jerbo.ca

What It Is

JERBO is a free web-based Scrum project management application. Its goal is not to cover every project management scenario, but to provide a minimal yet complete toolset around Scrum planning and tracking. It emphasizes simplicity and focus, making it suitable for teams that already run Scrum with whiteboards or spreadsheets but now need remote sharing, access control, reporting, and historical tracking.

Core Features and Collaboration

Based on the main description, JERBO is organized around four main interfaces: Admin View, Project View, Release View, and Sprint View. Its features cover user and project access management; planning for projects, releases, sprints, and sprint teams; Release/Sprint backlog maintenance; story and task management; a Sprint task board; Sprint burndown; and Sprint reports. It also supports Sprint estimation and estimated velocity calculation, covering the basic closed loop needed to execute Scrum.

For collaboration, JERBO allows teams to create application users, create projects, and grant project-level access permissions. This makes it suitable for distributed teams that need to share project status while restricting access to certain project information.

Pricing, Deployment, and Technical Requirements

The pricing information is straightforward: JERBO is free. The main description does not mention commercial plans, subscriptions, paid support, or trial limitations.

Deployment is more traditional and self-hosted. JERBO provides a Windows GUI installer and a generic Web Application Archive. The Windows installer preconfigures Java Runtime 1.6, MySQL 5.1, Tomcat 7, and the JERBO application. The archive package requires users to prepare Java 1.6+, Tomcat 7.0+, and MySQL 5.1+ themselves. It can run on most Unix, Linux, Mac, Mac Server, and Windows systems. Browser support starts from IE10 and includes newer versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Pros and Cons

Its advantages are that it is free, lightweight, and focused on Scrum. Once deployed, its feature boundaries are clear, making it a good fit for teams that do not want to introduce a complex enterprise platform. Self-hosting also helps organizations retain control over internal data.

The drawbacks are also clear: the main description does not mention third-party integrations, APIs, cloud hosting, mobile apps, enterprise security compliance, or service support. It depends on Java 1.6, MySQL 5.1, and Tomcat 7, which is an older technology stack. Ongoing maintenance and security hardening would need to be handled by the team itself.

Who It’s For and Access from China

JERBO is better suited to small or internal Scrum teams, teams teaching or practicing Scrum, and scenarios where teams need to replace spreadsheets and whiteboards but do not require Jira-level complexity. It is not a good fit for organizations that need DevOps integrations, enterprise SSO, audit and compliance features, cloud-based no-ops deployment, or large-scale portfolio project management.

The main description does not provide information about access from China, so domain reachability, download speed, and payment availability cannot be assessed. Since it is free and self-hosted, payment is not a major concern. Domestic alternatives in China may include ZenTao, PingCode, and ONES; international alternatives include Jira Software, Azure DevOps, Taiga, and Trello.