Show HN: Kan.bn – An open-source alterative to Trello
github.com

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486 points

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henryball

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2 days ago

226 comments

henryball ・ 2 days ago

Hey HN,

I couldn’t find an open-source alternative to Trello that I liked so I built my own.

It’s fast, free and fully-customisable. You can self host it, or use the cloud version if you don’t want to manage your own infra.

Repo -> https://github.com/kanbn/kan

Cloud -> https://kan.bn

Roadmap -> https://kan.bn/kan/roadmap

I’d love feedback, bug reports, or any feature suggestions!

  • mbreese ・ 2 days ago

    I think one thing that might help the discussion would be if you could explain a bit more about what you didn't like or thought was missing from other alternatives. IMO, there's nothing wrong with building an alternative because you wanted to, but if there is some feature that you're specifically trying to do support, it would be helpful to mention it here.

  • tiffanyh ・ 2 days ago

    Feedback (since you asked) ...

    Using the kanban for your roadmap, https://kan.bn/kan/roadmap two things I noticed:

    1. When I click a card, no data is present. It's just an empty card that says "Activity".

    2. After you click a few cards, it hijacks your browser Back button.

  • andruby ・ 2 days ago

    Really cool you built this!

    Can you elaborate a bit on what you were missing or didn’t like from the other existing open source Trello clones?

    I’m curious what potentially different choices/trade-offs you made.

  • AntiqueFig ・ 2 days ago

    Shouldn't this be a "Show HN:" post?

    • henryball ・ 2 days ago

      You're right - I thought I had posted it to show HN but obviously not...

  • jpc0 ・ 2 days ago

    I would love to see webhook support add to this.

    For many users this isn’t an issue but for use it’s a must have feature.

    Will stick to trello for the time being.

  • caseysoftware ・ 2 days ago

    Congrats, strong start.

    What are you doing (plan to do) that is more interesting/compelling/useful than anyone else?

    Also, what have you learned so far? What surprised you?

  • progx ・ 2 days ago

    Sorry, but I can't see what is better or other than every existing kanban-tool. I tried it, but you have only drag & drop lists with items and labels, that is all.

  • kadutskyi ・ 2 days ago

    Scrollbar in Safari looks wrong.

  • Closi ・ 2 days ago

    Just as a heads up, that roadmap you linked is broken.

    The formatting looks all off for me on chrome mac (black bars) and then if I click on a card it opens a window but then doesn't load any data.

    Also it looks like a bug that if you filter by some tags, then click a card, the filter gets reset.

    This is 5 secs of testing on the one board you have publicly shared, so there might be a few bugs to iron out!

    • Closi ・ 2 days ago

      A few other trivial bugs I have found:

      * Can create multiple workspaces with same name which then ticks both * Invite user seems to not work randomly or will not send the email * Cards with special characters like @ will just not be created, and won't show error messages.

      • Closi ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        oop found a security issue - you can abuse profile pictures to upload any file (e.g. to host malware if you were a bad actor!)

        IMO don't think this is ready for production use in the slightest - but cool project!

        • henryball ・ a day ago

          This has been patched - thanks for flagging!

        • Xiol32 ・ 2 days ago

          Would be interested to know if this was vibe coded.

  • stevekemp ・ 2 days ago

    How does it compare to the existing open-source boards, such as:

    https://wekan.github.io/

    https://taiga.io/

    https://kanboard.org/

    • mbesto ・ 2 days ago

      I went down the rabbit hole of self hosted kanban boards recently. Honestly, nothing comes close to Trello and while I love the open source communities (and supporting them), these alternatives usually dont come close, or worse they try to be super feature rich and its get in the way of their functionality. The better open source options tend to be airtable alternatives or full blown project management tools (Eigenboard, Plane, etc)

      • yolkedgeek ・ a day ago
        ・ 2 more

        Plane is so sick. I think it's better than trello

        • jasonm23 ・ a day ago

          Thank you, I hadn't heard of Plane... and ... nice

    • adr1an ・ 2 days ago

      Or this one that I've been self-hosting for my team: https://vikunja.io/

      • diggan ・ 2 days ago

        I've also been using Vikunja locally for myself, but the UX really isn't the best and it isn't keyboard-driven which is a bit of a shame. The mobile version also isn't really ready for real usage, seems to lose state every now and then, or disconnect in some manner.

