Lighthouse: flow metrics and Monte Carlo forecasts for software delivery

Know how likely your date is before you promise it. Lighthouse is a self-hosted, source-available tool that turns your team's delivery history into probabilistic forecasts and flow metrics, for one team or a whole portfolio. It runs on your laptop or inside your network and connects to Jira Cloud and Data Center, Azure DevOps, Linear and ServiceNow. It is a self-hosted alternative to ActionableAgile and Nave, and the Community edition is free for up to 3 teams.

Questions Lighthouse answers

When will it be done?

Ask about 10 items and you get dates with their odds, for example 50% by 14 March and 85% by 28 March. Ask about a date and you get how many items will probably make it. Lighthouse runs a Monte Carlo simulation over the team's past throughput, so nobody has to estimate. It assumes the next weeks look roughly like the last ones; holidays can be blocked out.

What's stuck right now?

Work in progress, work item age, blocked and stale items, each red, amber or green. Items at risk of missing the team's service level expectation (SLE) are listed while there is still time to act.

Which features make the release?

The delivery timeline shows one bar per feature, from the forecast start to the forecast finish, with dependencies from your tracker drawn as lines. Features that will not start before the target date are marked.

How is the portfolio doing?

The same flow metrics one level up, and a forecast for every feature. When several teams work on one feature, Lighthouse combines their simulations into one probability, which is lower than any single team's odds because all of them have to make it.

How much should we refine?

Lighthouse forecasts how many items the team will pull before the refinement after next, and the team sizes each item with one question: could we finish it within our SLE?

Did the change work?

Every team and portfolio has a Reports tab. The first report type, Then & Now, freezes a window from before a change, even one that ended long ago, and compares it with a window that moves with today: cycle time, throughput, WIP and work item age, with a summary of what changed. Reports can be edited and deleted, and they show on the Overview. The Community edition includes one report of each type per team and portfolio; Self-Service and Enterprise have no limit. More report types are coming. How reports work.

Forecasts you can check

Forecast Reality Check forecasts weeks that already happened, as if they had not, and compares the result with what the team really finished, for every percentile and sampling window. When Peter Zylka-Greger backtested his own team, the 85% forecast said 12 items for two weeks; the team finished 16.

Flow metrics

• Cycle time scatterplot and percentiles, named cycle times
• Throughput run chart and total throughput
• Work in progress and work item age, with pace bands
• Blocked items over time and stale items
• Risk of missing the service level expectation (SLE)
• Process behaviour charts, percentiles over time, cumulative time in state
• Feature size percentiles and a predictability score

Where it runs and what it connects to

• Desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, a Docker container, or Kubernetes with the official Helm chart.
• Jira Cloud, and Jira Server or Data Center with a personal access token. Azure DevOps, Linear, ServiceNow and CSV. OAuth for Jira Cloud and Azure DevOps on paid editions.
• Your work items stay in Lighthouse's own database on your systems. Usage data to LetPeopleWork is off unless someone turns it on, and it never contains work items, names or queries.
• The source is public on GitHub under the Lighthouse Source Available License.
• AI assistants such as Claude or Copilot can read the metrics and run forecasts through Lighthouse's MCP server. There is also a command line client, lh.

Editions and pricing

• Community: free, up to 3 teams and 1 portfolio with 1 delivery, all core flow metrics and Monte Carlo forecasts.
• Self-Service: CHF 2,000 a year, unlimited teams and portfolios, sign-in and role-based access, rule-based deliveries, data sync mappings.
• Enterprise: CHF 10,000 a year, everything in Self-Service plus priority support and onboarding calls.
• In the app and the documentation the paid features are called Premium. Self-Service and Enterprise both include all of them; Enterprise adds the support.
• Try Premium free for 30 days: the license comes by email, with no account and no credit card.

Compared with ActionableAgile and Nave: https://letpeople.work/compare/

Questions people ask us

I need lots of data first.

About ten finished work items are enough for a first useful forecast. Most teams have that after two weeks.

Our tracker is messy. I don't have clean data.

Messy is normal. Lighthouse pulls from Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear, ServiceNow, or CSV, and the math holds up against noisy data. The signal you need is when items started and when they finished, and that survives even in trackers that have been through three reorgs.

IT will block it. Our Jira isn't even reachable from the internet.

Then run Lighthouse inside your network too: on your laptop, a VM, Docker or Kubernetes. It connects to Jira Server and Data Center with a personal access token. Your work items stay on your systems, and nothing comes to us unless someone turns on usage data (which holds no content). For a first try, your own laptop is enough. No ticket to IT.

Won't Jira or Azure DevOps just build this in?

Maybe. For one team in one tool, its charts may be all you need. Lighthouse only does flow and forecasting, works the same way across Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear and ServiceNow, and checks its own forecasts against what really happened. A feature worked by three teams gets one forecast for all three. And the source is public, so you're not locked in, to us or to your tracker.

My team's not mature enough for this.

Probabilistic forecasting works on whatever flow you have today. Starting early helps, because the forecast shows you what to improve first.

I need management buy-in first.

Not to try it. Maybe to roll it out. Try it on your own, produce a forecast you couldn't have produced before, then decide whether to share it. The cheapest way to show the value is to run it yourself.

I'm just an IC, Scrum Master, or coach. This isn't my call.

Most of Lighthouse's early users are exactly that: ICs, Scrum Masters, and coaches running it for their own team. It installs on your laptop, and nobody else needs to know until you have something worth showing.

It looks complicated.

Plan for half an hour from download to a first forecast. Gábor Bittera did it live in under ten minutes, which you can watch further up this page. Pre-loaded sample data lets you look around before you connect anything.

Do you help with setup and onboarding?

Yes, and it's free. We help you get Lighthouse running, connect Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear, or ServiceNow, and walk your team through the tool, at no cost and for every edition. Write to contact@letpeople.work with the subject "Lighthouse onboarding". Enterprise licenses also include structured onboarding calls.

I tried something like this before and it didn't stick.

Was it ActionableAgile, Nave, or Jira's own forecasting? Most of these tools die in real organisations for boring reasons: IT blocks the SaaS, the budget gets cut, the champion leaves. Lighthouse runs on your own systems and is free to start, so none of that hits the same way.

Is this even for me?

Maybe not if you are one team with nothing bigger than the next sprint to plan; the charts in your tracker may be enough. Or if your project is nearly done, because a forecast can't help after the fact. Fixed deadlines are different: when the date can't move, the useful question is how much will fit by then, and Lighthouse answers that.

Downloads: https://github.com/LetPeopleWork/Lighthouse/releases. Documentation: https://docs.lighthouse.letpeople.work. Blog: blog.letpeople.work.