Options for free online sprint retrospectives

To begin with, of course there are a few ways to conduct a sprint retrospective online for free. It really depends on your goal and your budget.

1. Firstly, of course you could simply use your task management tools your task management tool like Jira, Confluence, Trello or similar and collect the feedback on the Retrospective Questions in there. The content of tasks is usually updated live.
   1. Advantage: The retrospective data is stored where everything else is stored.
   2. Disadvantage: The retrospective data is stored where everything else is stored 😄. It might be hard to “leave the work mindset” and shift into “reflection” and meta level mindset. It might also not be that flexible, you do not have smooth voting functionalities and so on.
2. Use an whiteboard tool like Miro, Mural or others when searching for a “sprint retrospective online free”.
   1. AdvantageYou might already have a license for that. Whiteboards offer a lot of possibilities to be creative in your retrospective.
   2. Disadvantage: You often have to design and prepare the retrospective yourself. You do not have the opportunity to record measures directly, you have to do this in the follow-up. Sometimes it is more difficult to correctly maintain the structure of the retro.
3. Use sharable Powerpoint like a Google Presentation (incl. live collaboration).
   1. Advantage: Your team might be used to working in powerpoint
   2. Disadvantage: The tool is not made for retrospectives, so many features to not really support the retrospective flow: You don’t have a timer, users can not hide their feedback before sharing, no connection to action items etc.
4. Use an online retrospective tool.
   1. Advantage: Retrospective tools have all the features you need for a good retrospective (voting, topic clustering, action item integration into task management tools such as Jira), including many templates that save you time in the preparation and follow-up of a retrospective. In addition, good retrospective tools (e.g. Echometer) even help you with other challenges like a continuous (even cross-team) health check. If you want to learn more, have a look at 14 retrospective tools in comparison in our blog.
   2. Disadvantage: Depending on the tool, you might need a budget. And some retrospective tools are relatively rigid or inflexible - you have to find the right one.

 

Sprint Retrospective Online Free: Echometer

As mentioned above, a free tool to do a sprint retrospective online is Echometer - at least if you use it with a maximum of 12 persons. You can start a free online retrospective now by opening a retrospective on the button below: