DEV Community: Miquel Las Heras

10 Best Planning Poker Plugins for Jira (2026)

Miquel Las Heras — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:11:06 +0000

Planning development tasks has become more important than ever. In the AI era, analyzing dev tasks in advance is what gives the AI agent the right context. I wrote about why that changes how much planning is worth in planning poker in the AI era.

Planning with your team using a gamified technique like Planning Poker is a great choice to engage your team and improve the quality of those estimates. Having everyone thinking about a task in a relaxed environment can help raise issues and ensure that the full context of the tasks is taken into account. That cuts down the downtime of the development process.

I am Miquel, and I have been running Planning Poker Online for 6 years, with 147,000 monthly users, including teams at Google.

After testing 17 Planning Poker apps in Jira, one thing is clear to me: If you use Jira and Planning Poker, the best alternative is installing an integrated Jira plugin.

Why a Planning Poker Jira plugin is better than a standalone web Planning Poker:

Jira plugins run inside Jira, so your company doesn't need to set up a new vendor or create new user accounts.
Jira plugins integrate much better with your Jira flow:
- Issue synchronization (save estimates automatically)
- Context: you can have all the context required for the estimation discussion right there

There are many Planning Poker plugins for Jira, in this post I have tried to list the ones that I think are best in an honest way. This is not an auto-generated post, I have actually spent a lot of time analyzing the tools and writing the reviews, I hope you find it useful.

What is the best Planning Poker plugin for Jira?

Short answer:

For most of the cases -> Gamified tool like Planning Poker Online by We Agile You
For Agile Suite integration -> A planning poker tool that is part of a suite like the Agile suite by DevSamurai.
For occasional meetings -> A free alternative like Planning Poker Agility by Agile Pulse

Planning Poker Jira Plugins Compared

Tool	Live voting	Async voting	Hybrid voting	Cloud Fortified
Planning Poker Online	✅	✅	✅	✅
Magic Estimations	✅	✅	✅	✅
Agile Poker	✅	✅	✅	✅
SprintPoker	✅	✅	❌	✅
Async Poker	❌	✅	✅	✅
Planning Poker®	✅	✅	❌	✅
AgileBox by DevSamurai	✅	❌	❌	✅
Foxly	✅	✅	❌	✅
Planning Poker Agility	✅	❌	❌	✅
Free Planning Poker	✅	✅	❌	❌

Every value checked against the app's Atlassian Marketplace listing on 29 July 2026.

How I evaluated the different Planning Poker Jira tools

I installed and tested 17 planning poker tools from the Atlassian Marketplace. These are the 10 worth your time.

Here are the 6 criteria:

Team Experience

How your team feels and engages in planning poker sessions can be highly determined by the tool you choose.

Seamless Adoption

Game facilitators and especially developers must be able to create and join games effortlessly.

Integration with Jira

This includes adding issues to games and synchronizing estimates.

Scalability

Is the tool prepared to handle a big enterprise?

Async/Live Modes

Does the app allow live voting sessions as well as async voting?

Vendor Reputation

The trust of the company behind the tool: security reliability, etc.

Live or Async Estimation in Jira

Every plugin below is built around one of these, so it is worth deciding before you install anything. Live voting puts the team in a meeting together. Async voting lets each developer vote on their own time, and the facilitator reveals the results once everyone is done. Plenty of teams end up doing both.

I wrote up the trade-offs in detail in async vs live planning poker. This post sticks to which Jira plugins support which.

The Biggest Problem with Planning Poker Tools

From my experience, most tools fail for one reason:

👉 They feel like filling spreadsheets.

They have a lot of features, integrations, etc. But when the team actually starts the planning meeting they feel like they are filling in bureaucratic forms.

This creates a:

👉 Boring environment for the humans in the meeting

Each person is less engaged and feels more isolated from the team, and they start scrolling social media in a separate window.

