Retrospectives· Pune, India· Founded 2010

IdeaBoardz

Free shared brainstorming boards

Overall score

3.1

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Appears dormant — adopt with caution

Checked 2026-10-05: the site is up and in live use. The homepage counter read 36,800,948 ideas on 3,415,704 boards, up from 36,791,001 on 3,414,900 four days earlier and 36,656,330 on 3,401,745 on 1 September, and the public demo board still loads and exports to PDF and Excel. The product has not changed since 2020, though. Every script and stylesheet the app serves carries a Last-Modified date between 21 March and 4 April 2020, the board bundle served today is byte-identical to the Internet Archive's first capture of it in June 2020, and neither the homepage nor the board page injects any banner or announcement. The public source repository (github.com/dhavalsdoshi/Orter) has had no feature commit since April 2020, only a monitoring update in October 2020 and a Google Analytics tag change on 2026-04-01. The Terms still read "Last updated: 2020-04-01" and refer to a privacy policy that is not published. The domain is registered through December 2027 and support is a Gmail address plus a Twitter handle; verify persistence before putting anything you care about on a board.

Overview

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.

Best for: Throwaway retros and quick distributed brainstorms when nobody wants to sign up.

IdeaBoardz retrospective board shown on desktop and mobile

How IdeaBoardz describes itself

IdeaBoardz fits its whole pitch into one homepage line:

"Brainstorm, Retrospect, Collaborate."

The offer underneath is deliberately small. Pick a preset — Retrospective, Star Fish, Six Thinking Hats, Pros and Cons or Todos — or set your own one-to-ten columns, 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 (36,656,330 ideas across 3,401,745 boards on 1 September 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.

Our take

IdeaBoardz is the sticky-note wall on a public wiki: no sign-up, no setup, no cost. It does ship retro templates — five presets, including a Star Fish board that lays out Keep Doing / Start Doing / Stop Doing / Less of / More of / Action Items in one click. Input is anonymous, anyone can upvote at any time, dropping one sticky on another merges them and sums their votes, and PDF and Excel export both work. Boards poll every ten seconds, so a live session runs close enough to real time.

Everything else the agile stack needs is missing: no timer, no phases, no hidden writing round, no owned action items, no health checks, no Jira, no Slack, no SSO, no AI. Votes are not tied to voters, so there is no per-person budget and one participant can tilt a board. The Terms cite a privacy policy that does not exist; the URL is the only access control.

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

Score breakdown

Ease of Use6.5

Retro Toolkit3.0

Value9.0

Fun Factor2.0

AI & Insights0.0

Integrations0.0

Open Platform3.0

Enterprise-grade1.0

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

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

Features

Retrospectives

Templates· 5 presets in the create form (Retrospective, Star Fish, Six Thinking Hats, Pros and Cons, Todos) that pre-fill the section titlesCustom templates· Pick 1-10 sections and type your own titlesAnonymous input

Facilitation

Drag-and-drop grouping· Drag-to-merge only — concatenates two stickies into one and sums their votes; dragging across sections moves a stickyAsync mode

Voting

Independent dot votingVote at any time

Engagement

Mobile friendly· Separate phone view (add/edit/vote plus PDF export); tablets get the desktop board

Reporting

Export formats· PDF, Excel

Enterprise

Meeting history· Boards persist at their URL; optional Google sign-in keeps a list of boards you have visitedPublic API· Undocumented JSON endpoints under /api/retros (create board, sections, ideas, votes); no developer docs, keys, auth or support