      • zikani_03 ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        We have been using Vikunja for our team for about 2/3 years and it's good. It has it's quirks but generally works. What we haven't done well is keeping up to date with development as the version we installed did enough for us. We recently found out that they moved main development to github and we are keen to contribute where we can as we have found value in it.

        • GlacierFox ・ 2 days ago

          Your comment just made me think about the fact I installed Vikunja like 2 years ago and I haven't updated it since. D:

    • walthamstow ・ 2 days ago

      Also https://github.com/plankanban/planka

      • senorrib ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 23 more

        Planka is not open-source.

        • organsnyder ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 21 more

          They don't appear to be using an OSI-approved license, but the source code is available. So depending on your use-case that may be an academic distinction.

          • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago
            ・ 20 more

            Its license has strict limitations on what you can use it for.

            It’s not open source in any reasonable sense.

            • Izkata ・ 2 days ago
              ・ 19 more

              It is open source (the code is right there), but it's not Open Source due to what GP references. There is a distinction.

              • j1elo ・ 2 days ago
                ・ 7 more

                We're talking in English, not in Go. The meaning doesn't change that much because of using uppercase initials. What you're referring to has already been consolidated as "source available".

                • broken-kebab ・ 2 days ago
                  ・ 6 more

                  I'm not a native speaker, but to me "open" sounds like it fits to the case when I can see the code. Am I speaking in Go?

                  • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago
                    ・ 2 more

                    No, it's just not speaking idiomatically. The term "open source", with or without caps, has a commonly understood meaning that's widely used. Whatever the individual words mean in the dictionary, together they have a well defined meaning. Applying it to other situations that contradict that meaning just adds confusion.

                    As an example, you could describe a spinning disk hard drive as "RAM" because it's a memory device you can randomly access. That would meet the dictionary definitions of "random", "access", and "memory". And yet, everyone would be annoyed with you for doing so. "I have 16TB of RAM in my computer!" "No you don't, Kebab. Stop saying that!"

                    • johnisgood ・ 2 days ago

                      He is a broken kebab. We will fix him!

                  • j1elo ・ 2 days ago
                    ・ 2 more

                    I'm sorry for the snark in my comment, it intended to just be a funny joke due to the capitalization thing (in Go that's what separates public from private fields, which is a weirdness of the language that surprises people the first time they get to learn it)

                    As others said, while "open" does indeed mean "reachable" or "available" in this context of source code, it happens that "open source" is a well defined thing to allow not only access, but also modification, reuse, and distribution without limitations. So the "open" in "open source" has its meaning brought to the highest level of openness.

                    • broken-kebab ・ 20 hours ago

                      Thanks! No worries, I'm not offended at all

                  • bmacho ・ 2 days ago

                    > Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code,[1] design documents,[2] or content of the product.

                    > Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for usage, modification from its original design, and publication of their version (fork) back to the community.

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

              • bmacho ・ 2 days ago
                ・ 4 more

                OFF: Can we do something about this "open source" = "Open Source" usage? I want the opposite, "open source" = "source available" usage, because

                    - that's what the words mean. 
    - the concept of Open Source is better denoted by a Proper Noun anyway
                I think the "open source" = "Open Source" usage will be a friction point forever if it stays. Can we ..

