Alternatives

Both tools run retros. EasyRetro uses a column-based layout — you create columns (typically 3-4), participants add cards, vote, and discuss. It’s structured, predictable, easy to understand, and has zero learning curve.

Ludi does that too. Pick a Start/Stop/Continue template, a Mad/Sad/Glad, or a 4Ls, and your team gets a structured retro with private writing, voting, grouping, and actions. You’re not giving up that workflow by choosing Ludi.

What you gain is the canvas underneath. In EasyRetro, customisation is limited to changing a column title, maybe a colour, a background image. In Ludi, you can change the layout, the zones, the colours, the shapes, the images, the entire visual structure. A “Sailboat” template in EasyRetro is columns labelled Wind, Anchor, Rocks, Island. In Ludi, it’s an actual visual sailboat on a canvas where the spatial metaphor helps the team think differently about what’s driving them forward and what’s holding them back. Participants can visually drag, group, and connect stickies together.

What Columns Can and Can’t Do

Here’s the thing about a column-based format: it works, but it also constrains.

When you give people three columns (What Went Well, What to Improve, Action Items), they’ll write short statements that fit those headings. That’s the format doing its job. But it’s also the format setting a ceiling on what gets contributed.

Retrospectives are supposed to surface the things teams don’t normally talk about. That requires different prompts, different frames, different ways of thinking about the same sprint. A sailboat retro isn’t just columns with nautical labels — on a visual canvas, the spatial metaphor genuinely changes how people approach the question. A timeline-based retro invites people to map the sprint as a story. A health check asks people to score how they feel, not just what they think.

Columns can’t do any of that. A card in a column is a card in a column, regardless of the heading. The format doesn’t invite exploration, lateral thinking, or expression beyond a single line of text. And when the format is limited, the contributions are limited — which means the discussion is limited, which means the actions coming out of it are limited.

This matters more than it sounds. The teams that get the most out of their retrospectives aren’t the ones with the best voting system — they’re the ones where the format itself draws out richer, more honest contributions. That’s what a visual canvas with varied templates, spatial grouping, and engagement features is designed to do.

”Almost all solutions I’ve reviewed, they are more like a Kanban board. You add tickets, goes straight into a fix column. Creative boards? Can’t. It’s just columns with +/- basically.”

— Florent de Luca, Agile Coach (reviewed 10+ competitors before choosing Ludi)

For teams running basic retros with no facilitation needs, EasyRetro works. For teams that want their retros to drive real improvement, with structured facilitation, honest contributions via visual prompts and private writing, and actions that get followed up, Ludi is the better EasyRetro alternative.

EasyRetro cannot do sprint planning or estimation. It’s a retrospective board — there are no planning poker templates, no story point estimation, no backlog import, no capacity planning. If your team needs to estimate and plan sprints, you need a separate tool.

Ludi has dedicated sprint planning and estimation templates with automated planning poker (Fibonacci and T-shirt sizing). On the Business plan, the Jira integration pulls backlog items onto the board, the team estimates collaboratively, and story points sync back to Jira automatically. The entire planning session (discussion, estimation, and Jira updates) happens in one place.

EasyRetro has no team health check functionality. You could hack together columns labelled with health check categories, but there’s no structured exercise, no scoring, no trend tracking.

Ludi has dedicated team health check templates: structured exercises where team members rate different aspects of their work (delivery pace, team spirit, learning, etc.) and discuss the results. It’s a proper facilitated exercise, not a column workaround.

EasyRetro is a retro tool. You can use it for simple brainstorming by renaming columns, but it wasn’t designed for workshops, story mapping, roadmapping, or any other collaborative exercise.

Ludi’s freeform canvas supports all of these. Story mapping templates, Lean Canvas, Crazy 8’s, roadmap timelines, and dozens of workshop formats are available out of the box. If your team runs any kind of collaborative session beyond retrospectives, EasyRetro simply doesn’t cover it.