, Confluence board publishing, Trello card sync.

They added AI board summaries in 2024, which helps with documentation. But there's still no AI grouping, so you're manually clustering cards every session. For a retro with 50+ cards, that eats real time. No poker, no standups. Just retros.

Sometimes that's exactly what you want.

Best for: Jira-centric teams that want a proven, simple retro board.

5. TeamRetro

Rating: 4.3/5 | No free plan (30-day trial) | From $25/month

TeamRetro is the enterprise pick. SOC 2 Type 2 certified, SSO/SAML on every paid plan (not just enterprise tier), and the only tool here with real cross-team analytics. If you're an engineering director overseeing eight squads, the ability to see recurring themes and action item completion rates across all of them is genuinely useful. No other tool in this list does that.

They recently added planning poker, though it's early compared to what Kollabe and Parabol offer. No standup feature at all. And no free plan means you're committing from day one.

Best for: Regulated industries and enterprise orgs where compliance is non-negotiable.

Quick Comparison

Tool	Price Model	Free Plan	Poker	Standups	AI Grouping
Miro	Per user	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Parabol	Per active user	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Kollabe	Flat rate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
EasyRetro	Flat rate	Yes	No	No	No
TeamRetro	Per team	No	Yes	No	Yes

Pick the Right One

There's no single best tool here. It depends on what you actually need.

If you're already paying for Miro, just use Miro. If open source matters, Parabol. If you're tired of per-user pricing and want poker, retros, and standups in one place, Kollabe. If you just need a clean retro board with deep Jira integration, EasyRetro. If procurement needs SOC 2 paperwork, TeamRetro.

I maintain detailed reviews and head-to-head comparisons for all of these (and about ten more) at RetroTools.io. No affiliate links, no paid placements. Just honest breakdowns from someone who's run too many retros to count.