The best Jira alternatives for small scrum teams in 2026

Jira's free plan covers ten users. I want to lead with that, because most posts with this title bury it, and for a decent number of teams reading this it settles the question before we start. If you are five people, you are not paying Atlassian anything, and the only thing Jira is costing you is the afternoon you spend in configuration screens. That is a real cost. It is just not a bill.

The question gets interesting at user eleven, or the day someone asks why moving one card takes twenty minutes. So this is a comparison for teams of roughly five to twenty running two-week sprints, written by someone who builds one of the tools on the list. I have tried to be straight about where the others win, including the one that costs exactly what we do.

First, be honest about why you are leaving

The alternatives split cleanly depending on the answer, and picking from the wrong group is how teams end up migrating twice.

If Jira feels heavy, you want a smaller tool, and almost anything on this list will feel like relief. If Jira got expensive, you want to look hard at how each tool counts seats, because that is where the money actually goes. And if you have quietly stopped believing in sprints, you do not want a scrum tool at all, you want continuous flow, and Linear is the honest answer.

Three different problems. I have watched teams solve the second one by moving to something that fixed the first, then leave again a year later.

Shortcut, if the ten-user wall is what hit you

Shortcut's free tier runs to 10 users and includes Iterations, which are sprints under a different name. Paid is $8.50 per user per month for Team, $12 for Business.

That free tier is better than ours, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. We have a 7-day trial and then you pay. If you are a small team who wants real sprints, real reporting and a zero on the invoice, go and look at Shortcut before you look at us. The wall is the same eleventh user as Jira, but you get further before you hit it.

Scrumwise, which costs exactly what we do

$9 per user per month, or $7.50 billed annually, with a 30-day trial. If those figures look familiar, it is because they are also Scrumpy's, to the cent.

I found this genuinely uncomfortable to write, then decided it was the most useful paragraph in the post. Scrumwise has been doing focused, unfussy scrum for years and it is a real, good tool. On headline price we are indistinguishable, so anyone telling you their tool is cheaper is picking a comparison that flatters them.

Where we actually differ is who counts as a seat. Scrumwise bills per user. Scrumpy bills per editor, and view-only people are free and unlimited. On a team of five editors plus a product owner, two managers and a client who all just want to watch progress, that is five seats against nine. If your stakeholder list is short, this difference is noise and you should pick on feel. If half the people who need visibility never touch a card, it is most of the bill.

Trello, only with your eyes open

Free for up to 10 collaborators, then $5 per user per month annually for Standard, $10 for Premium.

Trello is a wonderful board and it is not a scrum tool. There is no native sprint: no start date, no end date, no burn-up. Teams run sprints on Trello by treating a list as a sprint and moving cards in and out by hand, or by bolting on a Power-Up. That works, and plenty of teams are happy with it. But if you are leaving Jira because you want scrum to be easier, moving to a tool with no sprint object is a strange way to get there. Go to Trello because you want to stop doing scrum, not because you want to do it more simply.

ClickUp, with one catch worth knowing

Free Forever exists, then $7 per user per month annually for Unlimited, $12 for Business.

The catch is that Sprint Points and sprint reporting live on the Business tier. So the plan you would price out at $7 is not the plan that does the scrum thing you are shopping for. That is not a scandal, it is just the kind of tier detail that turns a cheap-looking quote into a more expensive one after you have already migrated. Check which tier holds the feature you actually came for. This is worth doing for every tool here, including ours.

Linear, if you have fallen out of love with sprints

Free for unlimited members, capped at 2 teams and 250 issues. Basic is $10 per user per month billed yearly, Business $16.

Linear is the best-built tool in this comparison and I do not think that is close. It is also not a scrum tool, and it is not trying to be. It runs Cycles, which are time-boxed and look like sprints but carry different assumptions: work rolls over automatically, the emphasis is on continuous flow rather than on a committed sprint goal your team plans and reviews together.

If your retrospectives have quietly become status meetings and nobody remembers the sprint goal by Wednesday, that is worth noticing. You may not want a better scrum tool. We wrote about where Linear stops being the right fit for teams who do still want the ceremony.

Zoho Sprints and the open-source options

Zoho Sprints has a free plan for 3 users and 3 projects and does treat sprints properly. I could not get its paid per-user pricing to render on the pricing page, so I am not going to quote a number I cannot stand behind. Check it yourself before you shortlist it.

Taiga is worth a look if you are willing to self-host, and the same goes for the other open-source boards. Free stops being free the moment someone on your team owns the upgrades, so price it in engineer-hours rather than dollars.

Where Scrumpy fits

We are a flat $9 per editor per month, $7.50 billed annually, with a 7-day trial and no card required. One plan, every feature, and view-only seats free and unlimited, which is the whole reason we made viewers free rather than a tier.

The board shows the sprint on one screen. Sprints can be switched off entirely if you want an always-on board. Import comes in from Jira or Linear CSV with status mapping, so moving your issues across is an afternoon rather than a project. The progress chart is a burn-up, not a burndown, which I think is the more useful of the two but is a genuine preference rather than a fact.

What we do not have: work-in-progress limits, so if you want strict kanban we are the wrong tool. No marketplace, so if a gap matters to you it stays a gap. And no free tier, only the trial, which as I said above Shortcut beats us on.

So which one

If you are under ten people and Jira's free plan is not actually hurting, stay. Seriously. Migration has a cost and "it feels bloated" is not always worth paying it.

If you want free and real sprints, Shortcut. If you want a focused paid scrum tool, it is a genuine coin-toss between us and Scrumwise on price, decided by whether you have a lot of people who need to watch without editing. If your team has outgrown sprints rather than outgrown Jira, Linear.

And if the thing you keep running into is Jira itself rather than any of this, we wrote the longer version of that argument, itemised bill and all. Either way, export the CSV first. Whatever you pick, having your issues in a plain file makes the decision reversible, and a reversible decision is a much easier one to make on a Tuesday afternoon.