Ask HN: What's the best tool you've used for sprint planning in 2025?

4 jackh04878 14 5/29/2025, 1:10:22 PM
Most PM tools feel like they add more overhead than they solve for. We’ve been looking for something that can actually handle end-to-end dev work sprint planning, tracking, and cross-team collaboration without needing a full-time admin.

Monday Dev’s been solid so far. It’s flexible enough for the way our team works, but still structured enough to manage real sprint cycles and deliverables. Definitely curious what others are using that can scale with both team growth and complexity.

Comments (14)

spoiler · 17h ago
Best tool I've used so far in this field has been Linear. It's simple, and a great balance between opinionated and customisable. The UI is simple and snappy too. It's like a polar opposite of Jira.
matt_s · 9h ago
I loathe Jira. People should be allowed to have that many fields on a screen, its ridiculous what is allowed. What sets linear apart from it?
leoh · 17h ago
+1 Linear is quite nice
deangiberson · 15h ago
Whatever the team I'm working with is currently using. Chasing the most recent tool doesn't add value until you see a process problem that a new tool obviously fixes without breaking everything else.
HereBeBeasties · 12h ago
fibery.io - it is excellent. You need to configure it, although it has various templates to get you going out of the box, including sprint-based development.

The nice thing about it is that you can add whatever you like, however you like. Want components with default owners for tasks? Want milestones? Want stakeholders? Want sign-off reviewers? Want to integrate with existing tools like Linear or Notion or JIRA or even email inboxes or Slack messages? Add entities for Incidents, that automatically make a dedicated Slack channel when you create them?

Want proper 1:1 or 1:manu or many:many links between Tasks and Milestones and Sprints and Incidents and Teams and Components and whatever?

Want single assignees? Or multiple ones?

Want flexible custom reports on all of it?

Or just want a simple flat Todo list, that can evolve later to fit your needs?

Stop having the tools dictate to you how you work and instead set it up how your company actually wants to work. That's Fibery.

(I am not connected to the company, just a very happy user.)

vishalontheline · 16h ago
OkNext.io - no flexibility, no sprint planning.. get shit done and the tool will fit into your next week tasks based on prior weeks' performance.
nickdichev · 16h ago
I’m using plane.so it’s got the basic features you need (tasks, sprints, epics) and that’s it. Generous free tier too
11235813213455 · 14h ago
GitHub or GitLab boards
nssnsjsjsjs · 6h ago
Excel.
HenryBemis · 15h ago
Jira (for life!)
Sohcahtoa82 · 14h ago
I think Jira gets unwarranted hate.

It has an incredible amount of flexibility and customizability. PMs take that flexibility and turn it into a draconian list of requirements for tickets and workflows.

PMs want a million ways to extract and analyze information from tickets so they can create a hundred dashboards. The software engineers want simplicity so they can just quickly find what needs to be done, do it, and mark it as done.

Jira can be simple and easy. It's the PMs that turn it into a nightmare, but the hate gets targeted at Jira.

matt_s · 9h ago
If a tool lets someone turn it into draconian screens filled with fields upon fields and arcane workflows then the hate is warranted.

I have yet to see any organizational improvements in our delivery cadence or value derived from any of the planning elements of Jira. With all the doo-dads and buttons and fields and multiple ways of organizing things Jira is just a PM dopamine fidget spinner.

Post-Its on a whiteboard with dry-erase drawn columns is really all that's needed. Use a wiki for tracking longer lived todo lists and documentation.

fragmede · 17h ago
physical post it notes from eg OfficeMax
scarface_74 · 17h ago
Trello