IdeaBoardz
3.1Free shared brainstorming boards
IdeaBoardz is a long-standing free brainstorming and retrospective board: pick one of five presets (Retrospective, Star Fish, Six Thinking Hats, Pros and Cons, Todos) or name your own 1-10 sections, 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.
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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 hosted MCP server exposes 29 read/write tools so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can query boards, health trends and actions directly.
Full review →Summary
IdeaBoardz scores 3.1 overall and is best for throwaway retros and quick distributed brainstorms when nobody wants to sign up. It offers a free tier.
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.
QRetro leads on ease of use, retro toolkit, fun factor, AI & insights, integrations, open platform 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 | IdeaBoardz | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retrospectives | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Small | Small |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Fully free, no paid tier | 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 |
| Starting price | Free | Free |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | Free (no paid tier) | Free (no paid tier) |
| Enterprise | No | No |
| Founded | 2010 | 2023 |
| HQ | Pune, India | — |
| Data residency | — | — |
| Languages | English only | English only |
| Export formats | PDF · Excel | Markdown · Email · JSON |
| Features | 10 | 39 |
| Integrations | 0 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | IdeaBoardz | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓note | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | ✓ | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓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 | — | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | — | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓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 | — | — |
| SCIM provisioning | — | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | — |
| On-premises | — | — |
| Public API | ✓note | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | — | ✓ |
IdeaBoardz — pros
- + Genuinely free — no paywall, no paid tier, no trial clock
- + No signup required to participate — just share the URL
- + Five one-click presets (Retrospective, Star Fish, Six Thinking Hats, Pros and Cons, Todos), or type your own 1-10 section titles
- + Drag one sticky onto another to merge them; the votes are added together
- + PDF and Excel export on every board, plus a working phone view
IdeaBoardz — cons
- − The presets only pre-fill column titles — there is no timer, no phases and no facilitator flow behind them
- − No action-item tracking, no owners, no due dates, no carry-over between boards
- − Unlimited anonymous upvotes with no per-person vote budget
- − Zero integrations, no SSO, no SOC 2 and no published privacy policy — the URL is the only access control
- − No product work since April 2020; support is a Gmail address and a Twitter handle
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, cards hidden from everyone else until grouping, a timer, drag-and-drop grouping, presentation mode, up to five in-board surveys, action items with owners and priorities, ROTI and a radar-charted health check that trends across retros
- + 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 hosted MCP server with 29 read, write and delete tools, two analysis prompts and OAuth sign-in, listed in the official MCP Registry as com.qretro/retro, though as of October 2026 its documented address (mcp.qretro.com) returns an error
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
- − The data stays inside the product: export is a Markdown copy of the summary, an email, a Slack or Telegram recap and a JSON dump of your own account, with no PDF, CSV or Excel. There is no cross-team reporting either; the dashboard's Analytics section is still labelled <em>Coming soon</em>
- − Integration set is narrow: Jira, Linear, Slack and Telegram only — nothing for Teams, Confluence, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps or any other tracker
- − Built for a live session: no async mode, no recurring or scheduled retros, a fixed stage order, a 30-minute timer cap and an automatic vote allowance (cards + 3, capped at 10). Once cards are grouped, only the group can be voted on
Keep comparing
Other IdeaBoardz comparisons
Other QRetro comparisons
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.