The top tools for agile teams do four jobs: they track the work, carry the team’s conversation, hold its written knowledge and help it review how things went. For tracking, the usual choices are Jira, Azure Boards, GitHub Projects, Linear and Trello. For conversation it is Slack or Microsoft Teams. For documents and diagrams, Confluence and Miro. The best choice is nearly always the one that fits what the team already uses for its code and its email, and for a customer the question that matters is whether you can see into it.
How these tools were chosen
This is not a ranking. The tools below are ones in common use by software teams, and each was checked on its vendor’s own website in October 2026 to confirm it is still sold and maintained. Two products named in the 2021 version of this article have changed: FunRetro is now called EasyRetro, and VersionOne, an enterprise planning product now sold as Digital.ai Agility, has been left out because it is aimed at much larger organisations. Prices change often, so none are quoted here. Where a free plan is mentioned, it is one the vendor advertised at the time of writing.
Tracking the work
A tracking tool holds the list of everything to be done (the backlog), shows what is in progress on a board and records who did what and when. It is the one tool an agile team cannot work without.
| Tool | Who makes it | Fits best when |
|---|---|---|
| Jira | Atlassian | You want detailed workflows and reporting, or several teams share one system |
| Azure Boards | Microsoft, part of Azure DevOps | Your code and release process are already in Azure DevOps |
| GitHub Projects | GitHub, owned by Microsoft | Your code is on GitHub and you want planning next to it |
| Linear | Linear | A product team wants a fast, opinionated tracker with little setup |
| Trello | Atlassian | A small team or a non-technical group wants a simple board |
Jira organises work into backlogs, sprints and boards, with built-in reports. It is highly configurable, which is its strength and its cost: a Jira that has been customised without discipline becomes slow to use and hard to read. Atlassian offers a free plan. One change to know about: Atlassian has announced the end of its self-hosted Data Center products, Jira among them. New customers have not been able to buy Data Center subscriptions since 30 March 2026, and the products reach end of life on 28 March 2029. For a new team, Jira now means Atlassian’s cloud service.
Azure Boards provides work items, boards, backlogs, sprint planning and dashboards as part of Azure DevOps, alongside code repositories and build pipelines. Because a work item can be linked to the code change, the build and the release that delivered it, it suits teams on the Microsoft stack. Microsoft’s Basic plan is free for the first five users and charged per user after that, and stakeholders who only need to view and comment can be added free.
GitHub Projects sits on top of GitHub Issues. An issue describes a piece of work, and a project shows issues as a table, a board or a timeline, with custom fields and an iteration field for planning in fixed periods. It is the natural choice when the code already lives on GitHub.
Linear is a newer tracker built around issues, projects and cycles (its name for sprints). It has a free plan and charges per user on its paid plans. Teams choose it for speed and for having fewer options to configure.
Trello is a board of lists and cards with built-in automation. It has a free plan and paid plans charged per user. It is the easiest of the five to learn and the first to be outgrown by a software team, because it is a general-purpose board that was not designed around backlogs, sprints and releases.
A physical board still works. If the whole team is in one room, a wall, sticky notes and marker pens show the state of the work at a glance and cost almost nothing. Keep a digital record as well, so there is a history and so people outside the room can follow.
If the team is weighing a flow-based board against sprints, see reasons to use Kanban.
Talking to each other
Agile methods rely on frequent, short conversations, and a team that is not in one room needs a place for them.
Slack, owned by Salesforce, organises messages into channels by topic and connects to most development tools, so that a failed build or a new support ticket appears where the team will see it. It has a free plan and per-user paid plans.
Microsoft Teams combines chat, channels, meetings and file sharing, and is built on Microsoft 365. If your business already runs on Microsoft 365, check whether your plan includes Teams. If it does, your staff already have it and know it, which usually settles the choice.
Either will do. What matters is that decisions made in chat are written into the tracker or the documentation afterwards. Chat is a poor archive.
Our article on tools for remote development teams covers video calls and remote working in more detail.
Writing things down and drawing
Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation. It does not say no documentation. A team needs somewhere to keep decisions, how-to notes, architecture diagrams and the steps to build and release the system.
Confluence, from Atlassian, is a wiki of pages with whiteboards and databases, and links closely with Jira.
A built-in wiki is often enough. Azure DevOps includes a wiki for each project, and a code repository on GitHub can hold documentation next to the code, where it is more likely to be kept up to date.
Miro is an online whiteboard used for mapping processes, planning sessions and workshops with people in different places. It has a free plan and per-member paid plans.
For a customer, documentation is also what makes a system possible to hand over, which is why having no documentation is a common problem when a supplier or developer changes.
Looking back
A retrospective is a regular meeting in which the team asks what went well, what did not and what it will change. In Scrum it is the Sprint Retrospective, whose purpose is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness.
EasyRetro, formerly FunRetro, is a dedicated retrospective board where people add cards under headings, vote on them and record actions. A whiteboard tool with a retrospective template does the same job, and so does a shared document. The tool matters far less than whether the agreed actions go into the tracker and are done.
The numbers a team reviews in a retrospective come from the tracker. Measuring productivity with agile metrics explains which are worth looking at.
How to choose, and what to check as a customer
Start from where the code is. A tracker that links each piece of work to the code change and the release that delivered it removes a great deal of manual reporting, so Azure DevOps users should look at Azure Boards first and GitHub users at GitHub Projects.
Use what the organisation already pays for. Adding Slack to a Microsoft 365 business, or Confluence next to an existing wiki, creates a second place to look.
Keep the set small. One tracker, one chat tool and one home for documents is enough for most teams. Most of these products now include an AI assistant. Treat that as a convenience, not a reason to switch.
If a supplier is building or maintaining software for you, check four things:
- You have a login to the tracker and can see the backlog, what is in progress and what was delivered.
- The accounts that hold your code and your project history are in your company’s name, or the contract says they will be transferred. Who owns the source code explains why this matters.
- The work items and documentation can be exported if you change supplier.
- Requests are raised in the tracker, not in chat or email, so that nothing agreed is lost.