Why planning poker tools charge money at all
Most planning poker tools are free to start and charge for the things a team eventually needs: removing ads, unlimited sessions, or a paid Jira app on top of a paid Jira instance. None of that is unreasonable - it's just money a team can skip entirely, because none of it changes what a planning poker session actually needs: a room, private votes, and a simultaneous reveal.
How the numbers above are sourced
Every price in the comparison is pulled directly from the vendor's own pricing page, with the URL and the date it was checked shown under each row - no estimates, no "starting at" guesses. Three different pricing models are represented:
- Per-user SaaS (Parabol) - cost scales directly with team size.
- Flat per-owner (Scrum Poker Online) - one account, held by whoever creates the room, covers every participant.
- Jira-instance-tiered (Agile Poker for Jira) - priced by your whole Jira instance's user count, not just the people estimating, which is the "plugin tax" of stacking a paid app on a paid tool.
Pricing changes. If a number here looks stale, the source link is right there to check - and worth a message our way so we can update it.
The honest tradeoff
A paid tool isn't buying better estimates - Scrum Poker works the same whether the room costs $0 or $40 a year: private votes, one reveal, a conversation about the spread. What the paid tiers usually buy is ad removal, integration depth (a Jira plugin lives where your tickets already are), or scale features a very large organization needs. For a team that just wants to run planning poker, that's real money for problems most teams don't have.