Agile approaches like Scrum recommend a “just enough” attitude in software development and this is also the case when you discuss tools. Ideally, you would work with a small team that is collocated, but this is not always possible and you might be running your project virtually with a distributed Scrum team scattered around the world.
If you don’t want to start using a sophisticated tool to manage your efforts, you might be interested in adopting some web tools that will fit your particular need to share some project information or status among all the team members. This article presents some online tools that are based on Scrum and Agile approaches, that implement specific Agile practices (backlog management, burndown chart) and that are freely available (no commercial/paid version!) on the web for distributed Scrum teams. Retrospective tools are not mentioned in this article, as we wrote a specific article about free retrospective tools for distributed scrum teams. The open source Scrum planning poker tools have been listed in a separate article like Open Source Planning Poker Tools.
We will not present in this page the free option offered by commercial Scrum tools vendors, neither some free offer from tools that are still in their beta stage. You will find only Agile tools with no commercial option that are completely free (and supposed to stay so forever). If you want to add a free online Scrum tool to this page, just let us know using the comment form or the contact page.
Updates
* October 2022
Added: Scrumpoker-online.org, Scrumpy Planning Poker
* June 2022
Added: Hewlett Packard Yoda, ScrumFast
Removed: APA, Print Your Burn Down Chart, PrintYourBurndown.com, Simple Burndown Chart Generator, TaskJunction (no longer available), ScrumVee (started commercial offering)
* September 2020
Added: BurndownChart.fr, PrintYourBurndown.com
* May 2019
Added: MeuScrum, Simple Burndown Chart Generator
Removed: ScrumTool.me (no longer available)
* June 2018
Added: Apa, Scrumvee, easyBacklog, Print Your Burn Down Chart, Yet Another Burndown Generator
Removed: SeeNowDo, Online Burndown Chart (burndownchart.nl), all scrum planning poker tools that will be now listed in a separate article due to the large number of existing tools
* May 2015
Added: PointingPoker.com, PlanningPoker.com, ScrumTool.me
scrumblr
scrumblr is a shared simple whiteboard where you can post post-its. The whiteboard can be split so that you can manage a simple equivalent of a taskboard. The posts-its are available in three colors and small color tags can be added to the post it to give some additional visual information about it. You can also use this tool for retrospectives. The interface is supposed to be intuitive, so you have to discover the available features.
Web site: http://scrumblr.ca/
No registration required
TaskJunction
TaskJunction is an online tool to plan, estimate, and track your software development projects that supports Scrum. It allows create an unlimited number of projects and iteration for your software projects that you can manage through taskboards and track with burndown and other relevant charts. Once you register, a step by step process helps you to add the initial data for your project.
Web site: http://www.taskjunction.com/
Registration required
PlanITpoker
PlanITpoker is an online Scrum planning poker tool for Agile project teams. You can create multiple poker planning rooms using different planning methods and invite the other team members.
Web site: http://www.planitpoker.com/
Registration required
MeuScrum
MeuScrum is a free Kanban and Scrum online tool designed to solve the deficiency of an agile project management tool that is at the same time, easy to use, fast, and complete with useful features and a friendly interface. It allows managing all your projects, scrum team, backlogs, user stories, sprints, tasks, and the Kanban board easily and quickly with a drag-and-drop approach. For each project’s sprint, you have a kanban board with predefined columns. You can also add additional custom columns. You can decide if some of the predefined columns are visible or not. On the kanban board, you can create tasks and link them to active user stories. You can define a type of task (new, improvement, bug, …), a priority, assign them to a team member. You can also define a status that will put the task initially on a column of the kanban board. Then the tasks can be moved between columns using a normal “drag and drop” action. You can also associate one file, like a document, to the task. MeuScrum is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Website: https://www.meuscrum.com/en/
Registration required
easyBacklog
easyBacklog is a completely free service that help you manage your Agile and Scrum backlogs and sprints efficiently. You can create versions of your backlog and compare them. You can estimate a budget for the items and easily create a high level cost estimation.
Website: https://easybacklog.com/
Registration required
Hewlett Packard Yoda
Yoda is a lightweight extension to GitHub (Cloud or Enterprise) for supporting Agile Project Management using GitHub issues. Yoda was developed as an internal tool at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Open-Sourced using an MIT license in 2018.
