Scrumfast - Free Agile Project Management Tool

Jerry Lupo, Scrumfast, https://www.scrumfast.com

Scrumfast is a free, lightweight alternative to expensive Agile project management tools such as Jira, Trello, Monday and ClickUp. Scrumfast focuses on the basic features of Scrum and offers an intuitive modern user interface.

Web Site: https://www.scrumfast.com
System requirements: Any modern web browser
Pricing: Completely free up to 5 users for all features. $4/month/user after that.
Support: Via a contact link for registered users.

Overview

Scrumfast is a free project management and Scrum tool for small businesses, start-ups and personal projects. It has almost no bells and whistles, but because it is so lean, the user interface is extremely clean and no training is required to get up and running.

Starting on Scrumfast

Register on Scrumfast.com with an email address and name and you will be sent right into the tool (email addresses must be verified within 7 days). You will be asked to name your project, choose from one of several very nice backgrounds, then specify your sprint name and dates. Then, you are led right into creating tasks. The entire process is hassle free and takes about one minute. Scrumfast’s primary user interface consists of 4 pages: Plan, Scrum, Analyze, and Retro.

Plan

The Plan page is where you will initially create sprints, add tasks to the backlog, and ready backlog tasks for the upcoming sprint. A handy optional feature is the ability to see the average pace of each team member, so scrum masters don’t overload them, leading to more predictability. Team members can easily be dragged to tasks to assign them, and multiple tasks can be edited at once simply by holding the Shift key.

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Sprint

The Sprint page is where you and your team will spend most of your time, moving tasks along a customizable set of status columns until the project is complete. The columns are completely customizable, and a gauge at the top shows team progress and whether or not they are on pace to complete their tasks in time.

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Team members can engage in lively discussions with media such as images, rich text and links, and log work hours. They can watch issues and be informed instantly, or daily on any updates. All the standard scrum meta tags are available, including story points or hours, percent complete, assignees, epics, tags, priorities, and auto-linked Github branches and statuses.

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Analyze

The Analyze page contains two of the most basic and important agile management metrics visualizations: the burndown chart and velocity chart. Additional analytics include the number of times tasks have been swapped.

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Retrospective

The Retro pages contain the standard sprint retrospective categories of what went well, what could have been improved, and changes to make for the next iteration. Team members can easily upvote the comments they agree with. Handy statistics about the percent of original points completed and the amount of scope creep will help to put the sprint in perspective.

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Additional Features

Scrumfast has a handy Github integration for developer teams, history views and configurable notifications. Scrumfast also works with Google SSO and API integration is available on request.

Summary

Built for immediate productivity, Scrumfast doesn’t have any bells and whistles. That being said, it hosts a whole complement of typical scrum features. Scrumfast is definitely a terrific option if you are not looking for a feature-rich platform, or if you are just looking for something on a budget. It will allow your remote teams to communicate and plan effectively. However, if you are looking at an advanced tool for a larger organization, Scrumfast wouldn’t fit the bill. Otherwise, it is a great value.

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This article was originally published in March 2021