There are dozens of planning poker tools and they all do the same core thing: hide the votes, reveal them together. Choosing between them is not about the card deck. It is about the nine minutes either side of the vote, and what happens to your data afterwards.
What follows is a set of criteria rather than a scoreboard. Tools in this category change their pricing and features constantly, so a table of competitor claims would be wrong within a quarter. Check each of these against whatever shortlist you have — including GiveItPoints — and the decision usually makes itself.
1. How much friction is there for the people who do not care?
The facilitator will tolerate anything. The eleven other people in the session will not. If joining requires creating an account, verifying an email and picking a password, some of them will still be doing it when the first story is being read.
The bar worth holding to: a teammate should get from link to voting in under thirty seconds, on a phone, without creating anything. Test this with the actual link, in a private window, on a phone — not from the facilitator's already-signed-in browser, which is the one path that always looks fine.
Creating a team needs an account. Joining one does not — teammates open the shared link, type a display name and vote. That is a deliberate split: the facilitator gets persistent teams and session history, and everyone else gets in without friction.
2. Can you change the deck?
Plenty of tools hard-code Fibonacci. That is fine until your team wants powers of two, or t-shirt sizes for roadmap work, or a deck that stops at 8 because anything larger should have been split.
Check whether scales are configurable, whether the setting is per team or global, and whether there is an abstain option. That last one gets overlooked and matters: without it, people who cannot size a story vote a number anyway, and a guessed number pollutes the result more than a visible abstention.
3. Does it meet your backlog where it lives?
If your stories are in Jira, a tool that cannot see Jira means somebody copies titles and descriptions across by hand during the meeting, while eleven people watch.
Worth checking: whether the integration pulls the description and acceptance criteria or only the title, whether it is configured once per organisation or per person, and how the credentials are stored. GiveItPoints looks up issues by key during a session and encrypts the stored API token with AES-256-GCM — details on the Jira integration page.
4. Can you get your data out?
Estimation history is the raw material for improving estimates. A tool that shows you the current session and forgets it is a card deck with a web page attached.
Ask two questions. Is there a record of past sessions, with the votes and not just the final number? And can you export it — CSV, API, anything — without a support ticket? The answer to the second is a decent proxy for how a vendor thinks about your data generally.
5. What happens to the data you put in?
Story titles are not neutral. "Rip out the legacy billing integration before the acquisition closes" is a sentence you may not want on an anonymous free service with no stated retention policy.
Look for, in rough order of importance:
- A privacy policy that names what is stored and for how long.
- GDPR handling: data export and deletion you can actually invoke.
- Whether session data is deleted when a team is deleted, or retained.
- Where the data is hosted, if that is a constraint for you.
GiveItPoints publishes a privacy notice and provides self-service data export and deletion. Whatever you pick, read the equivalent pages before your team's roadmap ends up in them.
6. What does the free plan actually cost?
"Free" in this category means several different things. It can mean genuinely free forever with limits, free until you exceed a participant count, free but ad-supported, or a trial that calls itself free.
The questions that separate them:
- How many participants can join a free session?
- Is session history kept on the free plan, or only live voting?
- What specifically triggers the upgrade prompt?
- If you stop paying, do you lose access to past data or just to new sessions?
Our answers are on the pricing page. Read the equivalent for anything else you are considering, and read the limits rather than the headline.
7. Does it hold up when the network does not?
Real sessions involve someone on hotel wifi. Worth testing before you commit: what happens when a participant's connection drops mid-vote — do they rejoin cleanly, does their vote survive, does the facilitator see them as present or gone? Tools that poll rather than hold a live connection tend to show stale state, and a board that looks empty when it is not will derail a session faster than any missing feature.
The short version
| Check | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Joining | Link, name, voting. Under 30 seconds, on a phone, no account. |
| Scales | Configurable per team, plus an abstain option. |
| Backlog | Pulls your stories in; does not need a copy-paste. |
| History | Past sessions retained, individual votes visible, exportable. |
| Privacy | Stated retention, self-service export and deletion. |
| Pricing | Limits published; leaving does not cost you your history. |
| Resilience | Live connection, clean rejoin, accurate presence. |
Run a real session on your shortlist — an actual sprint's backlog with your actual team, not a demo. Most of these criteria answer themselves within twenty minutes, and the ones that do not were probably not going to matter.