7 sprint planning tools to keep teams and products on track

Sprint planning meetings help keep teams on track, but not everyone knows how to run effective ones. Leaders need to invest in the right tools to run effective sprint planning meetings, including tools that let you do more outside of them. This way, you can make meetings shorter—or cancel them altogether, and boost productivity.

In this article, you'll get a list of seven sprint planning tools that let you run more effective sprints in real time and async. But remember: You don't need all the tools listed below. Tool overload and fatigue can also hold you back from meaningful focus work. It's all about picking the right platform and not overwhelming your team with the context-switching that can come with too many tools and notifications.

Want more productive sprint planning meetings? 
Switchboard's expansive canvas makes it easy to get everyone on the same page during the sprint planning process.
Sign up free.

The 7 best sprint planning tools of 2023

We've put together a list of seven sprint planning tools that'll help make your sprint planning meetings more efficient and productive—in real time and async. Let's dive in. 

1. Switchboard

Switchboard is an online collaboration platform that helps you move faster with fewer meetings. You can share ideas, give feedback, and make decisions in interactive rooms for projects, dashboards, and meetings. The expansive canvas in each room gives you space to visually organize and share applications, files, and documents. You can work in the room by yourself or teams can flip on video to meet in the place where all their work is ready to go.

Switchboard is the best platform for sharing and discussing work. Whether you're planning projects, tracking metrics, or reviewing client work, Switchboard brings people, applications, and conversations together in one place. The result? You can have fewer, more productive meetings, save time, and do your best work.

People use Switchboard to organize and share their work. For example, you could make a Switchboard room for a project. Drag, drop, and organize all the tools you’re already using on the room’s canvas. Websites, applications, images, videos, PDFs, sticky notes – they all can be used side by side in a Switchboard room. Then, share the room with anyone on your team who is also working on the project. They’ll have access to everything in one place: apps, docs, files, and the latest comments. Because everything for your project is a shared space, you can move work forward between meetings. Plus, all the tools we'll talk about work in Switchboard, so you can keep everything in one place. 

Key features

• Expansive canvas to add browser-based apps, websites, PDFs, and images
• Switchboard AI, which can answer questions and generate summaries of room activity
• Multiplayer browsers that support any website or web-based application
• Room recording
• Sections to organize content
• Voice and video calls
• Presentation mode, to get people to focus on your view
• Built-in whiteboard and whiteboarding tools including sticky notes, shapes, notepads
• Apps including timer, voting, polls, icebreaker, and open questions
• In-room chat
• In-app support
• Up to 200 rooms for projects, meetings, and more
• Up to 500 members and unlimited meeting guests
• Up to 300 GB storage per workspace

Pricing

• Free: Includes limited features, rooms, and members (ideal for small teams or individuals).
• Pro: $15 member/month for up to 200 rooms and 500 members; plus Switchboard AI and additional storage.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

When you sign up for free, you get access to all Pro features during your trial. After that, you can choose to keep your Pro plan or move to the free plan with limited features, rooms, and members. 

Best for 

Switchboard is ideal for highly collaborative teams that need an always-open space to move project work forward, together or async. 

Use Switchboard to create an awesome virtual meeting culture by doing more outside of your real time sprint planning meetings—or even cancel them altogether by switching to async sprint planning. Either way, you’ll be able to get more done in sprint planning meetings and outside of them.

2. Asana

‍Asana is a comprehensive project management tool that you can use to assign, manage, and move tasks through a workflow. It helps streamline work management by keeping everyone on track with to-do lists and providing visibility into task and project statuses, deadlines, and task ownership. For example, Gantt charts let you easily plan and track work through the stages of your sprint—and get people aligned regardless of when they're online. 

Let’s say your company’s product manager needs to keep track of tasks and statuses over your long-running project. Before the sprint planning meeting, the product manager reviews the product backlog in Asana. They organize and prioritize the backlog items (user stories, bugs, tasks) that need to be tackled in the next sprint. This keeps sprint planning sessions focused and organized. 

