A free, open-source scrum tool with real sprint boards

Built around the sprint, not around a to-do list

Plenty of tools will let you fake scrum. You make a board, name a column "In Progress", and pretend the two-week rhythm is a label. It works until you need to close a sprint and discover the tool has no concept of one.

SPIREX models the sprint as a real object. You plan into it, start it, run it, and complete it — and completing it asks what to do with unfinished work rather than silently leaving it behind. Incomplete issues can roll into a new sprint that is created for them in the same motion.

The sprint board

The board is drag-and-drop with columns driven by your own workflow statuses, not a fixed three-column template. Card moves apply optimistically, so the board responds immediately instead of waiting on a round trip and then jumping.

• Columns come from your custom workflow — add, rename or reorder statuses and the board follows.
• Manual rank ordering: drag cards to set priority within a column, and the order persists.
• Cards show story points, assignee, priority, issue type, labels and the parent epic.
• Moving a parent to Done warns you when its subtasks are still open, rather than quietly closing an incomplete story.

Backlog and sprint planning

The backlog is a ranked list you groom directly: drag to reorder, pull items into an upcoming sprint, and create issues inline without opening a dialog for every row. The same optimistic move behaviour applies, so planning a sprint does not feel like filling in a form.

Work is organised as epics, stories and subtasks with story points and labels, and issues can be linked to one another — blocks, relates to, duplicates — so dependencies are visible while you plan rather than discovered mid-sprint.

Custom workflows that stay consistent

The workflow editor is visual: define the statuses your team actually uses — Code Review, QA, Blocked, whatever the pipeline demands — and reorder them by dragging. The important part is what happens afterwards.

Rename a status and the change propagates to the board, the backlog and the activity history at once. Historical entries resolve the current label rather than freezing the old string, so reports and history never disagree with what the board is showing.

Reporting that adds up

Reporting is split across overview, time-tracking and sprint-health views. Time tracking is built in — log work against an issue, and worklogs are grouped by author with subtotals.

The reporting rule is deliberate: SPIREX sums time that was actually logged. It never presents an estimate as though it were recorded effort, which is the single easiest way for a burndown chart to become a comfortable fiction.

Honest scope

SPIREX is scrum-oriented, and that is a real constraint rather than a positioning choice. Dedicated kanban project creation is disabled in the current release, so continuous-flow teams who want WIP limits and cycle-time as their primary metrics are not the audience for this tool today.

If your team runs sprints, that constraint costs you nothing. If it does not, it is better to know now.