Planning poker online statistics: how many teams actually use it

No survey counts "planning poker users" directly, globally, the way a census counts people. But the closest real number comes from Digital.ai's 14th Annual State of Agile Report (2020): 60% of surveyed organizations reported using planning poker or team estimation as one of their agile techniques, out of 1,121 respondents worldwide. Combined with how many developers exist worldwide and how many of them work on agile or Scrum teams, a transparent, assumption-by-assumption estimate puts the number of developers on teams that use planning poker somewhere in the range of 15 to 20+ million people worldwide, as of 2025/2026. That's a calculated range, not a headcount, and the full math is below so you can adjust it to your own assumptions. Most of those teams today run the session with planning poker online rather than a physical deck, since a browser tab works the same way for a co-located room and a fully remote one.

The number everyone gets wrong

Search for "planning poker statistics" and you'll find the same claim repeated with different numbers attached to it. One guide says 81% of agile practitioners use planning poker, citing the "17th State of Agile report." Another says 84% of agile teams use it, citing the 14th. A third says 68%. None of them link to the actual page of the report where that number appears, and when you go look, the numbers don't match.

Here's what we found going to the source. The 14th Annual State of Agile Report (Digital.ai, published May 2020, survey fielded August to December 2019, n=1,121) really does contain a planning poker statistic: on page 11, in a chart titled "Agile Techniques Employed," "Planning Poker/Team Estimation" sits at 60%, in 7th place behind daily standups (85%), retrospectives (81%), sprint/iteration planning (79%), sprint/iteration review (77%), short iterations (64%) and Kanban (63%).

The confusion likely traces back to the same report's press release, headlined "14th Annual State of Agile Report Shows 60% of Respondents Have Increased Speed to Market." That 60% is about delivery speed, not planning poker. Two unrelated 60% statistics from the same report, and years of blog posts have apparently mixed them up, then rounded, inflated or misattributed the number as it got copied forward.

What real surveys say about planning poker online adoption

Digital.ai's State of Agile report: 60% use planning poker / team estimation

The 14th State of Agile survey ran for 4 months among a global, mostly enterprise, mostly Scrum-practicing audience: 95% of respondents said their organization practices some form of agile development, and 58% named Scrum as their primary methodology, with another 18% on a Scrum variant (ScrumBan or a Scrum/XP hybrid), putting total Scrum-family usage near 76%. Among the specific techniques respondents' organizations use, planning poker/team estimation ranked 7th out of 14, at 60%, essentially tied with Kanban (63%) and short iterations (64%), and well ahead of techniques like story mapping (37%) or agile portfolio planning (33%).

Worth noting for honesty: this is a practitioner survey, not a random sample of the software industry. Respondents opted in to an "Agile" branded survey, 39% identified as ScrumMasters or internal coaches, and only 14% worked at a CollabNet VersionOne customer. That skews the sample toward people and organizations already committed to agile practices, so 60% is a ceiling for "agile-committed teams," not a floor for "all software teams everywhere."

Academic practitioner surveys: smaller samples, same pattern

Independent academic research, with much smaller samples but less selection bias toward "agile enthusiasts," points the same direction. A 2025 survey of agile practitioners in Sri Lanka's software industry (93 valid responses, published at the XP 2025 conference) found planning poker to be the single most-used estimation technique, chosen by 50.5% of respondents, with the combination of planning poker and story points used by 70.2%, ahead of expert estimation (30%).

A systematic literature review that screened 291 papers down to 27 primary studies on agile effort estimation concluded that planning poker is the most popular technique used by agile teams during the planning phase, a finding echoed by at least two other, independent reviews of the same literature.

Different countries, different sample sizes, different years. Still the same ranking: planning poker (or planning poker plus story points) is consistently the most commonly reported estimation technique among teams that estimate at all.

How many people actually play planning poker online?

The funnel, step by step

Here's a transparent, step-by-step estimate built only from the numbers above, each one sourced. Change any input and the output changes with it, that's the point of showing the math instead of just stating a conclusion.

1. Global developer population: ~48.4 million professional and hobbyist developers worldwide (SlashData's Developer Nation research, Q3 2025 estimate).
2. Practicing some form of agile: 95% of respondents' organizations practice agile development methods (State of Agile, 14th ed.) → ~46 million.
3. On a Scrum or Scrum-hybrid team specifically: ~76% of agile respondents use Scrum, ScrumBan or a Scrum/XP hybrid (same report) → ~35 million.
4. On a team that uses planning poker/team estimation: 60% of those organizations report using it (same report) → ~21 million.

Trimming that further for the academic surveys' lower figure (adoption closer to 50 to 70% among teams that do structured estimation at all, rather than 60% of all Scrum teams) narrows the plausible range to roughly 15 to 20+ million developers worldwide working on a team that currently uses planning poker in some form.