Key features

• Unlimited tasks, projects, in-app messages, activity logs, and file storage  
• Shared team calendar
• List, board, or calendar view of projects and tasks 
• In-app messaging 
• Assignee and due dates 
• Project overview and brief 
• Unlimited file sharing and storage (up to 100MB per file)  
• 100+ integrations with popular tools  
• iOS and Android apps 

Pricing 

• Free version with limited functionality
• Premium:$10.99/month per user
• Business: $24.99/month per user 
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Best for

Cross-functional teams that want a central place for tracking tasks, setting milestones, and aligning and planning sprints async. 

3. Jira

Jira's flexibility in creating and managing tasks, customizable workflows, and strong support for Agile practices like Scrum and Kanban make it a top choice. You can create, prioritize, assign, and track tasks and issues efficiently, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks during sprint planning. 

Jira enables teams using Agile methodology to create and prioritize user stories, track sprint progress, manage backlogs, and conduct sprint planning and reviews seamlessly. With features like burndown charts, velocity tracking, and customizable dashboards, Jira empowers Agile teams to get real-time insights into their projects, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve their processes.

Key features

• Advanced security features like role-based permissions and access control 
• Velocity tracking
• Burndown charts 
• Agile templates and customizable dashboards
• Bug tracking
• Timelines, Scrum, and Kanban boards
• Project reporting and analytics 
• Integrates with popular add-ons and apps
• Drag and drop automation

Pricing 

*Pricing is based on a user tier of 10 users and an annual billing cycle 

• Free version with limited functionality
• Standard: $8.15/month per user
• Premium: $16/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Best for

Jira is suitable for teams of various sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. But setting up Jira to align with specific workflows and practices can require a significant amount of configuration and customization, which may be overwhelming for some teams. This makes it best for large-scale organizations and teams comfortable working within an Agile environment. 

4. GitHub Issues

GitHub Issues lets you create boards to organize tasks, automate workflows, and link code changes to specific issues. It's essentially a product development and project management tool all in one.

For example, you can spot and create issues, break them into tasks, track relationships, add custom fields, and have conversations with your team. Tables, boards, or roadmaps also let you visualize large projects and automate everything with code. This makes it easy to lead a successful sprint planning meeting because you can better understand what needs to be addressed and accomplished. 

Key features

• Ability to save views for sprints, backlogs, teams, or releases
• Project insights to track progress
• Project templates
• Automatic workflow management
• Issues tracking
• Custom workflows 
• Timeline, tables, and roadmaps view
• AI for code creation and review
• Pull requests, releases, and deploys 
• Backlog management
• Assign teams and contributors

Pricing

• Free version with limited functionality
• Team: $3.67/month per user
• Enterprise: $19.25/month per user

Best for

Software development teams looking for a cost-effective and hands-on solution to Agile project management and the development process.

5. Tara.ai 

Tara.AI is a product delivery platform that helps engineers move through the stages of product ideation to completion. Using the platform's task management and sprint planning tools, you can automate things like task prioritization and get moving on planning your next sprint. 

Sprint Scoping makes it easy to identify potential blockers and gives you insights into task statuses and overload alerts. Scrum masters can also easily view team progress daily or weekly and better understand allocation or resource planning. Plus, the Smart Indicator tool lets you plan future sprints based on your recent output and performance.   

Key features

• Visual dashboard 
• Automatic sprint scheduling 
• Smart indicators for capacity planning
• Multiple workspaces
• Sprint insights for measuring team performance
• Task management capabilities

Pricing

• Insights: $35/month per user
• Issue tracking add-on: +$5/month per user 

Best for

Engineers and software teams looking for a comprehensive solution to automate sprint planning and deliver across their product development lifecycle. 

6. Linear

Linear brings together all the stages of product development into one comprehensive platform. From streamlining issues and forecasting sprints to collaborating on product roadmaps—it lets software teams create and visualize all the elements of their workflow. 