                  - revert the usage to "open source" = "source available", or
  - decide that "open source" with small letters should not to be used (use "Open Source" or "source available" instead), or
  - defend "open source" = "Open Source" usage in a blogpost once and for all, and lessen this friction?
                • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago

                  It's unnecessarily complicating things to require case sensitivity here. Words don't typically completely change their meaning just because of capitalization. And suppose I write that in a Slack channel where no one uses caps at all? Do I have to use caps anyone to make sure I'm not confusing everyone? How do I pronounce it correctly if I'm giving a speech such that listeners know which one I mean? What if the closed captioner writes the case wrong?

                  Nah. "Open Source" = "open source", because any other interpretation goes against the norms of written and spoken English, and because it'd be an absolute freaking pain in the neck to create that brand new distinction that's not an issue today.

                • huhtenberg ・ 2 days ago

                  The term should've really been "Libre source" and that would've been very much in line with the idea behind it. Alas, that boat has sailed.

                • bityard ・ 2 days ago

                  Sure, if you invent a time machine and rewrite how things actually evolved.

                  Early on, you mostly had only two kinds of code: Proprietary software whose source code is closely guarded as a trade secret, contrasted with open software where the source code is quite deliberately shared with the world as widely as possible. The former was code owned by companies, the latter was generally academics and hobbyists.

                  It's only somewhat recently that there has been a fairly large gray area between those two, mostly from companies who want to capitalize on the warm fuzzy feels of Open Source in their marketing material while building a moat that doesn't allow others to do much without the missing proprietary bit, or because the license doesn't allow redistribution, to pick to random examples.

              • adastra22 ・ 2 days ago
                ・ 4 more

                That’s not what open source means. That is generally called source available.

                • Xss3 ・ 2 days ago
                  ・ 3 more

                  Source available sounds like you gotta buy it.

                  Think of it this way, if you were going to an event and saw 'buffet available' you'd enquire how to access it. If you saw 'open buffet' you'd know it's just there for the taking.

                  Open source sounds like it's free to view. It's open.

                  An open house isn't free to own. You view it.

                  Open source not meaning the source code is free to view but instead having a meaning related to licensing is silly.

                  Call it an open license, or just name the license. The code/source isn't the license. I'll die on this hill. Christine was cool but that doesn't make her infallible. Open source meaning open license was a mistake.

                  • jhardy54 ・ 2 days ago
                    ・ 2 more

                    > Think of it this way, if you were going to an event and saw 'buffet available' you'd enquire how to access it. If you saw 'open buffet' you'd know it's just there for the taking.

                    I think maybe you’re making a different point than you mean to?

                    - Buffet available = you can view the buffet for free, but you have to pay to use it

                    - Open buffet = you can use the buffet for free, it’s just there for the taking

                    • Xss3 ・ a day ago

                      The point is that it isn't free to access.

              • diggan ・ 2 days ago

                I'm not sure the same argument that Facebook's marketing teams use, hold a lot of water on a really programming-heavy forum like this :)

              • 7839284023 ・ 2 days ago

                That’s just called „source available“.

              • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago

                But since [oO]pen [sS]ource has a broadly understood meaning that's different, we shouldn't deliberately use the same description for both ideas.

                If you want to describe it as "source available", I'll happily go along with it. It's not open source, though. The source is visible, but it's not open to use. I mean, you can find the leaked Windows source code online, but it's not open source just because you can look at it.

      • rodnim ・ 2 days ago

        I am using Planka for my personal projects. Works great!

    • busssard ・ 2 days ago

      also Obsidian with Kanban plugin

      • mogoh ・ 2 days ago

        Obsidian is not open-source.

    • croisillon ・ 2 days ago

      and Nullboard: https://github.com/apankrat/nullboard

      i don't understand the wave of downvotes but whatever

      • neuroticnews25 ・ 2 days ago

        Thank you, hosted demo with no login required saving to local storage is exactly what i was looking for.

      • iLoveOncall ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Pretty obviously because this one is very different in philosophy (minimalism) than the one OP is working on while the other ones that have been posted aim for feature parity (at least) with Trello?

