Top 3 free online planning poker tools for 2021
Planning Poker
Agile teams around the world use Planning Poker as an consensus based estimation technique to estimate product backlogs, mostly used to estimate effort or relative time of development goals in software development.
In this blog we will cover
Online Planning Poker tools
Choosing the right tools can go a long way in making your scrum planning poker sessions fun and engaging. Indeed the one that fits your team needs can help to estimate user stories effectively.
Should you choose a new tool for just Planning Poker?
If you are a scrum team, other than planning poker you are likely also practicing daily scrum, retrospectives, backlog grooming and other ceremonies. Introducing new tools for each can be overwhelming to the team and a significant overhead onboarding and training the team members.
It will make sense to look for tools that offer an integrated solution for all scrum ceremonies for your team. You have options like Troopr and Standuply that offer all-in-one scrum ceremonies automations including for conducting your online planning poker sessions.
Evaluating online planning poker tools
There are a bunch of tools available to automate and run planning poker sessions. If you are looking for a reliable free planning poker tool, then you are most likely looking at 3 key factors.
Covers all the features that fits your team needs
Reliability - vendor and tool
Cost of upgrade when your team needs grow
Troopr, Standuply, Planningpoker.com* offers free tiers in their pricing plans. These online poker tools will be the focus of comparison here.
While Planningpoker.com works online with your email account, Troopr and Standuply are Slack bots that require your team to use Slack (free version works).
*Planningpoker.com tool is picked as a reference. There are many other largely similar tools in the market that offer free or ad-supported planning poker implementations.
Comparison of free tiers
The 3 vendors we picked for comparison offer all the basic features, so let’s not get into a detailed basic feature comparison.
Free tier user restriction
Troopr - Teams upto 25 members**
Standuply - Teams upto 3 members
Planning Poker - Teams upto 5 members
**Teams upto 25 members can request the free version by writing to hello@troopr.io
Free tier feature limitations
Troopr - Almost all the features
Standuply - Limited features
Planning Poker - Limited features
Key feature comparison
Custom pointing scales
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - Yes
Integration with Agile tools, say Jira
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - Yes*
*Only in the Paid Version
Fetching User stories from Jira
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - Yes*
*Only in the Paid Version
Automatically updating final estimate to Jira
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - Yes*
*Only in the Paid Version
Summary reports
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - Yes
History and analytics
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - No
Works on Slack
Troopr - Yes
Standuply - Yes
Planning Poker - No
Are they really free?
Cost of upgrade
Small team (Upto 25 members)
Troopr - Free
Standuply - Involves cost of upgrade from 4th member
Planning Poker - Involves cost of upgrade from 6th member
Although tools like these simplify the planning poker process, they require the entire team to onboard and learn another tool.
You can also analyze what workflow tools that you are already using and try to make the most use of it. If you are using Slack for workspace collaboration, then online planning poker automations that can work completely in Slack can be a must try to prevent additional application overload.
Additionally, your team need not be on the Slack paid version to start using Slack planning poker automation bots. All the functionalities are designed to work well in the free version of Slack.
Why choose Troopr?
1.Troopr covers almost all the features and also saves several hundred dollars when your team needs to grow
2.Troopr seamlessly integrates with Jira and the issues can be easily picked up for the estimation session in simple 3 steps
3.With Troopr, the team members can asynchronously cast their estimates for the tasks
4.Once the estimates are finalized with the team, Troopr lets you file the estimates to Jira via a single button without leaving Slack
5.Troopr allows managers to see how different team members have contributed to estimation processes over time
6.Troops is designed to fit teams of any size
Read more here.
If you would like to try Troopr, get started by installing from Atlassian Marketplace or Slack App directory. Teams upto 25 members can request the free version by writing to hello@troopr.io
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