Best Planning Poker Plugins for Jira

1. Planning Poker Online for Jira by We Agile You

Full disclosure: this is my own app, the one I mentioned at the start of the post. I put it first because I believe it is the best option for most teams, you can check that against the others yourself.

Stands out as a tool that feels like a game. The game screen uses a table layout imitating a poker table with the players around it.

It has a clean and simple layout, maintaining all the capabilities you would expect from a professional tool.

It feels like a game: Sometimes planning meetings might be boring, teams using this tool report more engagement and having more fun while doing estimates. The most loved feature in product reviews is throwing emojis at other players.
Live, Async or Hybrid: All games are live, async or hybrid by default. No need to choose between modes or export issues from one place to another. A very intuitive UI allows users to vote async, live or hybrid as they require.
Seamless adoption: Once the plugin is installed, the users can start creating games and invite players with a single click, no need to fill in long forms to get started. Advanced settings are also available for teams that require more customization.

The web version of this tool has been running for more than 6 years, with 147,000 monthly users including teams at Google.

Also: Feels like a game, Sync results to issues, Free voting (vote without issues), Scales for big corps, Fun Features, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.), Dark Theme.

The full feature list covers the rest, including what differs between the Jira plugin and the web version.

2. Magic Estimations by Magic Apps

Excels with a very functional lanes layout, providing a great overview of the already voted issues. Comparing the current voting issue with the issues already present on the board allows teams to have a quick reference of sizing before estimating.

This app is great for teams using the Magic Estimation technique and it also provides 3 other modes: consensus-based Planning Poker, Async Poker games, and a value-less Relative game. The mode is chosen when you create the game, and async games can be finished with a guided live voting session.

Also: Magic estimation, Lanes Layout, Sync results to issues (manual), In game chat, Relative estimation (no specific sizes), Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.), Dark Theme, Silver partner.

3. Agile Poker for Jira by Appfire

This is the perfect fit for organizations with teams using diverse estimation methods. Apart from the classic interactive planning poker, the app also includes Asynchronous, Relative and Bucket sizing modes.

Strongest points of this app:

It is in the Appfire ecosystem: Teams can benefit from great documentation and support, and special features like Appfire AI.
Best practices from agile theory. Appfire is the vendor with the Planning Poker trademark. They also follow well-known methodologies like Magic Estimation or Asynchronous estimation based on Wideband Delphi.

Also: Sync results to issues, Cloud Migration Assistance, Scales for big corps, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.), Platinum partner.

4. SprintPoker by Agile Pulse

The best option for data-driven teams, this app gives you a lot of useful context during the voting session: live voting stats, AI-generated complexity insights, and matching against similar issues you have already estimated.

This app is great for teams that like to have data at estimation time. Async runs as a separate mode rather than alongside the live game. It also has a strong background as it is the premium successor to Planning Poker Agility.

Also: Sync results to issues, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.).

5. Async Poker by Do Async

Full async teams will love this app, it has a great integration with Slack and email making async team collaboration really effective.

Do Async is a Silver Marketplace partner with SOC 2, which is great to ensure the trust of this vendor.

It works great also with hybrid teams providing an "end in live" guided flow for when a team wants to finish async voting in a live session.

Also: Sync results to issues, Comms integration, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.), Silver partner.

6. Planning Poker® by Appfire

This is the original Planning Poker by Appfire. This is a great option for organizations looking for an app with a long track record that has proved its scalability over the years.

It also benefits from the Appfire ecosystem. It might have a simpler UI than Agile Poker, with fewer estimation modes to choose from, removing the noise that several modes might produce.

This is the go-to option for organizations that want big-vendor support and a robust solution tested over time by many users.

One of the strongest points of this app is the integration with the Jira flows, allowing users to vote directly inside issue views, synchronization of issue comments, etc.

Also: Sync results to issues, Custom image in cards, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.), Platinum partner.

