The first thing to say is that the term “Planning Poker®” is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, the Mike Cohn company. This is why this agile planning practice could be sometimes names differently: scrum poker, agile poker, etc. This article presents a list of free and open source planning poker tools and plugins that are also directly available as online tools.
Planning poker is originally a card game used by Scrum teams to estimate effort or relative size of user stories or features when during sprint planning. Team members estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table. Then the cards are revealed and the estimates are discussed. Discussion is the main interest of playing planning poker, because some developers will share why they vote differently from the consensus. This can be done with paper cards if the team is collocated, but in the case of a distributed Scrum team, you need to use a software to do it. Using a tool also makes it easier to record and remind previous planning estimations.
There are many open source implementations of the Agile planning poker practice. I have decided to present only those who have also an online website or that are built as a plugin for another application like Slack, Jira, Trello or the Azure Boards. If a good tool is missing from this list, do not hesitate to contact us, and we will add it in a future update.
Updates
July 3, 2023
* Added: Planning-poker, PokeR, Planning Poker Plugin for JIRA, Planning Poker Discord bot
* Removed: Azure Boards Estimate (archived), WayneYe/ScrumPoker (archived), StoryPokerBot (deleted, switched to commercial model under new name)
June 1, 2021:
* Added: Hatjitsu, Parabol, PlanningPoker, ScrumPoker
* Removed: Pokrex (archived, switched to commercial model under new name)
Firepoker
Firepoker is an open source planning poker powered by Firebase and AngularJS. It is also available online on a dedicated website.
Websites: https://firepoker.io/, https://github.com/Wizehive/firepoker
Hatjitsu
Hatjitsu is an open source websocket-based planning poker that creates disposable online planning poker rooms for quick and easy estimations. It features a simple interface with an adaptive design that allows working on desktop, tablet and mobile with no login/signup required. Votes are kept hidden until all have voted to prevent coercion. There is an ‘observer feature’ that can watch the planning session without having to vote.
Website: https://github.com/richarcher/Hatjitsu
Panter Planning Poker
Panter Planning Poker is an open source planning poker tool written in Volt.
Websites: https://github.com/koffeinfrei/planning-poker
Parabol Sprint Poker
Parabol Sprint Poker is an open source planning poker tool. It allows synchronizing issues from the backlog management tool and let the Scrum team collaborates on estimation with a fun digital deck. Team members can use the built-in discussion threads to add comments, make note of important details or ask a question without interrupting the conversation. Distributed Agile teams can discuss each estimate asynchronously.
Websites: https://www.parabol.co/agile/sprint-poker/, https://github.com/ParabolInc/parabol
Planning-poker
Planning-poker is a Free / Open source Planning Poker Web App to estimate user stories for your Agile/Scrum teams. You can create a session and invite your team members to estimate user stories efficiently using Fibnoacci or T-Shirt scales. It provides an intuitive UI/UX for voting the story points, showing team members voting status with emojis. The session moderator has full control on revealing story points and restarting the session.
Websites: https://github.com/hellomuthu23/planning-poker, https://planning-poker-agile.web.app/
PlanningPoker
PlanningPoker is an open source fast and simple planning poker Android app. It is designed for to support Android phones, tablets and Android Wear devices. It offers Fibonacci, T-Shirt Size and Ideal Days card decks.
Websites: https://github.com/saschpe/PlanningPoker, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=saschpe.poker
Planning Poker 4 Azure
The Planning Poker 4 Azure web application allows distributed teams to play planning poker using just their web browser and is optimized for mobile. The application does not require any registration at all. The Scrum Master simply creates a team and all other members connect to the team. Observer role is supported too. The observer can watch the game, but cannot estimate. This is an ideal role for a product owner.
Websites: http://planningpoker.duracellko.net/, https://github.com/duracellko/planningpoker4azure
Planning Poker Discord bot
Planning Poker Discord bot is an open source Discord bot for playing planning poker. Once your instance of the bot is added to your chosen server, gather your participants in text channel you wish to play in. It may be a good idea to make a channel specifically for playing planning poker. Once every has there focus in the right channel, to start playing, type !start. The bot will will commence the game. To join the game, each player has to add a reaction to the bot’s last message. To put forward a user story or question to consider, just type !play followed by the question or feature to be considered. All players will then have 30 seconds to send their estimation to the bot via direct message. After 30 seconds the bot will automatically close the question and display all players estimations in the text channel the game was started in. If there are conflicting estimations, players will then have time to discuss there reasoning for the response they gave. After a consensus has been reached and the team has decided on an amount of storypoints / ideal days / etc. for the proposed user story, you can type !storypoints followed by the agreed amount of effort to tell the bot that the question has finished.
Website: https://github.com/Fubinator/planning-poker-discord-bot
Planning Poker Plugin for JIRA
The Planning Poker Plugin for JIRA is a simple open source implementation of planning poker for Atlassian Jira. You can create a new session for every created issue in JIRA. To create a new session you have to view the issue you want to create a poker session for, click on “More” and then on “Create Poker Session”.
Website: https://github.com/VaclavDedik/planning-poker-plugin
PoinZ – Distributed Planning Poker
PoinZ is a simple open source web application for planning poker in distributed teams in an agile setup. It allows to easily estimate user stories. The goal was to provide a ready-to-use tool without the hassle of registration/login, setup and a lot of configuration. The PoinZ client is built with ReactJS and redux. Webpack serves as bundling tool. The PoinZ app backend is a nodeJS express server.
Websites: https://poinz.herokuapp.com/, https://github.com/Zuehlke/poinz
PokeR
PokeR is a realtime planning poker app built with .NET Core and Angular. It features a custom-built frontend with some slick animations to make your next planning session just a little bit nicer. There is also a REST API that you can use to customize the game to your liking. PokeR uses Entity Framework Core in-memory. If you need persistence for some reason, you can swap this out for SQLite or another provider. Data is seeded on startup from the json files in the project’s root directory. You can also edit options via the exposed REST API. Documentation for the API can be viewed in the Swagger UI at /swagger.
Websites: https://planning.scrumptious.dev/, https://github.com/halomademeapc/pokeR
Poker Planner for Slack
Poker Planner for Slack lets you make estimations with planning poker (or scrum poker) directly in Slack, without any need of external software. It can be a useful tool for agile remote teams.
Websites: https://deniz.co/slack-poker-planner/, https://github.com/dgurkaynak/slack-poker-planner
ScrumOnline
ScrumOnline is an open source PHP web app for planning poker. It includes a master view for the ScrumMaster and a simple responsive card view for the team.
Websites: http://www.scrumpoker.online, https://github.com/Toxantron/scrumonline
Slack Pokerbot
Slack Pokerbot is an open source agile scrum poker planning bot for Slack. It is easily hosted on Amazon Web Services Lambda.
Website: https://github.com/nateyolles/slack-pokerbot
Thunderdome Planning Poker
Thunderdome is an open source agile planning poker tool in the theme of battling for points that helps teams estimate stories. Planning sessions are battles, users are warriors and stories are plans. Thunderdome uses WebSockets and Svelte frontend framework for a truly Reactive UI experience
Websites: https://thunderdome.dev/, https://github.com/StevenWeathers/thunderdome-planning-poker