    • dagelf ・ 2 days ago

      It takes forever to compile, the locally hosted solution links to the online one at https://kan.bn and you've got to spend half a day to figure out how to truly self host

SwiftyBug ・ 2 days ago

Im curious about the choice of Next.js for an open source project as Next.js is notoriously painful to deploy to anything other than Vercel.

  • hxtk ・ 2 days ago

    This isn’t something I’ve found with NextJS, but I also haven’t tried a lot of other, similar frameworks because I’m mostly a backend and SRE person who just learned NextJS so I could throw together pretty UIs to demo my backend ideas, so maybe I’m missing things that are well known among front-end specialists.

    My experience is that a basic deployment is very easy—it’s like a ten line Dockerfile to build a distroless nodejs container of the standalone build and if you deploy it, it just works.

    Then, as performance demands grow, there’s increasingly more complexity in the efforts that must be taken to squeeze additional performance out of it. An easy win is to host the static resources more efficiently with a static file server or better yet a CDN.

    A more complex performance optimization is to implement caching.

    At some point you start thinking about how to separate the middleware execution from the app so that it can be hosted in more regions or at the edge.

    Vercel provides all of those optimizations for free in terms of operational complexity, and charges a lot for it monetarily, but it’s not all that surprising to me that when I host an application it takes some effort to get performance and feature parity with a dedicated hosting provider for that service, just like how I am not surprised that RDS is a little more complicated, more performant, and more reliable than renting the equivalent EC2 and installing Postgres from the package manager.

    Caveat: as a backend dev, I’ve never written anything that relied entirely on NextJS as the server side, so I’m approaching this with a certain amount of baseline complexity already assumed. I’ve not touched NextJS static sites or incremental static regeneration.

    Do other frontend frameworks make it much easier to incorporate those performance optimizations? My impression is that it’s not all that hard to deploy NextJS, it’s just hard to manage the complexity of optimizing it to the extent that Vercel’s hosting does.

  • danabramov ・ 2 days ago

    Next.js is not difficult to deploy on a long-lived server. It’s just a normal Node app.

    What’s more painful is deployment to other serverless providers because historically they’ve had to reverse-engineer a few details for more advanced features. This is being fixed now in https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/77740 but that work is ongoing.

  • herrkanin ・ 2 days ago

    The difficulty to deploy Next.js is greatly exaggerated in my opinion. It's mostly if you care about some of the more advanced features, like image optimization and hosting static assets on a different origin it can become difficult, but these are features no Next.js alternative generally provide anyway.

    • diggan ・ 2 days ago

      > hosting static assets on a different origin it can become difficult

      What's the alternative? Hosting the static assets on the same place as the backend? Usually adding the CORS headers is enough to solve that (on the backend side), the frontend is still just HTML,CSS and JS running from nginx.

      Is it common to do a different type of deployment with Next.js? It's a pretty basic deployment scenario (having the frontend on a different origin than the backend it communicates with), so not sure why that'd be so difficult with Next.js compared to basically anything else.

      • lmm ・ 2 days ago

        It's the opposite, it's extremely easy to do that with Next.js - pretty much free - but only if you're deploying to Vercel. If you want to host somewhere else then you have to do that semi-manually the same way you would with any other framework.

    • freedomben ・ 2 days ago

      Same. I've deployed a half dozen or so Next.js apps and it's no more difficult than any other node app unless you're using some of the more advanced features. In fact, if you only need something static and can do SSG then it's far easier than other node apps because all you need is nginx.

    • mstade ・ 2 days ago

      Even with the optimizations it's not that difficult in my experience. Not terribly well documented (not worst-in-class either) but not that hard and mostly just works once you have a pipeline up and running. We set ours up about two years ago now and have had to make minor modifications maybe three times since then.