Best Planning Poker Tool with Agile Suite Integration

7. Agile Planning Poker, Retrospectives, Daily Standup for Jira by DevSamurai

It is a single app providing planning poker, retrospective, and daily standup apps, 3 in one.

Great for teams that are not looking only for a planning poker app but also want retros and dailies.

Regarding their planning poker app, teams will find a great app that allows project-scoped plannings or global (multiple projects). Another feature worth noting is customized card images.

Also: Retrospectives, Daily standup, Sync results to issues, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.), Gold partner.

Best for Prioritization Beyond Story Points

8. Foxly by Appfire

Great tool that can be used for all stakeholders, not only dev teams. Foxly is a project management tool focused on prioritizing. It allows users to estimate not only difficulty but also other metrics like "Impact" or "Ease".

Company managers that want to make data-based decisions will find it very useful, as it provides useful data to identify impactful issues or quick wins thanks to their dashboards, like the Priority Matrix.

Also: Great integration with Jira, Platinum partner.

Best for Occasional Meetings (Free Alternatives)

9. Planning Poker Agility by Agile Pulse

It is the free version of their other plugin: SprintPoker. It does not have all the features of the premium plugin, but it works well for teams looking for a simple yet fully usable planning poker tool.

Also: Free, Custom sizing (Fibonacci, t-shirt, etc.).

10. Free Planning Poker by Smart Guess

This option offers a great in-issue estimation panel that allows async or live voting for free.

It is the free version of the other plugin by Smart Guess: Predictive Planning Poker for Jira. Great option for when organizations want to translate estimates into metrics that can improve predictions of when work will actually be done.

Also: Predictability metrics.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which planning poker plugin for Jira is free?

Two of the apps in this list are free with unlimited use: Planning Poker Agility by Agile Pulse and Free Planning Poker by Smart Guess. Both are the free versions of a paid app from the same vendor, so you get the basics without a trial clock. Most of the other apps in the list are paid, usually free for small teams on the Atlassian pricing tiers.

Can you do async estimation in Jira?

Yes. Eight of the ten apps here support async voting, where each person votes at their own time and the facilitator reveals the results once everyone is done. If you also want to close the gap on the issues where the team disagreed, look for hybrid voting: Planning Poker Online, Magic Estimations, Agile Poker and Async Poker all let you start async and finish in a live session. For which mode suits your team in the first place, see async vs live planning poker.

What does Cloud Fortified mean for Jira apps?

Cloud Fortified is an Atlassian badge for apps that meet extra requirements in security, reliability and support on top of a standard Marketplace listing. It is a reasonable proxy for "this vendor can be trusted with an enterprise install". Nine of the ten apps in this list carry it; only Free Planning Poker by Smart Guess does not.

How do planning poker plugins sync with Jira?

Once the team agrees on a number, the plugin writes it back to the issue's story point field, either automatically when the round closes or after the facilitator confirms the result. That is the main reason to use a plugin instead of a standalone web tool: nobody has to copy estimates between two systems afterwards.

Verdict: Choosing the Right Tool

For teams that estimate occasionally: Use Planning Poker Agility by Agile Pulse, free and it has all the basic features to run planning poker estimates
For teams looking for an agile suite: Use the Agile suite by DevSamurai, it provides retros and dailies all in one app
For the majority of the teams: Use Planning Poker Online by We Agile You, it offers live, async and hybrid modes in an intuitive and gamified UI.

6 years building Planning Poker Online: from a weekend project to 147K users (and 3 mistakes I had to fix)

Miquel Las Heras — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:05:22 +0000

In early 2020 I built a real-time planning poker app over a weekend, almost by accident. Six years later, 147,000+ people use it every month, including teams at Google.

This is a story about Firebase, Hacker News, a €60k mistake, and what I'd do differently if I started today. Especially relevant if you're building a SaaS in 2026 and worried about LLM-era discovery.

