Here are my top ten Agile tools for teams based on my assessment and use of the tools. Since I’m a Scrum Master, I viewed the tools from the perspective of how I think they would suit me and my teams in their day-to-day work. There are loads of different agile workflow tools out there, and the great thing is that you can assess these tools and choose one that suits your team or organisation.
The article starts with a summary table, then some analysis of each of the tools, and finally my recommendations at the end. I also describe my assessment criteria as well, so you have some idea of what I was looking at in each of the Agile tools.
Summary
| Features | Scrum | Kanban | Backlog Mgt | Reporting | Free Option | Pricing | |
| Jira | Widely used tool. All the standard features you expect. JQL filtering and exporting. Confluence integration. | Supported | Supported | Good support | Standard Agile Metrics | Yes – For up to 10 users | |
| ClickUp | Enterprise level tool. Time reporting, workflow management. Large, powerful and flexible tool. | Supported | Supported | Some support | Some support for Agile metrics | Free limited option. | |
| Favro | Flexible, enterprise level tool for different types of teams | Supported | Supported | Good support | Some support for Agile metrics | 14 Day Free Trial | Starts at $10.2 /month (2 users) up to Enterprise pricing models. |
| Axosoft | Excels as an Agile tool for development teams. | Good Support | Good Support | Good Support | Great! | 14 Day Free Trial | $105 /month (5 users) up to $42,000 /month (2000 users) hosted. You can host yourself as well. |
| LeanKit | Excels as a Lean and Kanban tool for development teams and organisations. | Not Supported | Supported | Good Support | Great! | Free 30 Day Trial. | $20 /user/month |
| Asana | Good for individuals and teams. | Supported | Supported | Supported | Doesn’t include Agile metrics | Free limited option | From $10.99/user/month to $24.99/user/month to Enterprise pricing |
| Wrike | Good, enterprise level tool for multiple teams | Supported | Supported | Supported | Some support for Agile metrics | Free limited option for 5 users. | From $9.80/user/month to Enterprise pricing |
| Teamwork | Flexible, enterprise level tool. | Supported | Supported | Supported | No Agile metrics | Free limited option for 5 users. | From $10 /user/month to Enterprise pricing |
| Nutcache | Flexible tool that also has good functionality for time reporting and invoicing | Supported | Supported | Supported | Limited reporting on Agile metrics | Free for up to 20 users. Basic Scrum and Kanban functionality (no time tracking or invoicing) | From $6/user/mont to $12/user/month |
| YouTrack by JetBrains | Awesome as an Agile tool for development teams. | Good Support | Good Support | Supported | Great! | Yes – For up to 10 users | $4.40/user/month |
1. Jira
An widely used enterprise level application with support for additional features from third parties, external integration. Jira is used extensively by many organisations. Product roadmaps are supported in Jira.
Reporting: Jira provides some great reports, such as a sprint report for Scrum, Burn up and Burn down charts, velocity chart, cumulative flow diagram. Additional reporting is available via JQL (Jira Query Language), which allows for advanced querying of Jira data for reporting and exporting. Jira also supports dashboards to see key reports at a glance.
You are able to customise workflows to an extent in Jira.
Integrates with other Atlassian products, as well as other third party applications including developer tools.
| Pros | Cons |
| Designed for Agile teams, specifically those running Scrum or Kanban. Good backlog management. Standard Agile metric reporting. Widely used and popular tool. JQL queries made it easy to find the data you need. Good documentation and support. | Less features in the standard product, but it does have the essentials. You will need add some plugins to realise the full potential of Jira. |
Link to Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
2. ClickUp
ClickUp promotes their product as the one app to replace them all – an all-in-one productivity and project management app. It is loaded with features, putting it in the same category as Favro and Asana (for this article anyway).
As far as Agile functionality, it does support Kanban and Scrum. For Scrum, it supports Sprint through the Sprint app (ClickApp), which you need to enable to be able to create Sprints. You can also use Kanban. Some reporting for each of these is also available through the Dashboard (although not for the free option).
ClickUp’s strength is that it is a full enterprise productivity app, with support for Agile being just one of the features. Other features include the ability to write and manage documentation, check on the workload of team members, automate workflows, checking progress towards strategic goals, and mind mapping.
| Pros | Cons |
| ClickUp has many features beyond Scrum and Kanban. Is an enterprise-level collaboration tool, that will also suit smaller companies. | Because there are so many features, it may not suit teams that just need a tool to support their Agile way of working. Despite the excellent online help, it can take a little while to get used to the way things work. |
To learn more about ClickUp, see this comparison between ClickUp and Monday.com.