  • RitzyMage ・ 2 days ago

    Deploying next is difficult, but IMO that's because deploying anything substantial is difficult. I've had my share of nasty deployment debugging that took days and none of it was due to next. (the biggest offenders I've seen are (1) random open source software no one on my team is an expert on, (2) docker / kubernetes, (3) databases, and (4) integration hell)

  • kashnote ・ 2 days ago

    It’s as easy as deploying any other app that can be Dockerized. Deploying to something like Fargate isn’t _super_ trivial but can be done in <2 hours

  • TiredOfLife ・ 2 days ago

    It's what v0 and similar tools choose as default.

  • yc942 ・ 2 days ago

    Maybe it's difficult to deploy to your platform of choice. Deploying to AWS amplify or deploying using sst is matter of minutes or hour.

    I have deployed several next.js projects within an hour (not hours) that were created by different teams. The hour includes settings up DNS, CI/CD using github and deploying to AWS Amplify.

    Edit: Why are you down voting it? Is this unbelievable? I have deployed 5/6 next.js projects and none of them are on vercel.

AnonC ・ 2 days ago

Suggestion to the OP: please consider adding a family plan at a lower monthly price point.

On this topic, I really love Kanban boards, but a hosted version (or self-hosted) is not as appealing to me as a native app with some sync.

Years ago, I used to use a closed source but free desktop app on Windows (now long discontinued though) and found that it worked very well for me to track my work.

Apple’s Reminders app has Lists that can be further divided into Sections and then viewed and used (kinda) like a Kanban board, but the UX is not great. The macOS apps, especially, are an abomination with Catalyst.

I’m still looking for a native app that has a simple sync using iCloud or Dropbox. Plus no subscriptions (a one time price per version may be ok). The usage would be for one or two users.

  • rubymamis ・ a day ago

    You can check my FOSS note-taking app: https://www.notes-foss.com. It is a native Qt C++ app.

    It has a feature that converts your Markdown tasks into a Kanban: https://www.notes-foss.com/videos/kanban.mp4

    It doesn't have a built-in sync, but people have told me they managed to sync the DB using Dropbox and other such services.

    It has a one time payment option to unlock the Kanban feature, but you can also compile it yourself and get all the Pro features for free (all instructions are on GitHub[1]).

    [1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

  • sen ・ a day ago

    I use the KanBan plugin for Obsidian and have quite liked it. It’s basic but it does the job and lets you sync however you want (it’s just a folder with markdown files).

remram ・ 2 days ago

> Kanban reimagined

"reimagined" is a weird tagline given that your list of features is the same as Trello's (and Taiga's, etc). Don't get me wrong, I love opensource alternatives, but you did not "reimagine" to make the same thing.

wood_spirit ・ 2 days ago

This will sound crazy but I wish there was an open source “everything” app. If this could grow into a slack alternative (where channels can host a kanban board) with http bot api and built in charting and dashboards and python notebook snippets etc etc so we can get things in one place… that would be great!!

mdtrooper ・ 2 days ago

Some years ago, I used Kanboard (it written in php): https://kanboard.org/ . It was ugly but useful (and easy to install because I remember that it didn't need any data base).

  • rsolva ・ 2 days ago

    I threw it on a shared host and was up and running in notime. The UI is dated, but it is very functional.

  • kiney ・ 2 days ago

    I still use it. Love the simplicity.

subpixel ・ 2 days ago

Trello pricing just got a lot more reasonable, but there is one feature that might get me thinking of moving: conditional logic in automations.

Be advised that Trello is now $5/mo. It's gonna be hard to compete here.

  • croes ・ 2 days ago

    You can’t trust US companies anymore, they easily can become a weapon in a trade war.

    • robinhood ・ 2 days ago

      Beware of European companies too if there is a WWIII. Beware of Asian companies because China is not far away.

      What a weird comment.

      • bigfudge ・ a day ago

        I don’t think it’s weird to worry about this sort of stuff, although I think trello would be quite far down the list. I’d worry about the impact of Ms being weaponised first.

      • croes ・ a day ago

        We are already on the brink of a full-blown trade war.