The 2020 origin

In 2019 I was working as a frontend developer in a distributed team. At the start of every sprint we would always do the same estimation meeting: how many difficulty points each task should have, how to split them, etc. The "sprint planning meeting".

To not influence others, each team member has to say their estimation secretly, and on the count of 3 we all show our estimations and discuss the results. But… how do you do that in a video call?

Those sessions felt quite unprofessional and boring. To cast the votes we all wrote our estimations in the meeting chat at the same time. I am sure some team members cheated and waited until they saw other estimations to cast theirs xd. In a previous company we were using fingers in the camera — imagine trying to see all the fingers of a whole team and count estimation points xD.

Back in 2019, Google Firebase was becoming very popular. I was especially interested in the real-time capabilities — they had just launched Firestore and I wanted to give it a try. I thought it would be fun to build a small tool for my team so we could do proper estimations.

After shipping the first version of the planning poker app (early 2020), I was a bit shy or concerned about presenting it to my team and company, so I decided not to. Instead I posted it on Hacker News, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, etc. To my surprise the post on Hacker News gained big traction, and in 1 week I had 2,000 users!

Early decisions

A few early decisions shaped everything that followed:

Choosing the domain for SEO

While many companies pick their brand name for the domain, I decided to pick a domain name in SEO terms. I saw that "online planning poker" or "planning poker online" were highly used to find tools like mine, and planningpokeronline.com was available, so I went for it.

This had a great benefit in the early days: very quickly we ranked #1 in search results, which brought us a lot of traffic. But for the long term, it has been a problem, as we don't have a strong brand name for our app.

This has been even more painful now in AI times. LLMs are good at identifying tokens: when they find a brand name they know it is a brand and they store every occurrence in their models. We are usually mentioned as "planning poker online", which is often not related to our brand but to the technique itself.

Posting on Hacker News, 2k users in a few days

Posting on Hacker News got big attention. In just 2 weeks we went from a freshly shipped prototype with 0 users to 2k users.

Those users gave me really good feedback directly. Having a dedicated tool to run those meetings made teams feel more engaged and professional, and they were having fun. That's when I realized I was onto something.

Onboarding the designer, the professional touch

The app was useful, but you could tell it was a prototype made by an indie developer.

When Oriol, our designer, joined the project, the app became a real professional app. I remember looking at the site and thinking, OMG this is a real app. It wasn't the first app I'd launched publicly, but this one felt really mine, as I had started everything from scratch.

This is how our landing page looked in the early 20s:

Our landing page in the early 2020s.

Simple & Fun: The Real-Time Poker Table

This has been the key decision point in our success: while other apps felt like filling boring spreadsheets, we made a tool that felt like a real game.

You can see when a player joins a room because their avatar appears next to the table. When they cast their vote you see their cards turning blue, and when showing the cards, a nice flipping animation comes in revealing the results of the voting round.

We even made it possible to throw stuff at other players around the table, like you would shoot Nerf darts in an office. You can throw whatever emoji you want, or predefined objects like Nerf darts, paper balls, or paper planes.

This is a screen of our landing page from 2022 where you can see how our table looked back then — it hasn't changed very much:

Our landing page in 2022, the real-time poker table design we still use.

The no-signup decision

Making the app simple has been a top priority for us.

Create a game in 2 clicks: trying our app with the team just needs 2 clicks. The first one brings you to the create game form, the second submits the form with default configs and redirects to the game ready to play.

Developers just join and play: when they click the game link shared by the facilitator, they just see one small popup asking for a display name, and they can start estimating issues right away.

Making it easier for the facilitator has been key, but making it easy for developers has been even more important. We tried very hard to stay out of their way and let them just run their estimation meetings with ease.

This has some downsides, obviously. For example, it makes remarketing harder: as we don't collect email addresses we can't contact our churned or inactive users. But I think it has been a good decision so far.

6 years timeline

As the app became more popular, some people in my company saw on my LinkedIn that I was sharing stuff about my Planning Poker app, and they wanted to try it.

