9 Best Scrum Software Tools of 2020
There is no shortage of scrum software tools today. And it’s becoming a nightmare for teams to pick a tool that’d suit their needs.
Scrum methodology, after all, has gained tremendous popularity over the last decade. And for good reasons too!
Scrum, an agile framework, is used primarily for software development with the goal of delivering new, usable, and valuable software to customers quicker.
Fortunately, I spent the last several months signing up and trying new scrum software tools. And this blog post should help you pick a scrum software tool for your team.
I’ll walk you through the 9 scrum software tools in the market that can help teams to get work done. I’ll share in-depth about what capabilities they provide, why they’re a better choice than the others, and of course, their pricing. This will allow you to take an informed decision on which scrum tool you can use within your organization.
If you’re new to Scrum, you might be interested in this in-depth guide to Scrum Software Development.
Best Scrum Tool Selection Criteria
The scrum software tools available in the industry come with different features that allow you to plan, execute, and ship software. But there isn’t a single tool that can act as a gold standard and is perfect in every aspect.
In our experience, the best scrum tools:
- Enable you to run Sprints: This is of course is an obvious requirement. But you’d be surprised at how many scrum tools are out there without even a dedicated view for you to run your sprint.
- Keeps the customers at the centre: Customer feedback and requests should be at the centre of your software development. While it is the product owner’s duty to manage feedback and prioritize, it shouldn’t be a pain to collect these feedback and bring them together from your helpdesk software, live chat app, error monitor tools, and other channels your customers use to communicate with you.
- Promotes transparency & helps gain visibility of the progress: The best scrum tools helps you track at the micro level and at the macro level without any chaos.
- Developer-friendly: At the end of the day, it’s the developers who are going to update progress. If they aren’t happy with the tool and don’t update progress, knowing who’s doing what and when the feature will ship will become nearly impossible.
With this being said, let’s jump in and look at the top 9 scrum software tools you should consider for your organization.
1. Zepel
Zepel is the simplest project management tool that is built for product teams.
Zepel allows you to collect customer requests from multiple tools, turn them into priorities, and track its development progress every step of the way.
It shows you a snapshot of the work at every level. With Progress, you can simply drag-drop cards to prioritize features, visually track progress of the feature, and use it as a roadmap to align your entire team on a common goal.
Once you’ve prioritized your feature, Zepel lets you quickly plan features you’re working on with a simple document-like interface. It lets you add user stories, tasks, subtasks, enhancements, and bugs. Of course, you can add estimation points, assign to users, add comments, files, and descriptions too!
Zepel gives you a dedicated Sprint view, where you can view your Sprint Backlog and get a detailed scrum report in real-time.
Zepel is simple enough to support Scrum and Kanban. That means, you can track your sprint with a scrum board or simply follow Kanban methodology to track your team’s progress.
Since Zepel is built for software product teams, it recognizes the importance of a developer’s productivity and integrates fully with version control systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. This allows developers to link to pull requests, branch, commits, and automate Zepel to update progress based on their Git workflow.
Top scrum features in Zepel:
- Simple document-like interface to plan features with User Stories, Bugs, Tasks, Subtasks, and Enhancements.
- Dedicated view for Sprints
- Allows you to add scrum boards
- Burnup, burndown, and cumulative charts
- Desktop Widget to track Sprints from your desktop
- Deep integrations with version control systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.
- Developer friendly APIs
Pricing:
- Free — For 5 members. No feature restrictions
- Standard plan — From 6th member starts at $5/member.
2. Trello
There probably isn’t a single best-of-project-management-tools article that doesn’t include Trello in it.
Thanks to its simplicity, nearly everyone who has looked for project management tools has heard about Trello. You can create any number of Boards in Trello and use each Board to plan and track just about anything from a roadmap, simple task list, sprints, to even something as generic as a wedding. You can create a card, categorize it, add comments, set due dates and owners.
If this is all the functionality you’re looking for, then Trello is great. You can use power-ups, their integrations, if you want more functionalities. Capabilities like scrum reports are not available as a first-class feature, which is why several teams look for a Trello alternative as they scale.
Top scrum features in Trello:
- Simple Kanban Boards that can be used to plan and track sprints
- Ease of use
- Power-ups to integrate with other tools
Pricing:
- Basic: Free forever
- Business Class: $9.99/user/month
- Enterprise: $20.83/user/month
Is Trello not powerful enough to meet your needs? You might want to have a look at these 11 Trello alternatives that are simple yet more powerful than Trello.
3. JIRA
JIRA is the go-to scrum software tool for bigger teams. JIRA is marketed as the agile tool in the industry and provides nearly every agile capability you can think of.