Why this is a range, not a headcount

Every step above carries its own bias. The 95% and 60% figures come from a self-selected "Agile" survey audience, not a random sample of all developers, so both are likely higher than the true population-wide rate. "Developers" also undercounts the real room: product owners, QA, designers and PMs often sit in planning poker too, so the true number of people who have estimated with planning poker is higher than a developer-only count. And none of the source surveys were fielded after 2019 to 2025 with this exact technique breakdown, so this is the most recent verifiable data, not a live number.

That's why this article gives a funnel and a range instead of a single confident digit, and why you should treat "15 to 20 million" as an order of magnitude, not a citation-ready fact.

Planning poker vs. other estimation techniques

Source: Digital.ai, 14th Annual State of Agile Report, "Agile Techniques Employed," n=1,121.

Is planning poker online adoption growing or shrinking?

No credible, repeated-methodology series answers this precisely: later editions of the State of Agile report don't appear to re-ask the "Agile Techniques Employed" question the same way, at least not in anything we could verify against an original PDF, so there's no verified year-over-year line for this specific metric to show you. What the data does support: every independent academic survey measured between 2014 and 2025, across different countries, sample sizes and research teams, ranks planning poker at or near the top of estimation techniques. That's consistency, not proof of growth, but it's real evidence against the idea that teams have moved on from it.

Limitations: why nobody can give you an exact number

Planning poker isn't a product with a login screen, so no single company sees all its usage the way a SaaS vendor sees its own signups. It's run with a physical deck of cards, a spreadsheet, a video call plus someone shouting numbers, or any of dozens of competing planning poker online tools (including ours, which you can start free), each with its own separate, private usage data that none of them publish or share with each other. Even adding up every planning poker online tool's registered users wouldn't produce a real total: it would double-count teams that tried more than one tool, miss every team using physical cards, and miss every team whose tool doesn't publish numbers at all. That structural fragmentation, not a lack of trying, is why this article estimates from adjacent survey data instead of pointing to one source of truth.

Frequently asked questions

How many people use planning poker online?

No source counts this directly. The best verified data point is that 60% of organizations in Digital.ai's 14th State of Agile report use planning poker or team estimation, most of it run today through a planning poker online tool rather than physical cards. Combined with global developer population and agile/Scrum adoption rates, that implies roughly 15 to 20+ million developers worldwide are on a team that currently uses it, as an estimate, not a headcount.

Is it true that 81% of agile teams use planning poker?

That figure appears on several blogs attributed to the "State of Agile" report, but we could not verify it against any original edition of the report. The only verifiable planning poker figure in the State of Agile series is 60%, from the 14th edition.

Is planning poker still used in 2026?

Yes. It remains the most common structured estimation technique found across both the State of Agile report and independent academic surveys through 2025, consistently ranking above alternatives like expert judgment or bare story-point guessing without a structured round.

Do remote teams use planning poker as much as in-person teams?

The State of Agile report doesn't break this number out directly, but the same report found 81% of respondents' organizations already have non-co-located team members, which is consistent with planning poker's popularity: the technique works over video call or an async tool as well as in a room, since it only needs simultaneous card reveals.

What percentage of Scrum teams use planning poker?

Among organizations using Scrum or a Scrum-based hybrid in the State of Agile sample, planning poker/team estimation usage was 60% across the whole agile sample. Scrum-only adoption wasn't cross-tabulated against technique usage in the published report, so we can't give a Scrum-specific percentage without over-claiming.

Why doesn't anyone publish an exact user count for planning poker?

Planning poker is a technique, not a product with login counts. It's practiced with physical cards, spreadsheets, or any of dozens of dedicated tools, so no single company or platform sees all its usage. Any "number of users" claim you see is either a single tool's own user count (not the technique's), or an estimate like the one on this page.

Sources

1. Digital.ai, formerly CollabNet VersionOne (2020). 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Survey fielded Aug to Dec 2019, n=1,121, analyzed by Analysis.Net Research (source of the 60% planning poker/team estimation figure, the 95% agile adoption figure and the Scrum/hybrid usage breakdown).
2. Business Wire (2020). 14th Annual State of Agile Report Shows 60% of Respondents Have Increased Speed to Market and 55% Are Planning to Implement Value Stream Management. (confirms the report's other, unrelated 60% statistic, about delivery speed, not planning poker).
3. Lee, S.J. & Senapathi, M. (2025). Agile Effort Estimation Usage in the Sri Lankan Software Industry. Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2025), LNBIP vol. 545, pp. 195-209, Springer (planning poker most-used technique at 50.5%, n=93; planning poker plus story points combo at 70.2%).
4. Canedo, E.D. et al. (2018). Methods for Estimating Agile Software Projects: A Systematic Review. Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, SEKE 2018 (planning poker is the most popular technique for agile teams in the planning phase, from 27 primary studies screened from 291).
5. SlashData / Developer Nation (2025). Developer Population, Q3 2025 update (global developer population estimate of ~48.4 million).