Spreo vs Miro

Miro’s paid plans cover more of a retro than people expect. There’s private mode with a host-controlled reveal, anonymous timed voting with a cap on votes per person, a countdown timer with music, hidden frames, content locking, and “Bring everyone to me”. They work, and you can run a good retro with them.

In both tools the facilitator runs the meeting. Neither one walks the team through it. What differs is how much is already set up when you start, and a few controls Miro doesn’t have.

Click Start Meeting in Spreo and private writing switches on, the board layout locks so nobody drags a zone by accident, and participants’ toolbars change to the collaboration tools. Each person reveals their own notes when they’re ready, one at a time if they like, and the host can reveal a straggler’s. In Miro, ending private mode reveals everyone’s notes at once.

Ready Check gives each participant a button to say they’ve finished, so you aren’t asking “is everyone done?” into silence. Activity Frames keep later exercises hidden until you want them, and one click herds the whole group to the next one. You can also change which tools participants have partway through, add a second host, or turn on Hide Identities for a single exercise.

In Spreo, any sticky note can become an action with an owner and a due date. The owner is emailed when it’s assigned, as the date approaches, and again if it goes overdue. Every action also appears in a team-wide action tracking dashboard, where you can filter, edit, and batch-update them between meetings.

At the next retro you import the open actions into the new board, where they stay synced with the originals. The session starts with what the team said it would do last time. On the Business plan, an action can also become a Jira issue.

Miro’s nearest equivalent is the card. Switch a sticky note to a card and you can give it an assignee and a due date. The card stays on the board it was made on, though. There’s no list of actions across boards and nothing that brings last sprint’s actions into the next retro, so follow-up depends on someone remembering to go back and look.

If the same actions keep reappearing in your retros, this is the difference you’ll notice first.

Both tools connect to Jira in both directions, and the core workflow is the same in each: pull backlog items onto the board, estimate together, send the results back. With Spreo’s Jira integration you can also edit the fields on a Jira card, bulk-update several at once, and turn sticky notes into new issues without leaving the board. Planning poker is built in, with Fibonacci or T-shirt sizing.

Miro goes deeper into Jira. It has a Dependencies app for mapping relationships between issues, widgets that update Jira fields automatically, and Miro boards can be embedded inside Jira issues. If that depth is what you need, Miro is the better choice.

For a straightforward estimate-and-commit session, Spreo covers the workflow on a plan that costs less than a third as much. The numbers are in the pricing section below.

Miroverse has more than 5,000 community templates, including some from well-known agile practitioners and consultants. If you rotate formats every sprint and enjoy browsing, there’s more to find there.

Spreo has 125+ templates, curated and designed for agile meetings, with one per format. The trade-off is choice against speed. With a single sailboat retrospective template, there’s nothing to compare before you start.

Most people in a retro didn’t set up the board, and some have never seen the tool before. In Spreo, double-clicking anywhere makes a sticky note, and it takes the colour of the zone it lands in. Each person writes in their own handwriting font, so you can scan the board and see who said what. We wrote up the thinking behind these choices in the design of a digital sticky note.

Miro is built around the person making the board, with a far bigger toolset for layouts, diagrams, and workflows. For a product roadmap that’s what you want. In a 60-minute retro, time spent finding the right tool is time taken from the conversation.

Then there’s the part that looks frivolous. Spreo has interactive icebreaker games, a jukebox that plays music to the whole board, a spinner, a buzzer, a confetti cannon, and hats for your avatar. Miro has live reactions, hand raising, a spinner wheel, an alignment scale, flip cards, and polls, and they’re useful too. We go further because people say more in a meeting they’re enjoying.