        It was already bad thanks to the CloudAct, but now it got worse. The previous adminstration at least tried to value the rights of EU citizens. The US now have the same trust level as China. Congratulations. At least China's support for Russia is more hidden.

        And the US already showed what happens if you don't comply to US wishes

        https://www.lbc.co.uk/world-news/british-icc-chief-prosecuto...

        Show me any other country that did this to their allies.

    • antithesizer ・ 2 days ago

      You can't trust companies. Indeed, you never could.

    • lmm ・ 2 days ago

      WTF? Atlassian is famously Australian (although they have a terrible security law that should make people nervous).

    • kjs3 ・ 2 days ago

      Indeed...we are the only country that uses trade to influence others. You got us.

      • croes ・ a day ago

        Who said use of trade? The threat are sanctions to ban the use of the software, like they cancelled the ICC investigators bank account on behalf of the US.

        https://www.lbc.co.uk/world-news/british-icc-chief-prosecuto...

        You're the only western country that enforces their sanctions on third party countries.

        For instance a german customer can't pay a german merchant via PayPal if he buys Cuban cigars, despite it's done by PayPal Europe S.a.r.l. et Cie s.c.a.

        And don't forget the things with Greenland.

    • jjtheblunt ・ 2 days ago

      What's an example of a US company being weaponized in a trade war?

singiamtel ・ 2 days ago

The project seems nice, but how good is that domain name

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    I'm so glad it's getting some recognition!

submeta ・ 2 days ago

I absolutely love Trello. Visually super appealing, very fast interface with shortcuts, and an API that allows me to do all sorts of automations (although it offers automations out of the box).

Will check out your solution.

  • OsrsNeedsf2P ・ 2 days ago

    > very fast interface with shortcuts

    Trello has either had some serious performance improvements since I last used it, or you have very few cards and no media. It used to take seconds for actions to process.

rodolphoarruda ・ 2 days ago

> "I couldn’t find an ... alternative ... that I liked so I built my own."

Congrats! That's a brave move. I've been using Kanboard for years. Good luck with your project!

  • henryball ・ 2 days ago

    Cheers! Kanboard is a great project, but I found the UI/UX a bit lacking (just personal preference)

    • rodolphoarruda ・ 2 days ago

      I agree. UI/UX lacks some basic data like the project start date, which is kind of odd for a PM app.

ramoz ・ a day ago

Thank you to those who referenced kanboard in this thread. I got it running and it is sweet:

$ docker pull kanboard/kanboard:latest

$ docker run -d --name kanboard -p 8080:80 -e PLUGIN_INSTALLER=true kanboard/kanboard:latest

(admin/admin)

anonymous344 ・ 2 days ago

biggest problems with trello, having using it 14 years or so - if user deletes card/list/board it's gone forever for whole group - i want to share board with secret link(no login) but this user cannot have rights to open any card, maybe just comment. Not available at all in trello

oldgregg ・ 2 days ago

Great project, will give it a try, we've been using another open source trello clone that has been pretty solid and very closely clones the trello UI.

https://github.com/plankanban/planka

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    Thank you! Planka is a great project, but I found the fact it closely clones Trello's UI to be its biggest downfall. I'm hoping to build on top of Trello's simplicity and customisability with a modern UI/UX interface.

  • tshannon ・ 19 hours ago

    Planka is awesome, too bad it's no longer Open Source.

akshayKMR ・ 2 days ago

I'm in search of something simple like this.

I tried the demo at https://kan.bn/kan/roadmap but clicking on the card shows the skeleton placeholder, doesn't seem to load the card content.

column ・ a day ago

Feedback : when creating a workspace, a board, or a list, pressing "Enter" is not the same as clicking the "Create" button which is the only button visible. Pressing "Enter" does not create the list.

For a new user like me, the difference between a workspace, a board, and a list is not obvious. A one image explanation would be welcomed.