3. Favro
Favro is a very flexible tool, supporting multiple projects and views. So you could put it into the same bucket as Teamwork, Wrike, and Monday.com, but Favro is a little different, for example they do provide reporting on Agile metrics, and with Favro there is better support for backlogs, and linking roadmaps to the stories and tasks that the teams are working on. There are other cool features, such as viewing a story as a Kanban board (you need to try it!).
I have written more about Favro in my review here.
| Pros | Cons |
| A highly configurable enterprise level Agile tool. Offers multiple views of the tasks. Support Scrum and Kanban, including reporting on the metrics. | Can take a little while to wrap your head around the power of it. |
Link to Favro: https://www.favro.com/
4. Axosoft
https://www.axosoft.com
Axosoft is an Agile project management tool that seems to be designed and built by developers for developers. In the one tool you can see your backlog for the new features the team is developing, as well as support tickets, and the team or department’s Wiki. Using this tool you really get the feeling that all the information you need is right there on the screen.
Axosoft supports Scrum and Kanban, provides the reporting you would expect, as well as release planning, custom workflows, multiple projects and teams.
| Pros | Cons |
| A well thought out, flexible Agile tool great for development teams. Supports Scrum and Kanban, provides reporting on the Agile metrics. | Really designed to be used by IT. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used by other teams, but the way it is designed and works is really for IT. |
Link to Axosoft: https://www.axosoft.com/project-management
5. LeanKit
LeanKit from PlanView is a Kanban tool, and a really good one. If your team or organisation runs Kanban, and I mean real Kanban, not just a board with sticky notes, then it is a great tool to consider.
There are a host of features available, and all the key ones you would expect. You can configure the Kanban board. There are a number of task types that can be created, and you are able to link them in various ways. Backlog management is great, you can set the WIP limit on the In Progress column, and the ability to filter on the Kanban board is right at your fingertips. As far as metrics are concerned, you get the reports you would expected, plus a summary of the ‘health’ of the board.
I’ve created a simple project with a few tasks below:
| Pros | Cons |
| Feature-rich for Kanban Teams. Standard metric, plus other team and board indicators. | The screen looks a little dated (in my opinion). Specialist Kanban tools (not suited to Scrum by default). |
Link to LeanKit: https://www.planview.com/products-solutions/products/leankit/
6. Asana
Asana is a flexible project management tool that can be used for all sorts of projects and team sizes. It is great for individuals and small teams, and widely used by freelancers to work with their customers and small companies. It has a pretty wide set of features in the free version.
It can be used by Agile teams – there is a backlog view for the task list, and a Kanban Board view. The documentation is pretty extensive and provides a wide number of use cases – the power in Asana is its flexibility. It isn’t rich in features you might expect from an Agile tool, but to get started it is a good choice.
Reporting is a bit limited and you don’t get the standard Agile reporting tools. However, you can integrate with Nave to get Kanban reports such as cumulative flow diagrams.
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple and flexible Good free option for small teams Multiple views of tasks (Kanban, Backlog, Timeline and Calendar). Applicable across multiple teams, including non-development teams. | Limited reporting for Agile metrics No WIP limit for Kanban teams Needs a bit of configuration to use it for Agile teams. |
Link to Asana: https://asana.com/
7. Wrike
Wrike is similar to products like Teamwork, Asana and ClickUp, in that it isn’t specifically an Agile tool, but a project management tool that can be used for Agile teams. It is quite flexible, offering the ability to configure the Kanban board, and offers different views for the project. Interestingly, estimates cannot be done using story points (only days and hours), but Wrike is able to report using Agile charts such as a cumulative flow diagram and a burn-down chart.
| Pros | Cons |
| Flexible enterprise level tool. | No support for story points |
Link to Wrike: https://www.wrike.com/va/
8. Teamwork
Teamwork, right out of the box, offers a lot to teams that use it. It is a versatile tool that provides the functionality for different types of teams to configure the project to the way that suits them. It can be used for Agile teams, specifically for Scrum, but it can be used for Kanban as well. Even running in Agile, different views are available for the project such as Calendar or Gantt views, plus features like time recording and messaging. The only drawback that I see is the reporting, which lacked the typical Agile metrics.
| Pros | Cons |
| A versatile and intuitive tool that can be used by a variety of different teams. | Although there is a pretty good reporting function, there are none of the Agile metrics included. |
Link to Teamwork: https://www.teamwork.com/
9. Nutcache
Nutcache is an application that supports Scrum and Kanban project, but offers functionality that the other do not – integrated time recording and invoicing. The ability to manage the backlog and sprint planning for Scrum is simple, and Sprint management intuitive. The reporting is limited to burn-down charts for Scrum projects, although you can select tasks, acceptance tests, and effort. Nutcache also supports Kanban projects, with a WIP limit.
