7 Best Retrospective Tools for Easy & Fun Retros in 2025

All right, for the impatient among you who don’t want the complete comparison of the 7 best retro board software tools: You can start a retro directly for free in our retro software or run your team’s retrospective online and see for yourself by clicking here:

For everyone else, I made an in depth comparison of the best team retrospective board tools to facilitate retros online below. Why do I think they are the best free retrospective software tools? I tried to be objective and simply looked at their website traffic. Find more on this below.

The 7 Best Retrospective Software Tools for Your Teams Retro

We will compare the following best retrospective software tools to do retros online:

Table: The 7 best retro tools compared

Here is a short overview of the 7 tools and their functions:

The 7 best retro tools in detail

Echometer Review on Capterra: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4.5/5)

Brief introduction Echometer

In summary, Echometer is easy to use for IT team leaders (whether Engineering Manager, Scrum Master, Agile Coaches, Product Owner, or other retrospective moderators). And it even optionally offers some “premium features” for IT managers in an environment for ” Agile at scale ” (see screenshots above).

Simply select a retro method to open your first retro now and optionally invite your agile team to our Sprint Retro App via link:

Echometer is the right choice for you if you want to develop individual teams and organizations at all levels. It offers you and your team a continuous Health Check of the team’s maturity level, makes successes of your agile transformation visible (as a Team Radar online tool) and is one of the few tools with an integrated online whiteboard for your retrospective. With this in mind and given the comparison here, Echometer is probably the best retrospective board software tool on the market.

By the way, in the following video, a Tech Lead, an Echometer customer, explains his 5 favorite features of the Echometer retro tool. Spoiler: He was positively “shocked”. 😄

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Team Retro review on Capterra: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4.8/5)

Brief introduction TeamRetro

Easyretro.io (formerly FunRetro) Review on Capterra: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ (4.6/5)

Brief introduction EasyRetro

Metro Retro Review on Capterra: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4.0/5)

Brief introduction Metro Retro

As I mentioned above, you could say that there are 6 phases of a retrospective. And the sixth phase focuses on the development of measures.

I am convinced that good measures play a key role when it comes to improving the maturity of teams. They are the output that is the prerequisite for one of the main outcomes of retros: Continuous improvement.

And they are also closely linked to learning the agile mindset. Why am I telling you all this? Because I believe that retro whiteboards (digital or on paper) are a great place for flexible brainstorming of measures. So this is a slight advantage of Metro Retro (and Echometer) over the other tools for remote retrospectives: You have an online whiteboard for your retrospective (More on: Tools for Remote Retrospective ).

To be more precise, the use of the “5 Why” or the “Impact Effort Matrix” to develop measures, for example, is a good way to improve their quality and effectiveness. Go directly there: 5 examples of retro whiteboard templates for brainstorming good measures .

In summary, based on the criteria above, Echometer is still the better retro software than Metro Retro. But back to our online retrospective tools (free of charge, of course), to the next sprint retro app that helps you conduct retrospectives online. It doesn’t have a retro whiteboard functionality, but it does have some other fancy add-ons.

Parabol Review on Capterra: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ (4.7/5)

Brief introduction Parabol

Kollabe Review on Capterra: No reviews yet.

Brief introduction Kollabe

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Retrium Review on Capterra: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ (4.7/5)

Brief introduction Retrium

Neatro Review on Capterra: No reviews available yet.

Brief introduction Neatro

Evaluation of 7 Online Retrospective Software Tools - what we looked at (summary)

Which online retro board software is right for your agile team? To summarize, we looked at 8 different variables for each retro tool to answer this question:

These 8 “retro board decision criteria” were compared

I organized the comparison of free retro online tools in 8 categories:

• Screenshot of the agile retro board tool
• Capterra Rating, as one of the key platforms that gives reviews of online cloud tools
• Short intro of the free online retrospective web tool, based on its website introduction (More about: Retrospective Web Tool )
• Feature comparison of the agile retro board
• Advantages and disadvantages of the online retro board software
• A few example screenshots of what the free sprint retrospective online tools looks like
• One example testimonial of the agile retro tool
• Information on their pricing, including links to free trial and access to the retro tool

For those of you who are only looking for purely free retro board tools: TeamRetro, Retrium and Neatro are each a Sprint Retro app that do not offer a free version of their retro online tool, only a free trial. You could therefore ignore these three tools in your comparison.