Jean-Philipe ・ 2 days ago

This looks really nice! I loved trello and I'm always happy to see alternatives. My two cents: I use the keyboard a lot, so when I hit "enter" on a form, e.g. to create a board, it closes the popup instead of creating that board.

  • rollcat ・ 2 days ago

    Yep, the "market" is littered with Trello clones. I was also a big fan - until they went downhill (basically everything post-Atlassian). What most of the clones miss, is Trello's enormous attention to details - like excellent keyboard navigation.

    What I also miss, is that with Trello, a board is a board, a list is a list, and a card is a card. The builtins are simple and flexible, the add-ons are optional. Most clones try too hard to guardrail boards into a ticket tracking system. We already have Jira for that.

    • blackqueeriroh ・ 2 days ago

      How has Trello gone downhill post-Atlassian, exactly?

tspng ・ 2 days ago

Congratulation on releasing this project, despite some of the criticism mentioned here.

One issue I encountered. I cannot seem to create lists containing works like Todo, Done, .... No error message is shown. Creating lists with random strings always work though.

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    Thanks for the support and for flagging - I've not seen that behaviour before, but I'll raise a ticket to investigate!

abcd_f ・ 2 days ago

> Kanban reimagined

In which way exactly?

Also, is there a demo account to try it out?

  • henryball ・ 2 days ago

    Thanks for checking it out!

    Kanban reimagined to focus on speed, simplicity, and user experience - all while being open source.

    I haven’t had a chance to set up a demo account yet (just added it to the roadmap), but you’re welcome to sign up and try it out in the meantime :)

    • abcd_f ・ 2 days ago

      You may want to rethink your pitch.

      Virtually all kanbans, being ultimately todo lists, focus on "simplicity, speed and user experience". You have an open source going for yours, but there is already a ton of O/S kanbans as well.

yolkedgeek ・ a day ago

Why are people still building new projects with react and next.js? This is why we have 1000 trello alternatives.

  • popcorncowboy ・ a day ago

    I'm legitimately asking what people "should" be building new projects in?

aarreedd ・ a day ago

It would be interesting to build an app like this designed specifically to run on Cloudflare workers.

- Essentially free for moderate use

- Use CF Access for simple access control

- Easier self-hosting because it is designed for a specific target environment

- No servers to worry about

- Could build AI integrations easily

rollcat ・ 2 days ago

IMHO many "open source alternatives to" should drop that tagline.

This sentence is the first thing I read, and likely the last.

I don't know what "Trello" is. I don't see what your project or app could do for me. Even if I knew Trello, I wouldn't know why does it need an alternative. (Trello was (is?) great for personal use, by non-technical people.)

"A powerful, flexible kanban app that helps you organise work, track progress, and deliver results—all in one place." This is your selling point, not what your app isn't.

  • freedomben ・ 2 days ago

    I would be careful suggesting this as a universal truth. I think it really depends on the receiver of the message. "An open-source alternative to Trello" is by far the best one-sentence pitch possible for me. It's something that I've wanted for years so I immediately noticed and clicked into it. Obviously I already know what Trello is, but my suspicion is the most interested people in this project are former Trello users.

    "A powerful, flexible kanban app that helps you organise work, track progress, and deliver results—all in one place." I would not have even clicked in. "An open source Trello" tells me way more about the app.

    Consider also how many apps are described as "the uber for <xyz>". For people who don't know what Uber is that message falls very flat of course, but a lot of people do know what Uber is and saying, "The Uber for handymen" immediately conveys the point of the app.

  • stronglikedan ・ 2 days ago

    If the marketing doesn't work for you, then it's not that it's bad marketing, it's that you simply aren't the target market.

  • imglorp ・ 2 days ago

    Yeah the tagline is leaning on the context, saying what it replaces instead of what it does.

