The short answer is NO. They are two different tools, with different backgrounds and different purposes. Before talking about them let me share a little about FunRetro history.
How FunRetrospectives.com was created
Since 2013, TC Caetano and I, Paulo Caroli, have been collaborating with many supporters to talk about and share FunRetrospectives. We fostered this community and gathered the content through the website FunRetrospectives.com, the FunRetrospectives e-book, talks, and training.
But how did the “fun” part come about in retrospectives?
The name was suggested by Patrick Kua in 2013. Pat is our friend who is also author of the great The Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams. While we were organizing retrospective activities in a new website dedicated especially to them, we met Pat when he was on a business trip in Brazil.
Then, we asked him: “We need a name for the website and the e-book that we are going to create. What do you suggest?” Pat replied: “Caroli, you make retrospectives lighter, you have a different style. Your activities are more… fun!”
And it was from this conversation that the name FunRetrospectives came up and, after that, the nickname “FunRetro.”
Retro is short for retrospective. It was already common for people to say “let’s do a retro,” instead of saying ‘let’s do a retrospective.” As many people were using the FunRetrospectives activities, they started to say: “Let’s do a FunRetro!”
A few months ago, the FunRetrospectives book was released and is getting great reviews by the community.
But What about the app?
I already told you the history about FunRetrospectives.com and the FunRetro nickname. But I realize I contributed to some confusion about the apps: FunRetro.io, EasyRetro.io and app.FunRetrospectives.com.
Back in 2015 I had a colleague of mine that had created an online board for remote retrospectives. Back then, FunRetrospectives.com was already the retrospectives website with the most access in the world, so I used to get requests to link FunRetrospectives.com to quite a few remote retrospective tools.
But I always said no. I was interested in giving to the community, I did not want to commercialise on Funretrospectives.com
Then I offered to give visibility to the nice work my colleague was doing: I would direct FunRetrospectives.com visitors to his free and open source remote retrospective tool. I even allowed him to add ads on FunRetrospectives.com to help pay for his servers.
Instead of hosting on the same server, he decided to host separately, and used FunRetro.io URL to show it was connected.
As a product was being born, I invited my close friend and product guru Joca Torres to join us on this enterprise.
The app was taking shape, a business model was being created and the number of website visitors and the app users kept on growing.
Then my colleague decided by himself to go solo.
Joca and myself did not give up on our vision of creating a great app driven by the FunRetrospectives.com community, and, along with Filipe Esperandio (a good friend and an amazing full stack senior engineer), we started the App.FunRetrospectives.com.
About one year ago, my ex-colleague renamed his app from FunRetro to EasyRetro.
FunRetrospectives is a community of practice, i.e., a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. We are constantly experimenting with new retrospective formats and activities, and constantly improving existing ones through the feedback from our hundreds of thousands of users in more than 100 countries. And all of this shared learning and knowledge is embedded in App.FunRetrospectives.com. Enjoy!
>> Try your next remote retro on App.FunRetrospectives.com
p.s.: We follow the Lean Startup style, build-measure-learn. The app is continuously receiving feedback from our engaged user community and evolving.