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How to choose the right retro board software in a smart way?

How can you find the right retrospective board software for your team and company? Good question! It is related to the question: What is a good retrospective really about? Only if I know what a good retrospective is about can I meaningfully compare tools.

That is why I have also written a lot about the outputs of retrospective tools and the outcomes of retrospectives in general. This gives us a valid decision framework for evaluating the different online retro board tools for Scrum that you can use in your teams. At the end of my analysis, you will know which free online scrum retrospective tool is the right one for your online retro. This will definitely help you to conduct a good remote retro.

This article should also help you with the following question: How do you conduct a retrospective online anyway? This is actually quite simple if the retrospective tool has a good user experience (UX). Therefore, the easiest way to understand how to conduct a retrospective online is to try out a retro tool - you can find direct access at the very top of this article.

Of course, these short words are just a small hint of what these Scrum Retrospective Tools for Agile really focus on — and how they can support you in running a remote retro. We’ll dive deeper into the details later. But first, let’s clarify what we should actually focus on in our analysis: What makes a great online sprint retrospective board?

As already mentioned, to answer the question of the best (free) retro tools, we should ask ourselves the following questions: What are the outputs and outcomes of retrospectives? Regardless of whether we use retrospective tools for distributed teams or on-site teams…

Given this, let’s first align on what outcomes and outputs actually are.

Many argue that outcomes are more important than outputs. There is even a book entitled “Outcomes over outputs”. However, since we are comparing tools in this text, I will not overemphasize the “outcome” of the tools and pretend that both are equally important.

Software Retrospective: Our “Core Features”

If we ask the question of the “why” for retrospectives, we can answer what makes a good retrospective web tool (More on: Retrospective Web Tool ). “Why” are retros needed? To answer this question, we should distinguish between the important outputs and outcomes to answer this question.

What should be the outputs of retrospective software tools, and what should be the outcomes of retrospectives in general? Which product features does this relate to? To give you a quick answer, have a look at the 2 graphics:

I am further elaborating on this below after the Comparison of online retro board tools ’ that compares solutions to facilitate retrospectives online. So if you want to learn more about which outcomes and outputs your teams retro should have, simply scroll down. Firstly, these are the Outcomes of retros in general and the product features related to them:

Which of the best free online retrospective tools is actually the best one with helping you get the given outputs and outcomes of agile retrospectives, doing retrospectives online?

I will now explain specifically what the outputs of retrospectives and the outcome of any online tool for agile retrospectives should be (More on: Agile Retrospective Board ). I will also name the specific features that - from my point of view - are directly connected with these outputs and outcomes. An example: If we have anonymous retrospective software, what is the outcome that I would expect from this feature (anonymity)?

Outputs of a Retrospective Software Tool

Here we go - overall I see 7 different outputs of retrospectives, online and offline.

1. Action items: The online retrospective app tool should take into account the 6th phase of a retrospective (see above, explanations for Easyretro aka Funretro).
2. Feature: Action Item Support & Tracking.
3. Fun, engagement and flexibility: A retro as an agile ceremony can be very interactive and fun compared to other ceremonies. It should also be very flexible - the agenda can change due to urgent topics.
4. Feature: Fun, interactive and flexible design (i.e., flexibility of a digital retro whiteboard).
5. The right questions: The retrospective meeting tool should help ask the right questions and be flexible, i.e., adaptable to the team’s needs (More on: Retrospective Meeting Board ).
6. Feature: Varied templates with good questions to reflect on past sprints and improve the team.
7. Efficiency: The Sprint Retrospective Board is designed to help save time in the preparation and follow-up of the retrospective.
8. Features: Pre-defined templates, optional asynchronous survey, support in facilitation, the right integrations with other tools, automated action item follow up.
9. Good time boxing: In order to keep the team’s focus and the ROTI “Return on time invest” in balance.
10. Feature: Effective timer.
11. Safe atmosphere: To be able to speak up and share ideas without the fear of being judged by colleagues
12. Feature: Optional anonymity when sharing feedback.
13. Professionalism: Being perceived as a professional coach or engineering manager to gain the trust required for the long-term development of a team.
14. Feature: Professionally designed & working retrospective software with intuitive UX. Mobile support for hybrid teams (More on: Free agile retrospective software ).

