Picture the end of a planning session. Eight engineers just spent twenty minutes debating a ticket, and everyone finally lands on the same number. Five. Great. Consensus.
Then nothing moves.
The number sits in a Zoom chat, or a standalone poker tool you'll close in an hour, or worse, in someone's memory. Later, if you're lucky, one person tabs over to the GitHub Project and types "5" into the estimate field by hand. If you're not lucky, it never makes it back at all, and two sprints from now nobody remembers why that issue was a 5.
I've watched this happen on team after team. The estimation part works fine. It's the getting it onto the board part where everything leaks. That gap is why I built Repoker, a planning poker for GitHub Projects that writes the agreed number straight back to your board.
The second-backlog problem
Here's the thing most planning poker tools quietly assume: that your estimates and your work live in the same place. They don't.
You run the vote in one tool. Your tickets live in GitHub Projects. So every session ends with a manual reconciliation: copy the number, switch tabs, find the ticket, paste, repeat. It's tedious, and tedious things get skipped. I've seen teams keep a whole shadow spreadsheet of estimates because moving them into the real board was too much friction. A second backlog, maintained by hand, slowly drifting out of sync with the first.
That's the part that always bothered me. Not the voting. The voting is a solved problem. It's the twenty small acts of transcription afterward, the ones nobody wants to own.
What makes Repoker different from other planning poker tools
So I started from the opposite end. Instead of "run a poker session and then figure out where the numbers go," Repoker starts from the board.
The estimate writes itself back. When your team agrees on a number and the facilitator confirms it, Repoker writes it to the GitHub Project field you picked. No copy-paste, no spreadsheet, no "I'll update the board later." The board stays the single source of truth, which is where it should have been all along.
That one decision changes how the whole thing feels. Your estimates aren't a separate artifact you have to reconcile afterward. They're just on your tickets.
Pointing without leaving GitHub
The second thing that sets Repoker apart is where you run it.
Most tools pull you out of your workflow. You open a separate app, create a room, import tickets or paste a CSV, and now you're managing two things. I didn't want that. If the work lives in GitHub, the estimating should happen in GitHub too.
So Repoker ships a browser extension. Open any issue or project board, click Point in Repoker, and a live room opens right there in the corner. Everyone votes at once, cards stay face-down until the reveal (so the loudest voice never sets the number), and you see the average, the median, and the spread between the highest and lowest votes. Agree, confirm, and the estimate lands on the board. You never leave the page.
Have you ever tried to run planning poker across three browser tabs and a video call? I have. It's a mess. One tab fewer makes a surprising difference.
I built it for my own sprints
I should be honest about the origin here. I didn't set out to build a product. I've spent about fifteen years shipping software, and I built Repoker because I was tired of the transcription tax on my own team's planning. It scratched my own itch first.
That's shaped every decision since. Repoker isn't trying to be a sprawling agile suite. It does one loop really well: point a ticket, decide together, write it back. The retros run at the same table, with action items that post to your Project the same way estimates do, because the same problem shows up there too. Good discussion, decisions that evaporate the moment the call ends.
The board is the point
If there's a single idea behind Repoker, it's that estimation should leave a trace on the thing you actually work from.
A number that lives in a chat log isn't an estimate. It's a rumor. The value shows up later, when you open your board and every ticket already carries the number the team agreed on, with the history of how you got there. No reconciliation, no shadow spreadsheet, no second backlog.
If your team already lives in GitHub Projects, that's the whole pitch. You can try Repoker today, or grab the browser extension and point your next ticket without leaving the issue you're already looking at.