Plan sprints, track velocity and ship on a steady rhythm.
Zoho Sprints is Zoho's agile project management app, built around scrum. Development and product teams use it to keep a prioritized backlog, plan sprints, move work across boards and track velocity and burndown. It connects to Zoho Projects, Zoho Cliq and code tools such as GitHub and GitLab, so agile work sits alongside the rest of the business. This tutorial walks through running sprints in Zoho Sprints from first setup to the retrospective. It is part of our Zoho Projects guide.
Create a project, build a backlog of user stories grouped into epics, estimate them, plan a sprint by pulling the highest-priority items, run the sprint on the scrum board, hold stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives, and track progress with burndown and velocity charts. Group finished work into releases.
| Zoho Sprints | Zoho Projects | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Software and product teams working in sprints | Client, delivery and business projects with fixed plans |
| Planning style | Backlog and time-boxed sprints | Tasks, milestones, Gantt and dependencies |
| Key reports | Burndown, burnup and velocity | Gantt progress, timesheets and budgets |
| Works together? | Yes, through the Zoho Projects integration | Yes |
Many organizations use both: Sprints for the development team and Projects for everything around it, such as client delivery, marketing and implementation.
Create a project in Zoho Sprints for each product or team.
Invite team members and assign roles, such as product owner, scrum master and developers.
Choose your estimation method, such as story points.
Set your sprint length, commonly one or two weeks.
Customize work item types and statuses to match your workflow, keeping them simple.
The backlog is the single list of everything the team might work on. Add user stories, tasks and bugs as work items, group related items into epics, such as a new checkout or a reporting module, and order the backlog by priority. Keep items near the top small and clear enough to finish within a sprint; items further down can stay rough until they move up.
Estimate backlog items with story points or your chosen method, ideally as a team. Estimates are not promises; they help the team decide how much to take into a sprint and, over time, show the team's real pace through velocity.
Leave some capacity free for bugs and unplanned requests, especially in the first few sprints. A team that consistently finishes what it commits to builds trust with stakeholders faster than one that overcommits.
In sprint planning, pull the highest-priority items from the backlog into the new sprint until the total estimate matches the team's typical velocity. Agree a short sprint goal that describes what the sprint should achieve. Then start the sprint, and the selected items move to the sprint board.
The scrum board shows every item in the sprint by status, such as To do, In progress, In review and Done. Team members move their items as work progresses, log time where needed and comment in context. Kanban-style boards are also available for teams that prefer continuous flow over time-boxed sprints.
| Meeting | Purpose | Typical length |
|---|---|---|
| Daily stand-up | What was done, what is next, what is blocked | 15 minutes |
| Sprint review | Show completed work to stakeholders | 30 to 60 minutes |
| Retrospective | What went well and what to improve | 30 to 60 minutes |
| Backlog refinement | Clarify and estimate upcoming items | 30 to 60 minutes |
Zoho Sprints can schedule these meetings and, in recent versions, host them within the app, with notes kept alongside the sprint.
Use releases to group completed items that ship together, track what is planned for each release and keep stakeholders informed of what is coming. Release notes become easy to write because every item is already recorded.
The retrospective is where the team gets better. Keep it short and specific: what went well, what did not, and one or two changes to try next sprint. Record the actions in Zoho Sprints and check them at the start of the next retrospective. Over a few sprints, small changes, such as smaller stories or earlier reviews, show up as steadier velocity and fewer surprises.
As more teams adopt sprints, keep shared conventions: the same work item types, similar statuses and a common definition of done. Use epics that span teams for large initiatives, and dashboards across projects so leadership sees progress without asking each team. Align sprint lengths where teams depend on each other, so planning and reviews line up.
Zoho Sprints integrates with Zoho Projects, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Desk, Zoho Analytics and Zoho Flow, and with development tools such as GitHub, GitLab and Jira, plus Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace. Connect your code repository so commits and pull requests link to work items, post sprint updates to a Cliq channel and turn customer issues from Zoho Desk into backlog items.
Agile teams build better products when customer feedback reaches the backlog quickly. Turn feature requests and bugs from Zoho Desk tickets into Sprints work items, tag them with the customer or account, and review them in backlog refinement. When an item ships, the support team can tell the customers who asked for it.
Teams that need to record hours, for example for client billing or capitalizing development costs, can log time against work items in Zoho Sprints. Time logs then appear in reports by sprint, project and person, alongside story points, so you can compare estimates with actual effort over time.
Zoho Sprints has a free plan for small teams, and paid plans are priced per user, with tiers such as Elite, Premier and Enterprise reported at about $3, $6 and $9 per user per month. Some plans have minimum user counts. Check the current Zoho Sprints pricing page for your team size, and note that Zoho Sprints is included in Zoho One.
Zoho Sprints is used for agile project management: backlogs, epics, sprint planning, scrum and kanban boards, agile meetings, burndown and velocity charts and releases.
Zoho Sprints is built for teams working in time-boxed sprints with backlogs and velocity. Zoho Projects suits traditional projects with tasks, milestones, Gantt charts, timesheets and budgets. Many organizations use both together.
Zoho Sprints has a free plan for small teams. Paid plans are priced per user, and some have minimum user counts, so check Zoho's pricing page for your team size.
Yes. Zoho Sprints integrates with GitHub, GitLab and Jira, as well as Zoho Projects, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Desk and other apps.
Yes. Zoho Sprints is one of the apps included in a Zoho One subscription.
Yes. Alongside scrum boards for time-boxed sprints, Zoho Sprints offers Kanban-style boards for teams that prefer continuous flow.
Yes. Team members can log time against work items, and time reports show hours by sprint, project and person alongside story point progress.
Most teams use one- or two-week sprints. Shorter sprints give faster feedback; longer sprints suit teams with more complex items. Pick one length and keep it steady so velocity is comparable.
A clean backlog, sensible workflows and the right integrations make sprints predictable from the first one.