But this is also one of the main reasons why several teams are moving away from JIRA. Due to its steep learning curve, slowness, and clutter, it can be hard to get started with JIRA if you haven’t already used it previously.
JIRA has an extensive list of integrations that you can use for your projects — over 3000 when I checked. You can use these integrations to track time, connect to external tools and more.
Top scrum features in JIRA:
- Backlog
- Scrum Board
- Scrum analytics
- Integrations
Pricing:
- Free for up to 10 users with feature restriction
- Standard plan from $7/member
Not a fan of JIRA? Here are 9 JIRA alternatives that are as powerful without the clutter.
4. Zoho Sprints
Zoho Sprints is project management software catered to teams who run Sprints.
Since it focusses only on the Sprints aspect of working, you’ll have a Backlog to collect all your work to plan your next sprint, Epics to group and structure your all tasks, and a Board to customize statuses.
Unlike other scrum tools, Zoho Sprints allows you to even schedule meetings and send invites with location and duration. This is great when you want to run Scrum Meetings. With reports such as burndown, burnup, and cumulative, backed by logged times that you can manually enter, Zoho Sprints allows you to see how your team is progressing.
Scrum features in Zoho:
- Sprints
- Integrations
- Epics
Pricing:
- Free for 5 users and 5 projects
- Standard plan at $10 per month per user
5. Yodiz
Yodiz is a project management tool that is easy to get started with. It supports both Kanban and Scrum methodologies.
One of the best functionalities of Yodiz is its capability to take any raw data and turn it into charts that you can use to see if you’re team is blocked and need help.
This tool also provides you the capability to add time estimates, add multiple columns to track work, and add priorities. And if you’re an NGO or a non-profit organization, Yodiz is for free.
Scrum features in Yodiz:
- Backlog
- Estimations
- Prioritizations
Pricing:
- Free for 3 users
- Issue Tracker: $3/user/month
- Agile Tool: $5/user/month
6. Sprintly
Sprintly is a project management tool for scrum teams and lets you run sprints. It makes it effortless for startups and agencies to work together and collaborate by giving them a full view of what the team is working on.
It integrates well with Github and allows your development team to automatically update their work from Github. For other integrations, if you need them, it relies on Zapier.
Sprintly offers an advanced search syntax with a nice type-ahead UI. If you prefer using the mouse, they have a point-and-click search filters that makes finding tickets a breeze.
One of Sprintly’s biggest drawback according to some reviews on the internet is there are no due dates or a dedicated view for sprints or scrum board. It also tends to get slow and hamper the team’s productivity.
Scrum features in Sprintly:
- Backlog
- Scrum Reports
- Github Integrations
Pricing:
- $19 per month to $399 per month
7. nTask
nTask is primarily a project management tool that provides a set of features that will make Scrum implementation easy for you. It comes with capabilities such as Gantt charts and time sheets that can be useful for tracking progress and deciding the next steps.
Similar to Zoho Sprints, nTask also comes with advanced meeting participant controls that can be used to schedule and productively execute your daily scrum meetings without any fear of losing productivity along the way.
Scrum features in nTask:
- Kanban Board to track tasks
- Meeting management capabilities to manage scrum meetings
- Time estimation
Pricing:
- Free with a limit of 100 MB storage
- Premium starts at $2.99/user/month
- Business starts at $7.99/user/month
8. VersionOne
VersionOne is an agile project management tool that’s packed with features and flexible. It supports Kanban, Scrum, a hybrid of the two, and even SAFe. This allows companies to scale quicker and efficiently.
VersionOne allows you to plan your portfolio and program level initiatives and track them It provides an end-to-end capability for you to gain visibility of your project’s performance and gives you reports to take data-driven decisions.
Scrum features in VersionOne:
- Sprint Planning
- Scrum Reports & Analytics
- Story, defect, and test tracking
- Release planning
Pricing:
- Free with limited capabilities
- Other plans requires you to contact the team for a quote
9. VivifyScrum
VivifyScrum lets you manage your projects and supports kanban and scrum methodologies.
It provides basic collaboration capabilities such as assigning, giving roles to team members, and more. One of its better features is where projects can be linked to relevant collaboration boards from which team members can track their work.
As a part of scrum features, it provides you with a product backlog, lets you have multiple sprints active, have a goal for a sprint, and view its progress as a report.
Scrum features in VivifyScrum:
- Product Backlog
- Multiple Sprints
- Sprint Goal
- Burndown charts
- Stats per user
- Planning poker to estimate user stories
Pricing:
- Premium starts at $10/user/month
- Enterprise plan requires you to contact the team for a quote
Further Helpful Articles When Considering Scrum Software Tools
Originally published at https://zepel.io on June 24, 2020.
