Parabol Reviews & Product Details

Parabol has been one of the best retrospectives tool I've ever used. Especially as a product with a free tier option, the benefits are unmatched!

The format of Parabol makes it the ideal tool for teams that are spread across multiple time zones.

It has been a great way to get all team members engaged in our Scrum ceremonies such as Backlog Refinement, Stand-up, Retrospectives, and more.

The integrations with JIRA and Teams have been super valuable for us and make meetings a lot smoother.

Their customer support has been fantastic and easy to work with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's some small admin things I would like to see improve like more options for the Organization Leader role and Billing role, being able to select who contributes in a stand up (not everyone on the Parabol team, just the dev team), and some nav menu options but Parabol is continuously pushing out more updates and changes. I have no doubt they'll get to all of these small issues soon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use Parabol mainly for weekly retrospectives. It's very intuitive, easy to introduce new members to it and facilates discussions.

The main reason I like parabol is because is a way to involve everybody without making feel force. Also every one can come up with good/bad things without being influenced previously.

The grouping cards is very handful also to decide what to do discuss further and of course the timer is essential. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like to have the option of locking individual cards. We currently use Parabol for individual reflections before the team discusses them together. Sometimes, teammates start grouping or moving cards prematurely, which disrupts the individual reflection process.

The cards written by the same person are spreded making difficult to comment on what you write without navigating first the whole. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We had been using Parabol for a long time, since we found it to be very helpful in streamlining retrospectives and sprint estimation meetings. We then had an aggressive "belt-tightening" string of budget cuts, to which Parabol fell victim. We tried many alternatives. It got to the point that we fought to bring Parabol back, and everyone was very happy that we won back the ability to use it. The icebreakers are great conversation starters to start the meeting off positively. The ability to add discussions to every card in the form of comments and reactions is one of the reasons we fought for it. The ability to vote, to group, discuss things by rank... All if it is great. The interface is mostly intuitive and people find it simple to use. Getting going with it is simple because of it. We use Parabol for every single one of our retros. We no longer do Scrum, but when we did the Jira integration was vital to the setting of story points on tickets, and I can't imagine having to do it manually. I don't believe we've ever needed customer support, which is a good sign, but if the support is like the rest of everything, I'm sure it's great also. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would say the "Ready" button in Parabol (where users indicate they're ready) could be more intelligent. For example, when selecting how you feel about work, when users have selected something then it could mark them as ready automatically. Furthermore, alerts for users that still have votes left during voting could probably be more prominent. We found that oftentimes someone will not vote but we sit around until the timer runs out because of it. This is mostly a "people problem", but I think something could be done about this in the app to ease the issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use Parabol for the scrum retrospective and scrum estimation. For the retro, we really like using Parabol because it makes it easy for everyone to provide feedback, and we can easily group, prioritize, and discuss the feedback. For estimation, Parabol is also very pleasant to use because it walks us through the issues to be estimated one by one, and it can automatically process the estimated story points into Jira. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's great that summaries are automatically generated, but unfortunately I (as the facilitator) can't specify that those summaries shouldn't be sent to everyone. Team members can, however, set it up themselves so they don't receive emails.

I would be great if we could use Parabol for the PI event as well, but that is not possible yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like being able to run sprint poker sessions with parabol. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish the link to share with teammates was unique to the meeting I'm using and didn't dynamically change each time I navigated away from the screen. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Love the ice breaker and the smooth UI/UX. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Would be great if can have back ground music option! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface matches our process. When we do poker planning and retro, little to no preparation is needed. The meetings follow simple and straightforward steps. In the end, we get the meeting minutes. There is also a rudimentary board for tracking our retro action points. The website works on the phone which allows people to join the meeting without carrying their laptops to the meeting room. And there is a Jira integration for quicker poker planning setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't think of anything that would stop us from using it. There are sometimes minor drag-and-drop issues, but they are rare, and with time they get fixed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've mostly used it for the retro meetings it gives everyone a chance to add topics of discussion and avoids needing to call anyone out to provide feedback. Allows to create trackable tasks that come out of the discussions for each topic along with notes that we can refer back to during the next sprint. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Don't really have any criticisms about it it's a really useful tool for team meetings with plenty of stuff that I probably havn't even tried out yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have been using Parabol for retro & pokering meetings for over two years now in different projects. Everyone who has worked with the tool always comments on the ease of use, the smooth user experience and the way it enables interaction within the team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So far, we haven't found any downsides to using Parabol. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very easy to set up and use. You can host different events. I personally like to use Parabol boards for quick brainstorming for sprint poker or evaluating a sprint.

Furthermore, an event can be very easily created and shared with your peers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI of parabol can be improved. Sometimes when I use the sprint poker event, the hover bar on the left is too small. I would like to collapse it or change the width myself. The information in the center also sometimes look crammed. The images that are sent from Jira to parabol are squished or not visible. I would like to have 'focus mode' where only the item that is discussed will be highlighted and enlarged. These above-mentioned points are minor things and I would still recommend parabol to others Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.