This became crucial to fine-tune the app: I was a real user of the app in every sprint. In every meeting I could see something to improve and write it down in a note.

The app started to grow massively. By April 2020 we released the premium plans. I still remember the first customer — it was amazing seeing someone willing to pay for something I built. This was the "proof of concept": we had not only a good tool but also a potential business.

The business kept growing really organically for years.

Listening to our users: The Jira Plugin

Some users asked if the app could integrate better with their Jira. So we decided to build a dedicated version of the app for Jira.

Having our app running inside Jira has great benefits for companies:

The Planning Poker table runs directly inside Jira, so there is no need to switch to another app.
Estimations sync seamlessly with Jira issues.
They don't need to set up a new vendor in their company, which usually means dealing with new data providers, new user accounts, an approval process, and so on.

We released the plugin in March 2024, and many of our web users switched to it. It was a big success. They were giving us great feedback, so it became a priority to make it the best planning poker app on the Atlassian Marketplace.

The Jira plugin today: the poker table running inside Jira.

The Retrospectives app

In February of this year (2026) we launched the final version of our Retrospectives app; both the web app and Jira plugin versions launched together. Our customers are loving it; the feedback has been really good.

A retrospective is an Agile ritual that runs after each sprint, where the team analyzes what went well and what didn't, and defines actions to improve their performance.

Our retros app follows the same principles: it feels like a game, and it is simple and fun. You can also throw stuff at teammates here! xD

We are actively working on improving this app. Don't hesitate to send feedback!

What we changed our minds about

The "big tool"

After the success of the Planning Poker app we thought we could create a full project management tool (something like our own Jira for Agile companies). We changed our minds and decided to make standalone apps for Planning Poker and Retrospectives. Here's why:

Each app keeps the maximum simplicity. Just one button to create the planning poker or retro and done.
Teams can plug and play apps easily. They can purchase the app they need for the time they need it.
Companies can keep using their existing project management tools: Jira, Asana, Linear, Trello, Todoist, etc.
It makes it easier for us to improve and simplify each app.

Paid Media

When I talked to other founders, many of them advised me: "Now that you have a working business model you need to invest money in scaling up", so that's what I did. I spent more than €60k in just one year on Google Ads only to see it didn't work. "Keep waiting, it will improve," I was told. You know what? Deleted money.

I realised that, at least for our case, we need to appear on the screens of our potential customers in the moment they are searching for the tool. So SEO was our best organic channel. Which brings me to the third thing we had to change.

Relying only on SEO

Our SEO was so good (we are the first result for "planning poker" in many search engines) that we thought it was the only thing we needed. And this worked well for many years, but now in AI times it has been a disadvantage.

To people starting now I would recommend picking the brand name for the domain and making sure LLMs know about your brand and recommend it. Although nowadays there are so many things changing that who knows which would be the best choice in the future :)

What we got right and stuck with

"Our app has to feel like a game, not like filling bureaucratic forms"

This has been a key differentiation point for us, and it has been our best feedback since day 1.

In our feedback tool, users report things like:

"team loves it and promotes conversations"
"Stays out of the way in a really nice way. Only does its job. Great work!"
"Easy to understand :) nice little robot <3"
"Feels really simple to use and can be overviewed quite nicely"

And the most loved feature, by far, is throwing stuff at colleagues xD:

"Throwing emotes to colleagues"
"I like throwing things at people"
"throwing the emojis to people is hilarious"
"it's super easy to use, team really likes the ability to 'throw' things at each other"

Our poker table today, same philosophy as day 1.

Closing reflection

I always loved coding and crafting the best stuff I could for others to use. Seeing more than 147,000 people using the apps we built feels amazing and keeps me wanting to improve them every day. (Don't worry, we won't start adding features without any sense xd.)

I am always happy to talk, so feel free to reach me on LinkedIn or try our apps: Planning Poker Online and Retrospective Online.