Planning poker tools compared: the 7 criteria that matter
Every online planning poker tool advertises the same three things: free, no signup, real time. Those three sort nothing. Here are the seven criteria that actually separate them, all checkable in a few minutes, without taking our word for any of it.
1. When the paywall shows up
This is the single most common complaint in negative reviews of agile tooling: the price arrives after the work is entered. A tool can be "free" and stop at the sixth participant, the third session of the month, or the moment you export. How to check: look for a pricing page. If there is one, read the free column in full; if there is none, the question is what the service lives on.
2. What happens to sessions after the meeting
A user story title regularly names a client. Depending on the tool, that text disappears on close, lives a few hours, or stays indefinitely in a browsable history. How to check: close the session, reopen its URL the next day. If the content is still there, it is stored, and the retention period belongs somewhere in writing.
3. Third-party scripts the page loads
An ad network, an analytics vendor or a remote font sees every visit, and for a European employer each one is a transfer to document. How to check: browser developer tools, Network tab, reload. Every domain that is not the site itself is a third party.
4. Real accessibility, not the badge
An estimation meeting one team member cannot join is a team problem before it is a compliance problem. Since June 2025 the European Accessibility Act also extends the obligation to many private digital services, and public-sector bodies have been covered for far longer. How to check: put the mouse away and go through a full round with Tab and Enter. If you cannot vote without a mouse, you have your answer.
5. Page weight
A tool whose only job is showing cards needs neither several megabytes of JavaScript nor three seconds to start. Weight is paid on mobile connections, in crowded meeting rooms, and in emissions. How to check: Network tab, transferred size column, bottom of the window.
6. What happens when someone drops off
The most common failure and the least visible on a homepage: does a participant whose wifi cuts out have to rejoin by hand, and does their vote survive? How to check: kill the network for twenty seconds mid-session, then bring it back.
7. Whether the code can be inspected
A public repository does not prove the published code is the code that runs, but its absence makes every claim unverifiable. That is the difference between a promise and a checkable fact. How to check: look for a repository link, and at the date of the last commit.
Exactly what CleanPoker covers
| Criterion | CleanPoker |
|---|---|
| Paywall | None. No paid tier, no participant cap, no session quota. |
| Sessions after the meeting | In memory only, never written to disk, deleted 24 hours after the last activity. |
| Third-party scripts | None. Two technical cookies: language and theme. |
| Accessibility | WCAG 2.1 AA, full keyboard navigation, NVDA and VoiceOver, Lighthouse accessibility 100. |
| Weight | Under 50 KB of shared JavaScript, brotli compressed, measured on every CI run. |
| Dropped connection | Automatic WebSocket reconnect with exponential backoff. |
| Source | Public, MIT licence. |
What CleanPoker cannot do
The list is short and deliberate, but it rules the tool out for some teams. Better to know before opening it than after:
- No integrations with Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear or GitHub: stories are presented out loud.
- No backlog import, and therefore no CSV export of results.
- No history of past sessions, no velocity tracking over time. That is the direct price of criterion 2.
- No voting timer, no permanent teams, no accounts.
If the estimate has to land automatically in a ticket's story points field, a tool built into the issue tracker does that job and CleanPoker does not. If the meeting only needs votes to stay hidden until the reveal, the integration costs more than it returns.
The tools people compare us with
To compare for yourself, the most common alternatives are Planning Poker Online, PlanITpoker, Scrum Poker Online, Kollabe, TeamRetro and Planning Poker Live. Several are excellent products and better equipped than this one on integrations. Run the seven checks above on them rather than trusting our claims or theirs: it takes ten minutes and it settles the question.