You can find an image above that shows a quick summary of the features I am mentioning here that any good free retrospective tool online should have.

All of these outputs have an influence on the outcomes of the retrospective (for any retro online and offline).

Outcomes of a teams retro

I see 4 different outcomes of doing retrospectives online (or offline and in general).

1. Continuous improvement: One of the core ideas of Agile is continuous improvement - and the retrospective is the central ceremony to support this.
2. Feature: Measuring the ROTI score, “Return on time invest”, as an indicator for the perceived quality of a retrospective (correlating with whether the time is worth it or whether you are actually improving).
3. Agile Mindset: Regularly experiencing the positive effect of retrospectives, i.e. improving teamwork, leads to a phenomenon called “self-efficacy” in psychology. This phenomenon can have a massive impact on the “belief” in agile methods, in other words, on agile growth mindset - more on this in the linked article.
4. Feature: Team health checks (or I should rather say Team fitness checks ) including analysis options over time can be a great help in regularly demonstrating how the team has improved in terms of agile maturity over time - which is very conducive to the agile mindset.
5. Team spirit: One outcome of sprint retrospectives should be increased motivation and satisfaction of team members (i.e. something that could be called team spirit, although this is not a psychological term).
6. Feature: A good team fitness check (incl. psychological validity & reliability) not only measures how you develop, but also to reflect on the psychological preconditions of team spirit & morale (e.g., the agile values).
7. Psychological safety: Psychological safety is a precondition for sharing one’s ideas and thoughts openly, which is a precondition for learning and thus continuous improvement.
8. Feature: Retrospective templates and questions that specifically foster psychological safety.

If you generally want to learn more about this, have a look at my post about 5 examples for outputs and outcomes of retros right now.

What’s pretty interesting given this: These outputs and outcomes match the overall impact of Agile Coaches pretty well, according to the State of Agile Q1/2022 (see graphic):

So there is a reason why retrospectives are called the core ceremony in Scrum (see: Retrospectives as a core ceremony): They can help you solve/achieve the key challenges/goals of Engineering Managers, Team Leads, Delivery Managers and Agile Coaches. Given these examples and facts, I hope you can understand why many argue that outcomes are more important than outputs (in general, not just in relation to Scrum Retros in Remote Sprint Teams).

So now you know why I am listing these 10 features as core features of (free) agile Retrospective tools that enable online retrospectives. Next, I’ll explain why I claim we’re comparing the 7 best retro tools.

##*Why are these the 7 “best” retro board softwares?

I wrote that these are the best retro board softwares for your teams’ retrospective and for conducting a remote retrospective. Why do I claim that - that they are the best?

Well, to be rather objective here, we tried to use numbers. In our case, we looked at website traffic. In the last months, these have been the pages with the highest traffic:

As you can see, Parabol (red line) and Easyretro (formerly FunRetro; purple line) have the highest traffic overall, followed at some distance by Echometer (blue) and the other tools for online retrospectives - which are all at a similar level. I have to add that Neatro is not listed here, simply because the comparison tool we used here (Ubersuggest) only allows you to compare 6 tools at the same time. I excluded it because Neatro has the least traffic from all the tools.

What you also cannot see: Of course, we also compared many other retro tools to carry out retrospectives online (see below, the honorable mentions). These simply had less traffic compared to the 7 best tools that we present in this article - but they may still be suitable, of course.

We also checked the traffic via Similarweb by the way, to have two different sources for the traffic data. It showed a similar pattern for the traffic of the Scrum retrospective tools. You can use Similarweb for free. So if you want to double check the traffic of the online retro tools on your own, feel free to do so.

