There is a specific week when a team starts shopping for a scrum tool. It is usually the week the shared spreadsheet gets a second tab, or the week someone on the team asks, in a slightly pointed way, what the sprint goal actually was. Before that, a whiteboard was fine. Nobody goes looking for scrum software because they read an article about it.
So the useful question is not which tool is best in the abstract. It is which one holds up at your size, at your budget, without asking you to become its administrator. This compares the realistic options for a team of roughly five to twenty, with prices checked in August 2026.
What a scrum tool has to do before anything else
Strip away the feature lists and there are four jobs. A backlog you can reorder without ceremony. A sprint with a real start, end and goal. A board where the whole team sees everything at once. And a way to move work across that board fast enough that standup does not stall.
That is a short list, and it is worth holding tools against it, because a surprising number of products marketed as scrum software are missing the second item. They have boards and cards and columns, and the sprint is a convention the team maintains by hand.
The prices, at twelve people
Twelve is a useful number because it clears every free tier on the market. Below ten, several of these cost nothing. Above ten, the bill arrives.
| Tool | Free plan | Paid, per user per month | 12 people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jira | Up to 10 users | $7.91 Standard, monthly | $94.92 |
| Shortcut | 10 users, sprints included | $8.50 Team | $102 |
| Scrumwise | None, 30-day trial | $9, or $7.50 annually | $108 |
| Scrumpy | None, 7-day trial | $9 per editor, or $7.50 annually | editors only |
| Linear | 2 teams, 250 issues | $10 Basic, billed yearly | $120 |
| ClickUp | Free Forever, 60MB | $19 Business, monthly | $228 |
| Trello | 10 collaborators | $6 Standard monthly | $72, no native sprints |
Two lines in that table deserve more than a row.
ClickUp looks expensive here because sprint points and sprint reporting sit on the Business tier, not the $7 Unlimited tier. Price the tier that has the feature you came for, not the cheapest one on the page. This trap is not unique to ClickUp, it is just unusually visible there.
Trello looks cheap because it is not doing the same job. There is no sprint object at all. You can absolutely run scrum on Trello by treating a list as a sprint, and teams do, but you are supplying the framework yourself.
How each tool counts a seat
This is the part that moves the bill more than the headline rate, and almost nobody checks it during a trial.
Most tools charge for everyone with access. Jira charges per licensed user whether or not they log in. Scrumwise, Linear and Shortcut all bill per user. So the product owner who checks progress on Fridays, the account manager who wants to reassure a client, and the client themselves each cost the same as a developer living in the tool all day.
Scrumpy charges per editor and makes view-only people free and unlimited, which is why we have a whole page on free viewers. On a team of six editors plus six watchers, that is the difference between six seats and twelve. If your team is all editors, this advantage evaporates and you should choose on other grounds.
ZenHub is the odd one out: its free plan allows fifty users but caps repositories at two and issues at 250, so the constraint is your work, not your headcount.
When you should not buy anything
Under ten people, Jira's free plan does real scrum for nothing, and Shortcut's free tier does the same with a lighter interface. If neither is actively annoying you, the correct amount to spend is zero. Tool migration has a cost that does not appear on any invoice, and "our tool feels a bit heavy" is not always worth paying it.
The honest signal that you have outgrown free is not frustration, it is arithmetic: the eleventh person joins, or you hit the issue cap mid-sprint.
Self-hosting Taiga is free in the same way a puppy is free. It is a capable agile tool, and someone on your team now owns its upgrades, its backups and the afternoon it stops responding. For a team with an ops person who enjoys this, that is a fine trade. For a team of six product engineers, it is a tax you pay in the worst possible week.
Where Scrumpy sits
We are one flat price, $9 per editor per month or $7.50 billed annually, with every feature included and a 7-day trial that does not ask for a card. There are no tiers, so nothing you shop for is waiting behind a higher plan.
The board puts a whole sprint on one screen. Sprints can be turned off completely if you would rather run a continuous board. Import reads Jira or Linear CSV and lets you map each status onto a column as it goes. Progress shows as a burn-up rather than a burndown.
We do not do work-in-progress limits, so strict kanban teams should look elsewhere. There is no marketplace, so a gap stays a gap. And Scrumwise matches our price exactly, which we would rather say plainly than let you discover after a demo.
Picking, in one paragraph
Under ten and content, stay free on Jira or Shortcut. Past ten and wanting a focused scrum board, the shortlist is Scrumpy, Scrumwise and Shortcut, and the deciding question is how many people need to watch without editing. Wanting one tool for scrum plus docs plus everything else, ClickUp, priced honestly at the Business tier. Not really doing scrum any more, Linear.
Whichever way you go, run one real sprint in the trial rather than clicking around the empty state. A tool that feels clean on an empty board and cluttered on day nine of a sprint is a tool you will leave. If you want to try that on ours, the board is here and it takes about ten minutes to have your backlog in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best scrum tool for a small team?
For teams under 10, Jira's free plan and Shortcut's free tier both cover real sprints at no cost. Past 10 people the choice is usually between a focused scrum tool like Scrumpy or Scrumwise at around $9 per user per month, and a broader work platform like ClickUp where sprint features sit on a higher tier.
Do I need a dedicated scrum tool, or is a general project tool enough?
You need a dedicated scrum tool if you run sprints with a start date, an end date and a sprint goal you review together. General tools like Trello and Notion can hold your work but have no native sprint object, so the sprint lives in someone's head or in a manually maintained list.
How much should a small team pay for scrum software?
Most focused scrum tools land between $5 and $12 per user per month. A twelve-person team should expect roughly $100 to $130 a month, though the real number depends on how each tool counts seats: some charge for everyone with access, others only for people who edit.
Which scrum tools have a genuinely free plan?
Jira is free for up to 10 users, Shortcut's free tier covers 10 users and includes sprints, ZenHub's free plan allows 50 users but caps you at 2 repositories and 250 issues, and Zoho Sprints is free for 3 users. Taiga is free if you self-host it.
