Top 11 scrum tools for maximizing team collaboration

Before anyone has an allergic reaction to scrum and "tools" in the same sentence, hear us out.

Over the past 20 years, an entire sub-industry has emerged to help agile organizations practice agile. There are 3.2 million scrum masters on LinkedIn and 46,000 agile coaches. 

And yet, if you ask the engineers who work for these organizations (which we did), over 75% agree that “most agile teams are not actually agile”. More than a third of engineers agree that "scrum practices are outdated"

It's time to challenge some of the legacy thinking around agile, or at least what agile has become in practice, and how tools available to scrum teams have evolved to improve communication and collaboration.

If you're managing a Scrum team, the right tools can have a positive impact on communication, collaboration, and overall satisfaction. They can give you an advantage, making you and your team more successful.

That’s why we’ve created this roundup that includes some of the best Scrum tools out there. 

How Scrum tools can set your team up for success 💪

Think of Scrum (or any agile methodology) as a framework. Within this framework, there are a lot of smaller steps that all fit together to help teams deliver products. How you execute those smaller steps depends on your team, your product and a host of other factors, but by-and-large, here are the steps:

• Plan & Commit: Scrum methodology starts with sprint planning, where you define what the team will focus on and release.

• Execute & Adapt: Then 1-5 week sprints for project work to meet sprint goals, where you meet every day in “daily scrum” to support each other and adapt.

• Release & Reflect: It typically ends with a sprint review, a release, and a sprint retrospective before you begin the cycle again. 

If you want this process to run like a well-oiled machine, you need a great set of agile project management tools to help keep everything organized and everyone on track. Especially if your team is remote, hybrid or distributed.

Tools can improve communication 🗣

“Individuals and interactions over process and tools,” right? 

Right. But, we need to consider that the Agile Manifesto was written over 20 years ago — in a time before team interactions mostly took place within tools.

Today, product and dev teams rely on lots of different collaboration tools to interact — Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams (among endless others). With so many digital tools, communication can get confusing. Someone said something important yesterday, but did they send it as an email? Or was it a message in Slack? Which channel was it? 🤔

It’s easy for important comms to get lost in the shuffle, especially when using multiple tools for email, commenting, and more. Good Scrum tools will integrate and help organize information across these tools so that it’s easier to find what you need when you need it.

Tools can improve meetings 🎯

The Scrum framework revolves around the daily scrum meeting, where your development team gets together and talks about their progress yesterday, what they have planned for today, and any blockers that may be in their way. It’s meant to be a fast-paced, energetic meeting that sets the tone for the day.

Great Scrum software can give you tools to make your daily scrum even better. That can include timers to keep conversation contained, app features that randomly select the next speaker, templates you can use to outline what needs to be discussed, and more.

Tools can help you track tasks and progress ✅

Scrum is a process — and each project you work on within this process is made up of lots of little subtasks. That’s what makes project management tools, project tracking, and task tracking crucial. 

Look for project management software that facilitates Scrum so that your team can track tasks, metrics, and due dates seamlessly.

Tools can enhance collaboration and connection 💭

Perhaps most importantly, good Scrum tools won’t get in the way of your team’s ability to collaborate. Quite the opposite, actually — these tools should facilitate teamwork and make it easier to communicate.

Ultimately, it should help team members make more time for tasks by saving them time on task management — all in a user interface that is user-friendly and easy to learn.

For meetings…

1. Spinach

Need a tool specifically to make your daily Scrum better? Spinach is the only Scrum tool out there designed to facilitate live Scrum meetings — and that’s significant because while most other standup tools focus on asynchronous standups, 90% of development teams rely on live standups.

So, what does Spinach do? It runs your daily Scrum for you. Forget manual time tracking: A visible timer keeps the discussion moving, and the app shuffles the speaking order, so you don’t have to choose who goes next. It’ll take notes for you, help you identify and clear blockers, and create agendas for future meetings.

Key features and capabilities

• Set up notifications to prep for daily scrum meetings.

• Use icebreakers to loosen everyone up and set the vibe.

• Rely on speaker rotation and timers to run the meeting for you.

• Park discussions for later in the Parking Lot.

• Get instant meeting summaries in Slack.

• Integrate with tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, and Jira.

Pricing

• Free plan for small team

• Business: $6 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing
  
  

2. Parabol

Parabol is a unique tool designed to facilitate retro meetings and incident post-mortems. The tool asks each person to add cards for what you should Start Doing, Stop Doing, and Continue Doing. You can see each avatar in the app, so it feels collaborative and can eliminate the need to share your screen. Users can also add cards async if they can't join the retro meeting or post-mortem.

Key features and capabilities

• Use timers and other tools to keep live chats flowing.

• Set notifications and deadlines to ensure people respond to async meetings.

• Use anonymous suggestions in retrospectives to get honest feedback.

• Integrate with Jira, GitHub, Slack, and other popular scrum tools.

Pricing

• Starter: Free forever for two teams

• Team: $6 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing
  
  

3. Miro

Miro is a visual collaboration platform that lets you connect many of your team's most popular tools — like Jira, Zoom, or Google Docs. Everything you do in Miro is laid out beautifully in an easy-to-read format with color coding and drag-and-drop features. That includes card-based task management and things like digital whiteboards for brainstorming sessions.

We especially recommend Miro for your retrospective meetings. It’s easy for the team to prepare their input in advance, async. Which leads to more honest and transparent input and more concise sharing during the live discussion. 

Key features and capabilities

• Integrate and work with popular tools directly within Miro.

• Flexible templates offer lots of project management customization.

• Use both the desktop platform and mobile apps.