The Cycles feature lets you group work by time to keep up the project and team's momentum. But unlike sprints, cycles aren't tied to product releases—letting your team focus only on what happens next. For example, automatic tracking makes sure any issues are added to your next sprint planning meeting, while unfinished work rolls over to the next cycle automatically. Since too much carryover from previous sprints is often why sprint planning sessions fail, Linear takes care of this by automatically accounting and planning for it. 

Key features

• Custom workflows and roadmaps
• Timeline view
• Project insights dashboard
• Automatic sprint and cycle tracking 
• Ability to predict delays
• Scope creep capability 
• Automated backlog and auto-archival of issues
• Filters and custom views 
• Parent and sub-issues to break up larger tasks

Pricing

• Free version with limited functionality
• Standard: $8/month per user
• Plus: $14/month per user

Best for

High-performing software teams looking to plan ahead for their next sprint, and looking for a less complex setup process than Jia's, for example. 

7. Trello

Trello's drag-and-drop cards, scrum boards, and list system make it easy to create, prioritize, and track tasks. This lets you visualize sprint-related activities, which is essential for effective sprint planning and Kanban or Agile project management. 

Each board represents a project, and lists represent stages of the workflow (i.e., "To Do," "In Progress," "Done"). Cards represent individual tasks or items. This visual representation lets you see the flow of work at a glance and promotes transparency and real-time visibility into the sprint's status. 

Trello is highly customizable, letting you tailor boards, lists, and cards to your specific workflow and sprint planning requirements. Teams can also add labels, due dates, checklists, and custom fields to cards to capture important details and metadata. 

During the sprint planning meeting, teams can discuss each card in the backlog. The project manager facilitates the conversation, helping the team prioritize tasks and move them from the 'Backlog' list to the 'To Do' list for the upcoming sprint. 

Each card in Trello can also contain detailed information, comments, attachments, and task checklists. This level of granularity is great for enabling Kanban teams to add context, updates, and documentation directly to tasks, making it easy to track progress and improve team productivity. 

Key features

• Visual organization system of boards, lists, and cards 
• Drag and drop interface
• Comprehensive task descriptions including comments, attachments, labels, checklists, due dates, and custom fields
• Highly customizable workflows 
• Real-time project status updates and activity feed 
• Task lists, checklists, and attachments within cards 
• AI-generated workflows and templates
• Guest access 
• Integrates with popular add-ons and apps

Pricing 

*All prices are based on an annual billing cycle 

• Standard: $5/month per user 
• Premium: $10/month per user 
• Enterprise: $17.50/month per user

Best for

While Trello excels as a Kanban tool, it's not known for its scalability for larger software development projects and more complex workflows. Some teams may find that they need additional features or integrations to meet their specific needs as they scale. However, for smaller to medium-sized teams or those new to Kanban, Trello offers a user-friendly and effective solution for visualizing and managing sprint planning and sprint-related workflows.

Pro tip: Every app you use for sprint planning works in Switchboard. Cut down on context-switching by populating your designated sprint planning room with everything you need to manage and deliver your best work—and get it all done in one place. 

Sprint planning tools: Keep everything in one place and boost productivity 

You don't have to be a seasoned product owner to know that effective sprint planning tools enable better teamwork. But what you might not know is that while sprint planning meetings help keep teams on track, they aren't worth slowing projects or teams down—especially if you're struggling to find time to meet. 

That's why leaders of highly collaborative teams need to invest in the right tools to run effective sprint planning meetings, including tools that let you do more outside of them.

In this post, we discussed the pricing, key features, and target users for Switchboard, Asana, Jira, GitHub, Tara.AI, Linear, and Trello. All of these collaboration tools can help you make solid project progress by planning better sprints.  

And when you use your favorite tools in Switchboard, you get everything you need in one place so you can make sprint planning meetings shorter and more effective. Or you can cancel them altogether, and boost productivity by getting back more time for focus work. 

Want more productive sprint planning meetings? 
Switchboard's persistent rooms make it easy to get everyone on the same page during the sprint planning process.
Sign up free.