Every agile team needs an effective project management methodology. In the search for the perfect system for your team, the choice is likely to come down to kanban vs. scrum. These two common systems both encourage the continuous, iterative improvement that is the heart of agile.

Let’s take a look at the differences between the two, the benefits of each, and when to choose kanban, scrum, or a mix of both methods.

Already know which methodology you want to use? Take a look at our list of top project management software and tools to find the right fit for your team.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a visual project management methodology centered around the eponymous kanban board. On a kanban board, cards, representing tasks, move left to right through a series of columns as they progress toward completion.

Kanban works well for tracking any recurring task that goes through several stages from planned to done. This could be anything from social media posts to software updates.

The system was originally developed at Toyota by industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno to reduce inefficiencies in the manufacturing process. The goal, for Taiichi Ohno and anyone today who adheres to original kanban principles, is to minimize the amount of in-flight work at any one step of the process. 

Seeing all in-progress tasks on the board helps you notice where tasks tend to pile up. You can then work to make that part of the project move faster. For example, if your engineers’ code tends to get stuck in review for a long time, you may require that they each spend a certain amount of time each day reviewing a coworker’s commits before working on their own tasks.

Most popular project management tools support kanban boards. Trello is a kanban-first tool, and it does kanban well. Asana and Monday.com are also popular options with good, customizable kanban boards.

How Kanban Boards Work

On a kanban board, work progress is represented by the flow of cards across the board.

A kanban board from Asana

This example is for a brand campaign and shows tasks moving from research through to production. Kanban boards are near ubiquitous options in project management tools today. This one is from Asana. If you want to go low-tech, sticky notes on a whiteboard also work.

With the wide popularity of the kanban board, teams have found other ways to use the columns and cards visualization system. One common choice is for each column to represent a different type of task. In this system, checklists on the cards are used to track progress on tasks rather than motion across the board.

This kind of board doesn’t use the full original kanban methodology, but if you want to see more types of tasks at once, it might be a good fit.

Pros and Cons of Kanban

Kanban is a great option for teams with a continuous workflow of tasks that move through the same stages.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an agile project management methodology that centers around a cycle of short sprints, typically 1-4 weeks long. The scrum methodology includes a built-in set of roles and ceremonies to keep the team moving through each sprint.

Scrum and agile have been closely linked from the beginning.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland finetuned the scrum framework and spearheaded its adoption in the software development community in the 1990s. The two men were instrumental in the publication of the Agile Manifesto, many of whose principles are put to practice in scrum.

Scrum teams consist of a product owner, a scrum master, and the development team. 

• The product owner prioritizes which features should be completed when and facilitates communication between business stakeholders and developers. 
• The scrum master schedules and leads all scrum ceremonies and helps keep the team on track. 
• The development team does the development work to create and maintain the product.

Scrum teams also use a series of recurring ceremonies to keep development on track.

• Sprint Planning: Before each sprint, the scrum master facilitates a sprint planning meeting, where the product owner works with the team to select the most important work that can feasibly be accomplished in the next sprint.
• Daily Standup: Every day during the sprint, the scrum master leads a short (10-15 minute) meeting where the development team checks in and shares how their work is going. Any blockers are called out and addressed if possible.
• Sprint Review: At the end of every sprint, the team meets with stakeholders to demonstrate their work and collect feedback. Feedback about desired updates is taken into account when planning the next sprint.
• Retrospective: At the end of every sprint, the team also meets internally to discuss what work processes went well and what could be improved. Items for improvement are prioritized, and an action plan is made for the next sprint.

Scrum is a great choice for teams that work best in shorter increments and want to review their work or processes regularly. Developing a new app or feature is a classic use case for scrum, but it can be adapted for use on any team that regularly performs work on tight timelines, like marketing.

Jira is the classic software choice for development teams running scrum, for good reason. Miro has great visual options for retrospectives and planning meetings. For small teams looking for free project management software, ClickUp’s free plan includes unlimited users and sprint management.

How Scrum Boards Work

Scrum boards are used to track scrum artifacts during each sprint. In addition to set roles and ceremonies, scrum includes three artifacts to organize work.

• Product backlog: The product backlog is a living document containing all work that must be accomplished for the product to be considered complete. Tasks are pulled from the product backlog during each sprint planning session, and new tasks are added to the product backlog based on stakeholder feedback at each sprint review.
• Sprint backlog: The sprint backlog is the list of work to be accomplished during the current sprint. The product owner selects tasks for the sprint backlog in conversation with the team based on priority and current feasibility at the sprint planning meeting. The sprint backlog is updated as work is completed or challenges arise throughout the sprint.
• Increment: The increment is the goal for what will be accomplished by the end of the sprint. Establishing this ahead of time gives the team something to measure their work against.

The scrum board only includes the sprint backlog, work in progress, and work completed toward the increment. The product backlog is kept elsewhere. Most teams create a new board for each new sprint, even if some work is still in progress at the end of the last sprint. This gives the team a fresh start each time and makes reviewing previous work easy.

A scrum board from Jira

This board from Jira, like most scrum boards, has few columns. “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Complete,” are standard, and you may also include “In Review” and “Blocked” depending on your team’s workflow.

Pros and Cons of Scrum

Kanban vs. Scrum: Quick Look

Differences Between Kanban vs. Scrum

The biggest difference between kanban and scrum is the continuous workflow of kanban vs. the sprint cycle of scrum.

A team running kanban can have tasks in all stages of progress at all times and will pull new tasks from the backlog on an ongoing basis. A scrum team will work on tasks for a sprint, then review the work and plan the next sprint before starting again.

Another key difference between kanban and scrum is that scrum comes with a set of predefined roles and ceremonies, while the structure of kanban is more flexible.