Pricing

• Free for single workspace with three boards

• Starter: $8 per user per month

• Business: $16 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

For tracking tasks…

4. Jira

There are few bigger names in Scrum project management tools than Jira. This platform offers just about everything you can imagine — Scrum boards, Kanban boards, reporting options, customizable backlogs, burndown charts, highly customizable workflows, and much more. 

By the way — Spinach integrates nicely with Jira, too. This integration adds status updates to Jira tickets so that you can see at a glance what’s happening, the progress being made, and any blockers in the way. Check it out here.

Key features and capabilities

• Get started easily with templates for daily Scrum, Kanban, and more.

• Create project roadmaps to plan projects and track progress.

• Develop reports to get key insights into project progress.

• Use drag-and-drop features to set up automations.

Pricing

• Free for up to 10 users

• Standard: $7.75 per user per month

• Premium: $15.25 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

  
  

5. Asana

Among project management tools, Asana is one of the bigger players. This tool delivers features for planning projects, assigning tasks, tracking milestones, and more. It’s a fully featured app that allows you to track dependencies, and teams can use it to collaborate easily. 

This one is ideal for teams or startups who want a simpler solution to project management and task tracking than, say, an app like Jira with thousands of features.

Key features and capabilities

• Use Boards to track tasks through a visual interface.

• Create to-do lists to break projects down into manageable steps.

• Map out projects via Asana’s timeline view.

• Set up calendars to track schedules, spot downtime, and manage workloads.

Pricing

• Basic: Free forever

• Premium: $10.99 per user per month

• Business: $24.99 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

6. Monday.com

monday.com is up there with Jira and Asana as one of the most popular Scrum management apps out there — and there are good reasons why. This platform features a simple, clean interface with color-coded features that makes it easy to see what is happening at a glance. Create highly customizable workflows for Scrum or other methodologies. You use monday.com for communication and collaboration, too.

Key features and capabilities

• Create task boards with custom fields.

• Create powerful Gantt charts.

• Automate status updates, email notifications, and more.

• Share documents, files, and more.

Pricing

• Individual: Free forever

• Basic: $8 per user per month

• Standard: $10 per user per month

• Pro: $16 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

7. Trello

If you need a simple task management platform that offers a few great collaborative tools, Trello is a good option. Trello revolves around its card-based boards: Create a board, add lists to it, then add cards to your lists to manage individual tasks. 

From there, you can attach shared documents, files, links, and more to each card — and you can also add checklists, deadlines, and more. Trello also lets you assign tasks out to individual users plus commenting features let you easily leave updates on tasks.

In addition to the board view, Trello also lets you look at tasks via calendars, timelines, tables, and other views — plus you can track metrics through the dashboard view.

Key features and capabilities

• Switch between different views to see projects from different angles.

• Automate tasks and workflows via built-in automation tools.

• Use plug-ins to integrate other popular apps and platforms.

• Use premade templates or create your own for efficient task tracking.

• Add different users to different workspaces to keep team spaces organized.

Pricing

• Free: Basic features for individuals and small teams

• Standard: $5 per user per month

• Premium: $10 per user per month

• Enterprise: Sliding scale; quote for specific pricing

For smaller teams…

8. Targetprocess

One of the unique aspects of Targetprocess is that this is a platform designed to scale with the needs of a growing company. You can start out using it as a small team and gradually scale it up as you add more teams and projects.

This app offers plenty in the way of project management tools, too. Use sprint management features, product backlog management, and backlog refinement tools to keep projects running smoothly. It also gives you tools to split user stories, which is super helpful for product owners.

Key features and capabilities

• Manage agile projects and Scrum projects at scale

• Use resource management tools to manage cross-functional teams

• Remove blind spots with strategic portfolio management

Pricing

• Pricing details are available via quote only.

9. Scrumwise

Scrumwise is all about managing Scrum projects. It has a streamlined user interface that makes it easy to jump in and get started, and with it, you can handle all the basics: sprint planning, backlog management, product roadmap development, burndown charts, and more. 

Key features and capabilities

• Create teams within the app and assign roles.

• Manage your backlog with lists, tags, and filters.

• Plan releases efficiently and predict release dates.

• Use sprint management tools to organize sprints visually.

Pricing

• Yearly Plan: $7.50 per user per month, billed annually

• Monthly Plan: $9 per user per month, billed monthly

  
  

10. Infinity

Infinity is a good choice for smaller projects or single teams — and that’s because while it provides simple features for task management, it doesn’t offer a dashboard to manage multiple projects. What it does offer, however, is progress visualizations, the ability to assign tasks, and to easily manage sprints, all with drag and drop functionality.

Key features and capabilities

• Use different views for progress tracking and prioritization.

• Customize workflows with filters and tags.

• Automate recurring tasks with preset templates.

Pricing

• Basic: $3.75 per user per month

• Pro: $6 per user per month

11. VivifyScrum

VivifyScrum is a good option for small teams who need developer tools similar to Jira's, but without the expense. With this platform, you’ll have both an agile board and a Scrum board so that you can plan sprints and track tasks. It offers a Kanban board, too. It’s easy to use and offers time management features to help everyone stay on track.

Key features and capabilities

• Track work hours with timesheets.

• Choose between agile, Scrum, and Kanban boards.

• Get reports and statistics to monitor team performance.

• Use time management features to create invoices.

Pricing

• Seven-day free trial, no credit card required

• Starter: $96 per year up to 10 members

• Growth: $4 per user per month

• Standard: $4.80 per user per month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Facilitate better team standup meetings with Spinach

There are a lot of great tools out there that will help you maximize collaboration among Scrum teams. But, no other tools will help you make the most of live daily standups. Only Spinach can help you with that.

Ready to get started? Sign up here!