Mural
6.6Visual collaboration whiteboard with a mature facilitation toolkit and AI-assisted sessions
Mural is a long-established visual collaboration platform — an infinite canvas with sticky notes, anonymous voting, timers, Private Mode, 250+ workshop templates (eight of them retro-specific), Mural AI (cluster, summarise, mind-map, Classify by emotional tone), and a Facilitation Superpowers toolkit (Outline, Timer, Voting, Private Mode, Summon, Celebrate) refined for over a decade. Best-in-class enterprise posture: SSO/SAML with multi-IdP support, SCIM, BYOK, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001, GDPR and US/EU/Australia data residency.
Full review →
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
Mural scores 6.6 overall and is best for workshop-heavy teams (design, product, agile coaching) that want a polished facilitation canvas with strong retro templates and enterprise-grade controls. 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.
Mural leads on integrations, open platform and enterprise-grade. QRetro leads on ease of use, retro toolkit, value, fun factor and AI & insights.
Across our eight scoring dimensions, Mural edges ahead with an overall score of 6.6. That said, the right pick depends on your team — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown below.
Scores compared
| Detail | Mural | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Whiteboard | Retrospectives |
| Team size | Mid-market | Small |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free limit | Unlimited murals but only the 3 most recently created stay editable (older go view-only); unlimited members and view-only visitors; no Mural AI or MCP | 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 | $9.99/user/mo billed annually ($12/user/mo billed monthly) | Free |
| Est. 3 teams × 8 people | $240/mo billed annually ($288/mo billed monthly) | Free (no paid tier) |
| Enterprise | Yes | No |
| Founded | 2011 | 2023 |
| HQ | San Francisco, US | — |
| Data residency | United States · European Union · Australia | — |
| Languages | 9 (English, Spanish, German, …) | English only |
| Export formats | Image · PDF · PowerPoint · HTML · CSV | Markdown · Email · JSON |
| Features | 43 | 39 |
| Integrations | 10 | 3 |
Feature & integration comparison
Side-by-side checklist across features, integrations and security. Hover a note for details.
| Capability | Mural | QRetro |
|---|---|---|
| Features | ||
| Custom templates | ✓ | ✓note |
| Anonymous input | ✓note | ✓note |
| Health Checks | — | ✓note |
| Action tracking | ✓note | ✓ |
| Async mode | ✓ | — |
| Whiteboard | ✓ | — |
| Independent voting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Polling | ✓note | ✓note |
| Icebreaker games | — | ✓note |
| Agile Estimations | ✓note | ✓note |
| Team Kudos | — | ✓note |
| AI grouping/clustering | ✓ | ✓note |
| AI action items | — | ✓note |
| AI Summaries | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Insights | — | ✓note |
| In-meeting AI assistant | ✓note | — |
| Action dashboard | — | ✓note |
| Integrations | ||
| Asana | ✓note | — |
| Azure DevOps | ✓note | — |
| Basecamp | — | — |
| ClickUp | — | — |
| Confluence | ✓ | — |
| GitHub | ✓note | — |
| GitLab | — | — |
| Jira | ✓note | ✓note |
| Linear | ✓note | ✓note |
| Microsoft Teams | ✓ | — |
| Monday.com | — | — |
| Notion | ✓note | — |
| Shortcut | — | — |
| Slack | ✓ | ✓note |
| Trello | ✓note | — |
| Security & Privacy | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | — |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓note |
| SSO / SAML | ✓note | — |
| SCIM provisioning | ✓note | — |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | — |
| On-premises | — | — |
| Public API | ✓note | — |
| Webhooks | — | — |
| MCP server | ✓note | ✓ |
Mural — pros
- + Mature facilitation toolkit — Outline, Timer, Voting, Private Mode, Summon, Celebrate — refined over 10+ years
- + Anonymous where it counts: votes hide who voted, and Private Mode can keep sticky authors hidden even after reveal
- + Best-in-class enterprise posture: SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and 42001, GDPR, SSO/SAML (multi-IdP), SCIM, BYOK, US/EU/Australia residency
- + Two-way work-item cards for Jira and Azure DevOps and, since September 2026, Linear issues and GitHub pull requests, all editable inside the mural
- + Five export formats (PDF, PNG, PPT, HTML bundle, CSV of stickies) — unusually broad for a canvas tool
Mural — cons
- − Per-seat pricing: a 24-person org pays ~$240/mo on the Team+ tier (annual), well above retro-native tools at that headcount
- − No health checks, mood tracking, recurring retros, action carryover or cross-team rollup — facilitators rebuild structure each sprint
- − AI (clustering, summary, sentiment Classify) helps inside a session but doesn't track trends across retros
- − SSO/SAML needs the $17.99/user/mo Business tier; SCIM, audit logs and data residency are Enterprise-only
- − The public API is still labelled beta and has no webhooks, and the MCP server is a public preview that needs the mural open in a browser tab
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 Mural comparisons
Other QRetro comparisons
See alternatives
Not sure which to pick? Read our guide on how to choose a retrospective tool.