Scrum teams meet every day for standup, which the scrum master leads. The product owner is in charge of deciding what work gets done every sprint. Kanban teams can meet less frequently and reprioritize work to be done continuously.

The two systems measure efficiency differently and seek to optimize it in different ways. Scrum aims to maximize velocity, or the total amount of work done each sprint.

Kanban aims to minimize cycle time, the amount of time it takes for a single task to be completed once it’s started, and lead time, the time it takes for a task to be completed after it’s added to the backlog.

Scrum is designed and best suited for development teams, whether you’re developing software or a physical product. It can also work for other teams that create deliverables on short timelines, like marketing, although it may take some adaptation.

Kanban works for software teams as well but is more flexible for use across functions from content to operations.

When to Use Kanban Boards vs. Scrum Boards

As we’ve seen, kanban and scrum are both agile project management systems that use boards to visualize progress on tasks. All agile systems allow for fast, collaborative, iterative development.

When to Use Kanban Boards

Kanban boards are a great choice for a wide variety of projects. As long as your team will be tracking progress on tasks through a series of continuous stages, you can likely use a kanban board. Here are a few cases where kanban boards might be a great option:

• Maintaining Existing Software: If your product is already released and your team is primarily fixing bugs and making minor feature updates, the continuous workflow of kanban might be a good fit for your work cadence. The philosophy of minimizing lead cycle time fits well with solving individual product issues quickly when they arise.
• Content Production: Content, whether it’s for social media, YouTube, or a blog like this one, typically progresses through several predictable stages on the way to completion (e.g. “Scheduled,” “Drafting,” “Editing,” “Rewriting,” and “Published”). The TrustRadius research team uses kanban boards on Asana to track some of our content work.
• User Support: Kanban’s focus on minimizing the number of tasks in progress makes it well suited to user support, where the goal is to resolve users’ issues as quickly as possible. Columns on a kanban board for a support team might include “Ticket Created,” “In Progress,” “Waiting on Customer,” “Escalated,” and “Complete.”

When to Use Scrum Boards

The main thing that makes scrum boards different from kanban boards is that a new board is created for each sprint. This also means that the backlog for the whole product or project doesn’t live on the board. Scrum boards work best for projects that are structured around sprint cycles and start on a new set of tasks every few weeks, which could include:

• Developing New Software: The scrum framework was designed for software development teams. Short sprints ensure regular bursts of productivity, and regular reviews with stakeholders keep the team working on the most important things.
• Marketing Campaigns: Marketing campaigns often run on short timelines where tasks change regularly. Marketing teams might appreciate the regular, built-in check-ins and focus on progress throughout short cycles that come with scrum. Sprint cycles could be shortened or lengthened to accommodate each project phase.
• Construction Projects: While a Gantt chart might be a better out-of-the-box fit for many construction teams, the sprint cycle and accountability processes of the scrum framework could help speed up long projects.

Can You Use Both Kanban and Scrum?

In practice, many teams implement a hybrid “scrumban” process that combines elements from both frameworks. You might take the sprint structure from scrum but the flexibility in team roles and meeting cadence from kanban, or vice versa. 

The TrustRadius BI team, for example, started out with a traditional scrum framework, including two-week sprints and regular retrospectives. After a while, we’d met most of our initial product goals and were focused as much on maintaining dashboards as creating new ones. We then shifted to a kanban, continuous workflow framework, but kept our standups to work through blockers together.

Choosing Between Kanban vs. Scrum

Either of these agile frameworks can help your team get the job done, but there are a few factors that might make one a better choice for you than the other:

• Continuous vs. Sprint-Based Workflow: This is the most critical difference between the two frameworks. If the type of work your team does only makes sense when done continuously and can’t fit into sprint cycles (e.g. ticket-based work, client work), kanban is a better choice. If you’re working on a longer-term project that can be broken into chunks, scrum’s sprints are designed to help you work faster.
• Team Size: Out-of-the-box scrum is best suited to mid-sized teams. Too small, and it doesn’t make sense to have a Product Owner and Scrum Master instead of more hands doing the work. Too large, and daily standups and other meetings can run long and be difficult to manage. Kanban works best for small teams working independently, and it can become difficult to monitor who’s doing what on larger teams.
• Level of Flexibility Desired: Scrum can of course be adapted to suit your team’s needs, but if you’re adopting it as-is, scrum is more rigid than kanban. Set roles for team members, several required daily and biweekly meetings, and the inability to change goals during a sprint are all features that make scrum teams efficient but can be restrictive. Kanban is easier to customize for different working styles, which is why it’s used more outside of software development.

If none of those criteria are deciding factors for you, you can experiment with both methodologies and see which works best for your team. You might find the best option is a unique scrumban system, tailored to the way your team works.

After you’ve decided which system to use, you’ll need to choose a project management tool. If you’ve chosen kanban, you’re in luck! Most project management software includes kanban boards. Consider how well the software integrates with your existing tools, particularly anything your team uses for communication or collaboration (or version control for development teams).

You’ll have a more limited selection of products designed for scrum boards, though there are still plenty of great options to choose from. Look for products designed for software developers, and make sure to read reviews from users who run scrum. Scrum boards look a lot like kanban boards. The main extras you’ll want are unlimited boards and the option to archive old boards (so you can track progress during previous sprints).

Kanban vs Scrum Boards: Leverage the Right Software for Agile Success

When comparing kanban vs. scrum, the most important differences are the workflow structure and the level of flexibility. Kanban is a visual system designed for continuous work that can be adapted for various team structures, while scrum is a cyclical system where work is done in short sprints and team roles are predefined.Are you ready to find the perfect tool for your kanban, scrum, or scrumban system? We’ve got you covered! Check out reviews of project management tools on TrustRadius from real users to find out what people at all kinds of companies are using for their own scrum or kanban implementations.