Questions before the first vote
Free rooms, team workspaces, and what happens between them.
Straight answers about limits, accounts, private voting, imports, identity controls, and billing.
Free rooms
Do participants need an account?
No. Anyone with an anonymous room link can choose a display name and preset avatar, then join immediately in the browser.
What is included in an anonymous room?
Anonymous rooms support realtime freestyle voting with a Fibonacci, T-shirt, or sequential deck, up to 12 participants, and up to 9 voting rounds.
Are votes private before reveal?
Yes. The table shows that a participant has voted, but the selected value stays hidden until the facilitator reveals the round.
Who controls an anonymous room?
The browser that creates the room receives the facilitator seat. Other guests can join and vote, but cannot start, reveal, or finish rounds.
What happens after the ninth round?
The room remains visible, but another round cannot start. The facilitator can sign in to create persistent workspace sessions for future planning.
Workspaces and integrations
What does a workspace add?
A workspace adds organization membership, reusable issue queues, saved session history, CSV and provider imports, billing, invitations, SSO, and SCIM directory sync.
Why does the free room allow more participants than a free workspace?
They solve different jobs. The anonymous room provides a larger, limited freestyle vote without saved issue workflows. The free workspace trades some room capacity for persistent sessions, history, organization membership, and one provider connection.
Which issue trackers can I connect?
Planning Whale can preview and import issues from GitHub, Linear, and Azure DevOps. CSV import provides a portable option. These are inbound imports, not bidirectional issue synchronization.
Does Planning Whale support SSO and SCIM?
Yes. Organization administrators can configure SSO sign-in policy and generate organization-scoped SCIM credentials for directory provisioning.
Plans and billing
Is pricing per participant?
No. Starter and Growth are priced per workspace, not per invited participant. Each plan enforces its own active-room, participant, history, and provider-connection limits.
Can I use a workspace without paying?
Yes. A free workspace includes two active rooms, five participants per room, 20 sessions of history, and one issue provider connection.
Do you offer annual billing?
Not currently. The published Starter and Growth prices are monthly workspace prices in USD. Applicable taxes are calculated separately during checkout.
Still deciding?
The fastest answer is a real planning round.
Create a free room, invite the team, and see whether the workflow fits before creating an account.