Website: https://hewlettpackard.github.io/yoda/
Scrumfast
Scrumfast is a free online Agile project management and Scrum tool for small businesses, start-ups and personal projects. It has almost no bells and whistles, but because it is so lean, the user interface is extremely clean and no training is required to get up and running. Scrumfast’s primary user interface consists of 4 pages: Plan, Scrum, Analyze, and Retro.
Website: https://www.scrumfast.com/
Yet Another Burndown Generator
Yet Another Burndown Generator is a simple online tool to create a PDF ideal burndown chart. Creating it is as easy as give values to days that your sprint lasts, points that your team is trying to achieve and a describing title. Only with these values, a new “ready to print” PDF page containing the burndown is created for you just for free
Website: http://www.burndowngenerator.com/
No registration required
BurndownChart.fr
The Scrum burndown chart was a very powerful tool for the team if displayed on the Scrum Board, not hidden in an app. We developed this generator to easily create a reference burndown chart for each sprint for our own needs. And we thought that it could be cool to share it online.
Website: http://www.burndownchart.eu/en (English version. There is also a French version of the tool)
Scrumpy Planning Poker
The Scrumpy Online Planning Poker application uses funny images and jokes for the estimations. It makes sure that your team will not get bored again during the refinement sessions. It integrates with Atlassian Jira/Confluence seemlessly and automatically updates the ticket’s story points when the voting is completed and agreed with the team. GitHub and GitLab are also integrated with story points as labels. The Scrumpy Online Planning Poker application automatically generates a Confluence summary page with the anonymous results of the voting, ticket by ticket with the average and chosen estimate. The Scrumpy Online Planning Poker application allows you to vote in advance when your teams work in different time zones. The Scrum Master can later only collect the votes and complete the estimation. Scrumpy Planning Poker works equally well on all mobile, tablet and desktop devices. The advantage of the Jira plugin is that boards are associated with planning poker rooms and the current Jira user is automatically mapped as a voting participant. The Jira integration can also be accomplished using a regular API key from Atlassian. Even if you don’t use Jira/Confluence, Scrumpy should work just fine for you too! Estimating add-hoc stories and creating plans for the refinement sessions has never been easier before.
Website: https://scrumpy.poker/
Scrumpoker-online.org
Scrumpoker-online aims to be a simple tool to quickly start estimating with story points in scrum poker. You can use the instant room feature or sign-up to keep the same room number for future plannings – making the set-up even faster. Then you can invite your colleagues to your planning poker by sharing the room id, let them scan the QR code with their mobile or just send them the link. If you have trouble to find a common time slot, create a poll with our Doodle alternative “Whocan.org”. Once your team has entered the room, you can see them online and the scrum poker can start. The team can submit estimates, see who has provided estimates and show the results. The tool supports French, Italian and German
Don’t forget Trello – the free version is super functional
Trello is a good tool and we have already published an article about using it for Scrum on http://www.scrumexpert.com/tools/agile-and-scrum-trello-extensions/. However, Trello is not directly aimed at Agile project management and it has a paid version, so it doesn’t meet the criteria of ” only tools with no commercial option” that we use to select the tools presented here.
A relatively new tool that is probably worth reviewing – Scrumpy Planning Poker. It is a completely free, zero install, no registration application for online planning poker with distributed teams that runs on any device and integrates with Jira, Confluence, Stride and Slack. It brings fun and joy to refinement sessions.
I will think about it when I will write the article dedicated to Scrum planning poker tools.
Next tool to make it to our list of best Scrum tools is Scrumwise. It is a simple and intuitive tool that comes with dedicated Scrum features to help you achieve your sprint goals effectively. The tool has a simple interface which further makes it a go-to tool for Scrum implementation. You can create backlog items and categorize them through lists, tags, and filters for quickly accessing them whenever required. You can also conveniently break down your tasks into subtasks and checklists for managing them in a better way.
Scrumwise is not free and doesn’t even have a free plan ;O(
I’d like to suggest Draft.io, a collaborative board that allows you to build fully customized Scrum Boards. Draft.io is free up to a certain point and offers complete integration with Jira.