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple but powerful Agile team and project management. Budget, time recording and invoicing. | Reporting is limited compared to other applications. |
Link to Nutcache: https://www.nutcache.com/
10. YouTrack by JetBrains
Right out of the box (or right after your first login), YouTrack by JetBrains looks like it was built for developers, for developers. It might not seem as flexible as other tools (like Asana or Favro), but if you’re a development team or department, maybe this is exactly what you need.
The features you would expect from an Agile tool are right there, and can be reached quite easily (easier than Jira, for example). For example, on the view below you can see the simple Scrum or Kanban Board (technically it’s a Scrum Board) you can see that in this Sprint, you have 7 days left, you can adjust the details shown on each issue with a slider, you can quickly access reports, and it has a the online help right there under Knowledge Base.
| Pros | Cons |
| Designed for Agile Teams, right out of the box. Really nice features that are easily accessible. Intuitive interface. Demo project that teaches you how to use YouTrack. | Trying to think of one. |
Link to YouTrack: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
Other Agile tools…
There are more Agile tools available. I reviewed three others that didn’t make the top ten.
I know that there are a lot more out there, so please tell me about your favourites! I will be adjusting this Top Ten through 2021 as I review and rate more.
Monday.com
Monday.com’s offering is similar to Favro, Wrike and Teamwork, a multi-functional application that can be used by many types of teams. In fact when you first start it you need to answer a few questions so that Monday.com can create the right sort of project for you.
Interestingly, for Agile projects you can choose a Scrum Board view, which displays the sprints and stories in a table view, or a Kanban view. But you can’t run Scrum and use a Kanban view. Monday.com explain why, saying that the Kanban view gets a bit too cluttered and confusing for Scrum teams. But a Kanban view is not a part of the Scrum framework, just an accepted convention. In Scrum you can assign story points to the stories and issues, but not in the other project types (which would include Kanban), instead you use time estimates.
| Pros | Cons |
| A large scale, versatile application that can really allow an organisation to get their teams and projects organised. | No reports to support Agile metrics. No Kanban Board view for Scrum. |
To learn more about Monday.com, see this comparison between ClickUp and Monday.com.
Trello
Trello from Atlassian, the same company that makes Jira, is a very simple team workflow tool that supports Scrum and Kanban. Trello is really simple, and doesn’t provide a lot of the features you might want from an Agile tool – but if simple is what you need that it might be perfect! It’s included in the this list because it provides the basic tools to get a small team running.
Why didn’t it make the top ten? I found it too limited out of the box for Agile teams to use, lacking some of the basic features that other tools provide by default.
CodeGiant
CodeGiant’s Agile management tool is actually just one feature of its full offering, as it integrates tools for CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), and documentation all in one tool. For developers, especially for startups, this is a big deal.
Looking at the Agile tools specifically, CodeGiant has good support for both Scrum and Kanban, backlog management tools, and reporting.
Blah https://codegiant.io/
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple, well laid-out tool for your Agile team. Integrates with CI/CD and documentation for your product. | For teams and smaller organisations this is a good solution, but may not have the features for larger scale projects and organisations. |
My Assessment Criteria
- Out of the box support for Agile frameworks: For an Agile tool, I don’t want to have to do too configuration to get a backlog, Kanban or Scrum board.
- Scrum Features: Does the tool have support for sprints? Does the backlog view support planning for future sprints?
- Kanban Features: Does the In Progress column on the Kanban board also you to set a work-in-progress (WIP) limit?
- Reporting: What Agile metrics does the tool allow you to report on? Does the tool provide burn-up an burn-down charts? Cumulative Flow and Cycle Time diagrams?
- Backlog Management: Does the tools have a nice way to manage the backlog, such as being able to prioritise the tasks easily, set the story points, support different task or story types, etc.
- Team Management: Can you assign tasks to more than one person? Can you easily see what tasks are assigned to each member of the team? Can the team members easily see what has been assigned to them?
My Recommendations
This study is based on my personal opinions and experiences with the tools. And of course, they are only my opinions, you are welcome to leave yours in the comments section below.
My recommendations should be viewed the same way – these are my opinions, and you should try a few tools before making your own opinion and purchase.
So, here is what I recommend:
Best Agile tool for Development Teams: YouTrack by JetBrains. Everything you need for your team is right there on the screen. If your team is running Agile, this is the tool.
Best for Enterprises: This is a tough category to choose. The most exciting is Favro. The most versatile is probably Teamwork. Jira should also be mentioned because it is used by so many organisations, – but it is really suited to large software development organisations.
Best for Time Reporting and Invoicing: Nutcache.
Best for large-scale Lean and Kanban: LeanKit
Main Photo by John Hoang on Unsplash