Finally, it should be pointed out that higher traffic does not clearly prove that it is one of the “best” retro tools. However, for the purpose of this article, it served as a handy indicator as it was rather neutral.

Retrospective Board online: Some honorable mentions

To let you know which other online retro boards we have reviewed in our traffic comparison, I have added honorable mentions to the following section. To find even more remote retro tools, feel free to jump to our retro board comparison.

Online Retro Board Tool Alternative: Outro

“A new kind of retrospective for progressive teams.”

Outro website: https://outro.co/

What I like about it: Outro is a little side project by Taylor and Danny from NYC, who have a lot of experience with retrospectives. You can read their story and more about their tool on their website (More on: Project Retrospective Tool ).

Online Retrospective App Alternative: GoRetro

“GoRetro is an easy, fun, and customizable agile retrospective tool that uses sprint data and team sentiment to drive continuous improvement.”

GoRetro website: https://www.goretro.ai/

I haven’t tried this free online sprint retrospective tool, but it sounds and looks like a decent simple retrospective tool to do retrospectives online. Feel free to investigate on your own.

Online Retro Tool Alternative: Retrocat

“Easy retros for you and your team.”

Retrocat website: https://retrocat.app/

Retrocat offers the basic features of a free online retro tool. I haven’t delved deep enough to know how it is with the core features mentioned above - but it’s worth a look. I have to admit: What I don’t understand with this tool is the connection to cats…

Online Retro Tool Alternative: Miro

“Where teams get work done.”

Miro website: https://miro.com/

Okay, you probably already know Miro. It’s probably the most popular digital whiteboard tool out there. Why am I mentioning it here? Because I know that many Agile Coaches, Engineering Managers and Scrum Masters use Miro for their free online retrospectives by simply using an online whiteboard for their remote retrospective. 

Advantages: Many people are used to using a whiteboard tool.

Disadvantage: You cannot call Miro or other pure whiteboard tools a software tool for agile retrospectives. It does not have many of the necessary features of an online retro board tool, including anonymity, action item support, ROTI score and health checks.

If you are looking for an online whiteboard for a retrospective, I would rather choose the following software as described above: Echometer or Metro Retro . The choice is yours! Both are creative retrospective boards (More about: Creative Retrospective Board ).

Online Retro Board Tool Alternative: Scatterspoke

“Run Better Retros. Build Happier Teams.”

Scatterspoke website: https://www.scatterspoke.com/

Scatterspoke describes itself as a “data-driven” tool. Which (as you may have noticed) I like, because I believe that data can be a great help when it comes to getting the necessary outcomes from retrospectives. An online tool for agile retrospectives to keep an eye on.

Online Retrospective App Alternative: retros.work

“Better team performance with online retrospectives”.

Retros.work website (pretty obvious): https://retros.work/

It looks like “retros.work” is a free online retrospective tool from a one-man show in the Netherlands - not bad! For this reason alone, this tool for online retrospectives is worth a look (More on: Retrospective Collaboration Tool ). But now, after all these retro tools, let’s draw a conclusion.

The market for free retrospective board tools is confusing. This makes it difficult to decide on a software tool. As my selection has shown, many online retro boards have their own approaches to improving teamwork. At the same time, however, many retro apps also offer the same features, so it is often not clear at first glance which tool is suitable for which requirements.

Hopefully this comparison has given you some guidance on which online retro board tool is best to use. As we are developers of one of these tools ourselves, we are of course biased as to which software tool we recommend. But I’ve tried to explain our decision-making framework for this recommendation as logically as possible. Feel free to give us feedback on our logic and the conclusion that Echometer is the best retrospective software board.

If you are looking for some fun retrospective questions, feel free to have a look at these 54 kickass retrospective ideas (More on: Software Retrospective Ideas ).

By the way: One of the most effective ways to sustainably develop the “mindset” of teams is to hold regular one-on-one meetings between engineering leads (or generally Servant Leaders) and software developers. We have developed a specialized software tool for this very purpose - you can take a look at it here: Echometers 1-to-1 Meeting Software .

Have fun with your next online retrospective - hopefully with the right software tool!

You can find more retro ideas in our collection 32 Retrospective Methods .