PlanITpoker Alternatives - Where to Go When You Outgrow the Free Plan

If you're here, one of two things happened: your seventh teammate joined the session and PlanITpoker politely declined, or you exported a Jira XML file in 2026 and had a small moment about it.

Standard disclosure before we go further — we make a planning poker tool, so this page exists partly because "PlanITpoker alternatives" is a thing people search when they're ready to switch. We'd rather be honest about that and give you a comparison you can actually use than pretend we wrote it out of pure civic duty. Where PlanITpoker is the better call, we'll say so.

PlanITpoker has been a dependable free option for well over a decade, and for a small team it still is. The free plan gives you unlimited rooms and stories, multiple card decks, and CSV/XML story import — all with no signup required for a quick game. That's a genuinely good deal.

Teams usually start looking elsewhere for one of two reasons.

The first is the 7-participant cap on the free plan. It's fine until the session grows: add a product owner, a QA lead, a designer, and a stakeholder who wants to listen in, and you're over the line. The fix is PlanIT Premium at $20/month for unlimited participants, which is reasonable — but it's a real decision, not a rounding error.

The second is that the interface shows its age, and story import is file-based rather than a live connection to your tracker. Exporting XML from Jira to import into an estimation tool feels like a workflow from a different era, because it is.

Here's what to move to, depending on which of those is your problem.

Quick comparison

Verified August 2026. Vendors change pricing — confirm before committing.

If the participant cap is your problem

Pointing Poker and Scrum Poker Online both remove the limit entirely and stay free. Pointing Poker is ad-supported; Scrum Poker Online is open source and ad-free, with QR code room sharing and the option to self-host.

Neither has issue tracker integration, so you keep the manual-entry workflow you already have with PlanITpoker's CSV import — you just stop paying attention to headcount. If PlanITpoker's free tier works for you in every way except the cap, these are the shortest moves.

With PlanningPoker.live, joining a room is always free and unlimited — only creating one consumes a credit. So participant count is never the thing you're managing.

If file-based story import is your problem

This is where the newer tools separate themselves. PlanningPoker.live connects directly to Jira and Linear: pull issues into the session, estimate them, and write the story points back without touching a file. Parabol offers similar live integrations across Jira, GitHub, and Linear. PlanningPoker.com integrates with Jira.

The practical difference is per-session. Exporting XML, importing it, estimating, then transcribing results back is maybe ten minutes of overhead each time. A live integration makes that close to zero. Over a year of fortnightly refinement, that adds up to a working day.

If you want to stop context-switching out of the call

Most estimation happens during a video call, and most tools ignore that — you share a link, everyone leaves the call view, and the facilitator loses the room.

PlanningPoker.live runs as an embedded app inside Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Webex, so the session happens in the meeting rather than beside it. If your refinement is always a call, this matters more than any feature comparison table suggests.

Where we're the wrong choice

The obligatory honesty section, which on most pages like this is one sentence long and buried.

PlanningPoker.live is not free for unlimited use. Creating a room costs a credit; you get 5 at signup plus 1 a month, and bundles are one-time ($9 for 7, $17 for 15, $50 for 50) rather than a subscription. So if your team is six people who estimate twice a week and PlanITpoker's free tier already covers you completely, switching to us means paying for something you currently get for nothing. Pointing Poker or Scrum Poker Online are the honest answers in that case, and we'd rather you end up somewhere that fits than bounce off us in a fortnight.

We also don't have a native Azure DevOps integration yet — there's a documented workflow that handles it well, but it is a workflow, not a button.

The bottom line

Staying on PlanITpoker is a perfectly good decision if you're a team of seven or fewer and don't mind file-based import.

If the cap is the issue and cost matters most, move to Pointing Poker or Scrum Poker Online.

If you're paying the $20/month anyway, compare that against tools with live tracker integration — at that price point you should be getting more than unlimited seats.

If your sessions happen inside a video call and involve Jira or Linear, PlanningPoker.live is built for exactly that shape of team.

Start a free estimation session — joining is always free.