Nine rounds into a session, the tool asks you to upgrade. Everyone is on the call, the backlog is half sized, and the person running it is now reading a pricing page out loud.
That is the thing worth knowing before you pick one of these, and it is what almost every "best free planning poker tools" list leaves out. Nearly all of them are free. What separates them is the exact moment they stop being free, and whether that moment lands in the middle of your sprint planning.
So this list is organised around the limit rather than the feature grid. Every figure below was checked against each tool's own pricing page in September 2026. If you are in a hurry: Pointing Poker and Scrum Poker Online are free with no caps and ads, Planning Poker Online and Kollabe are metered, and ours is free without ads because it exists to sell you something else. More on that last one when we get to it.
The short version
| Tool | Free limit that actually bites | Sign-up |
|---|---|---|
| Pointing Poker | None stated, ad-supported | None |
| Scrum Poker Online | None stated, ads unless you pay $40/year | None |
| PlanITpoker | Quick play is unrestricted | None for quick play |
| Planning Poker Online | 9 votings and 5 issues per game, games kept 6 weeks | Host account |
| Kollabe | 10 people per room, 7-day history | None |
| Scrumpy | Room deletes itself about 12 hours after the last person leaves | None |
The table is the summary, not the argument. The rest of this explains which limit matters for which kind of team, because "9 votings per game" sounds harmless until you understand it means nine.
Pointing Poker, if you want the thing that has always worked
Pointing Poker is the one a lot of teams already have bookmarked, and it earns that. It is completely free, sustained by what it calls unobtrusive ads, needs no download and no registration, and states no limit on participants or on how many sessions run at once. Open it, share the URL, size the backlog.
The ads are the price, and they are the honest kind: the tool is not going to develop a limit halfway through your quarter, because there is no paid tier for it to push you towards.
What you give up is polish and anything beyond the cards. There is no backlog behind it, no record of what you decided, no integration. It does one thing.
Scrum Poker Online, the same deal with an escape hatch
Scrum Poker Online works the same way: open a room, share the room ID, no account or email needed, and it explicitly does not cap the number of participants. Ads in the free version.
The difference is the escape hatch. Forty dollars a year removes the ads for everyone in the room and adds a voting timer, automatic statistics, a reusable personal room ID and an attendance indicator. That is one of the better small purchases in this space if your team runs sessions weekly and the ads have started to grate.
PlanITpoker, free without the funnel
PlanITpoker offers a quick play that needs no signup at all, and an optional free account if you want to secure your rooms and keep them. People joining someone else's room never need to register.
It has been around long enough to be boring in the good way. Its pricing page exists, so treat "entirely free forever" as unverified rather than assumed, but nothing in the quick-play path asks you for money.
Planning Poker Online, where the free tier is a demo
Planning Poker Online is the most corporate-feeling of the set, and its free tier is the one most likely to interrupt you. The Basic plan gives you unlimited players and permanent game URLs, but caps you at 9 votings per game and 5 issues voted per game, and keeps unlimited games only for 6 weeks. Premium is $30 per facilitator per month, or $300 billed yearly.
Five issues per game is not a planning session, it is a sample of one. If your refinement covers a dozen stories you will be starting new games mid-meeting or paying.
That said, this is genuinely the right pick for some teams. It imports issues from CSV, it has the trappings that survive a procurement review, and $30 a month for one facilitator is nothing next to what the same organisation spends on its issue tracker. If the reason you are shopping is that someone in security asked who runs the free tool your team has been using, this is the answer that ends the conversation.
Kollabe, if you want retros in the same place
Kollabe is newer and bundles planning poker with retrospectives. No signup, unlimited rooms on the free tier, and custom decks. The free limit is 10 team members per room, with 7 days of meeting history and a monthly cap on meetings. Planning poker on its own is $12 a month per space, and $29 gets the retros and the rest.
Ten people is a real ceiling but an honest one: most teams sizing stories together are five to eight, and if you are eleven in a planning poker room you have a bigger problem than the tool. The 7-day history is the sharper edge, because it quietly means the record of what you decided is temporary.
Ours, and the part where we declare an interest
We publish a free planning poker room too. No account, no email address, no cap on how many people sit at the table, no ads, and no round where it asks you for anything. The room deletes itself about twelve hours after the last person leaves, which is the one real limit: it is a session, not a record. Copy the list of estimates out before you close the tab, which is one button.
Here is the interest to declare. It is free because Scrumpy is a paid scrum tool and this is how most people will meet us. That is a different arrangement from the ad-funded tools and a different one again from the metered ones, and you should weigh it accordingly. What it means in practice is that the room has no upgrade prompt in it, because the upgrade is a different product entirely: if you are already signed in, the same room sits next to your backlog, deals your team's own point scale, and writes the agreed number straight onto the story.
And the honest weakness: it is the newest thing on this list by a wide margin. Pointing Poker has been quietly working for years. We have not earned that yet.
What to actually pick
If you are sizing a backlog this afternoon and will not think about the tool again, take Pointing Poker or Scrum Poker Online. They ask nothing of you and they will not stop halfway.
If your team runs sessions every sprint and someone will eventually ask where the estimates went, the ad-funded tools are the wrong shape, because none of them keep anything. That is the case for either paying for one of the metered tools or using something attached to your backlog.
If a security or procurement question is what sent you looking, Planning Poker Online is the path of least resistance.
And if you are about to spend an hour comparing these, stop. The tool is not the variable that decides whether the session is worth having. Running the round well matters more than any of them, and there is a decent argument that most teams should reach for the cards far less often than they do. Every tool on this list will show you the same spread of numbers. What you do with the disagreement is the part that is yours.
If you have never settled what your numbers actually mean, that is the more useful hour: story points are relative sizes, not hours, and a team that has not agreed on that will get inconsistent estimates out of the best tool on the internet.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free planning poker tool?
For a team that just wants to size some stories today, Pointing Poker and Scrum Poker Online are the safest picks: both are genuinely free, need no account from anyone, and cap nothing, in exchange for showing ads. If you would rather not have ads in front of the team, Scrumpy's free planning poker room does the same job without them. Planning Poker Online and Kollabe are better if you need Jira import or want retrospectives in the same tool, but both meter their free tier.
Is there a planning poker tool with no sign-up?
Yes, several. Pointing Poker, Scrum Poker Online, PlanITpoker's quick play and Scrumpy's free room all let you open a session and share a link without anyone creating an account or handing over an email address. Planning Poker Online and Kollabe also let participants join without accounts, though the person running the session may need one.
Do free planning poker tools have a participant limit?
Some do. Kollabe's free tier caps a room at 10 team members. Planning Poker Online allows unlimited players but limits the free tier to 9 votings and 5 issues per game, and keeps games for 6 weeks. Pointing Poker, Scrum Poker Online and Scrumpy state no cap on how many people can sit in one room.
Why are planning poker tools free?
Three reasons, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at. Ad-funded tools like Pointing Poker and Scrum Poker Online sell your attention. Freemium tools like Planning Poker Online and Kollabe give you a metered version and charge when you outgrow it. And some, including Scrumpy's, are marketing for a paid product the same company sells, which means the tool is free but it is also an advert.
