QRetro vs Retrium

The short version

Retrium is a retrospective specialist built around guided facilitation: it walks a facilitator through each phase of a session, which makes it a common choice for teams whose Scrum Master is new to the job.

It is priced per Team Room — the space where a team starts retrospectives and keeps its history and action items. Team is $39 per Team Room per month, Business is $59 per Team Room per month ($715 per Team Room per year, billed annually), and Enterprise is by quote. Users are unlimited on every plan, and there is no free tier — only a 30-day trial.

QRetro is free to use, with no per-team fee and no trial to run out.

Side by side

Where Retrium is the better choice

Guided facilitation. Retrium's strongest feature is that it tells the facilitator what to do next — gather, group, vote, discuss — and enforces the phases. A team whose facilitator is learning the job gets real value from that, and QRetro leaves the structure to whoever is running the session.

Compliance paperwork. Access to a SOC audit report and SIG Lite documentation on the Business plan, plus custom security and contract review on Enterprise. If your procurement process asks for those documents, Retrium has them ready.

Facilitation as a service. Training sessions, personalised onboarding, a dedicated customer success manager and a discount on their facilitation coaching. This is a different kind of product than a tool you sign up for and use.

Team Radar. A well-developed health assessment with history, which is more mature than QRetro's health checks.

Where QRetro is the better choice

The Team Room fee scales badly. $39 per month buys one team a room. Five teams is $195 a month, or $2,340 a year, before anyone runs a single retrospective. QRetro has no per-team charge, so the cost of adding a sixth team is zero.

There is a free plan at all. Retrium's trial is 30 days, after which the tool stops. A team that runs a retrospective once a sprint gets two sessions out of the trial and then has to justify a purchase order.

Planning poker in the same tool. Estimation runs on the same accounts and boards, with task import from Jira and Linear. Retrium does not do estimation, so that is a second subscription.

Access from your assistant. QRetro exposes retrospectives over the Model Context Protocol, so Claude, Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code can query boards, health trends and open action items directly. See the MCP integration guide.

One thing worth knowing about Team Rooms

A Team Room is a container, not a subscription seat, and Retrium lets you delete a finished room to free the slot for another team within the same billing period. That makes the pricing more flexible than it first looks for organisations with short-lived project teams — but it also means someone has to manage rooms, and deleting one takes its retrospective history with it.

Retrium states that it does not issue refunds of any kind, which is worth reading before an annual purchase.

Choosing between them

Take Retrium if your facilitators need the session structured for them, if procurement wants SOC and SIG documentation, or if you want training and coaching alongside the tool.

Take QRetro if you have more than two or three teams and the per-room fee is the blocker, if you need a tool that stays usable after 30 days without a purchase order, or if you want retrospectives and estimation in one place.

Getting started

Open a board from a format your team knows — Mad Sad Glad, Starfish, Lean Coffee, KALM or any of the 52 templates — and share the link. Participants join from the browser without creating an account.

Frequently asked questions

Does Retrium have a free plan? No. There is a 30-day free trial, after which a paid plan is required.

How much does Retrium cost? $39 per Team Room per month on the Team plan and $59 per Team Room per month on Business ($715 per Team Room per year, billed annually). Enterprise is by quote. Users are unlimited on all plans.

What is a Team Room in Retrium? The space where one team starts retrospectives and keeps its history and action items. It is the unit Retrium bills for, and deleting a finished room frees the slot for another team in the same billing period.

Does QRetro charge per team? No. There is no per-team or per-seat fee.