    Trello was a popular, free, simple sticky note kanban board. It was too nice, maybe competing with Jira, so Atlassian ate it, leaving a void again.

voldrix ・ a day ago

I also made a minimalist Trello clone, but it is single-user (no authentication). Runs on just the basic LAMP stack. https://tellor.cc/

tarasyarema ・ 2 days ago

Nice one, more of a random question: are you planning on having paid only features for the project, or have it fully self-hosted version be the same in terms of features as the hosted one?

  • henryball ・ 2 days ago

    The plan currently is to keep cloud and self-hosted exactly the same in terms of features. I'd only consider open-core if I can't find a reliable alternative source of income to support the development of the project :)

GlacierFox ・ 2 days ago

Random curious question. I was pondering the kanban backend. How do you store the order of the kanban cards in your database and keep that in sync with what's in the UI?

  • loumf ・ 2 days ago

    Here is the answer for Trello: each card and list has a field called “pos” which is a number. The initial values are spread out (e.g. 1000, 2000, 3000) and then when you move a card, it takes on the average of the two adjacent cards.

    So, if I move the 3rd card to the 2nd position, its “pos” becomes 1500. This means it doesn’t have to constantly renumber the cards -- but, every once and a while, the server does reorder the “pos” fields for a whole list and send the new values down the socket.

    • somat ・ a day ago

      I was going to guess linked lists/graphs as that is my goto for extremely flexible local structure. But the sparse array is probably better, relational databases hate linked lists.

    • GlacierFox ・ 2 days ago

      Thank you for this, that's so simple and I'd never stumble on that solution which is embarrassing haha. How do you know the Trello internals by the way? You work there?

      • loumf ・ a day ago

        Yes. I worked there. But it’s described in the API

    • neucoas ・ 2 days ago

      This concept is called "lexorank"

      • GlacierFox ・ a day ago

        Well, not quite. Although lexorank is similar, the mothod described above is not lexorank. Lexorank uses strings and buckets and a completely different set of math to work it out.

  • xet7 ・ a day ago

    Here is answer for WeKan https://wekan.github.io

    Order is stored to sort field as number. When changing order with JQuery Draggable/Droppable/Sortable, it saves new order to browserside MiniMongo, that is made with Javascript, and then to serverside MongoDB. It is possible use mouse or touchscreen to drag drop reorder board icons at All Boards page, swimlanes, lists, cards and checklists. There are also roles at right sidebar avatar icons popup settings, so BoardAdmin can drag drop everything, and there are some limits for other roles, like Normal, CommentOnly etc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165257

    For realtime updates, Meteor web framework reads realtime changes from MongoDB OpLog (operations log), and with Publish/Subscribe at realtime updates all changes immediately for all users, like what card moved, etc.

    There is in progress of adding support for other databases, like SQLite etc.

jacktheturtle ・ 2 days ago

Hey this is awesome. It's exciting to see people launch side projects like this. The UI/UX looks very nice. Thanks for building and sharing.

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    This is really great to hear, thank you for the feedback :)

XCSme ・ 2 days ago

Congrats, any plans to add it as a Collify app?

  • henryball ・ 2 days ago

    Cheers! Yes, I plan to make it as easy as possible to self-host so Coolify and Dokploy apps are on the roadmap

hnthrowaway121 ・ 2 days ago

Hi! Your license link is a 404, just FYI

  • henryball ・ 2 days ago

    Great spot, thank you! Fixed :)

satellite2 ・ 2 days ago

I'll take anything that allows more than one assignee per task. Is that the case?

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    You can indeed! There's also plans to allow custom restrictions on resources if wanted to limit cards to one assignee

bitsignal ・ 2 days ago

having mardown support for code blocks would be good.

ralusek ・ a day ago

Does anybody else have an issue with the like $8/user/month price point that products like this have coalesced around? I feel like a service like this should be like $1-5/user/year, at most.

randomuxx ・ 2 days ago

what's that '.bn' extension? Banana Republic?

Cool app though

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    Brunei! I prefer Banana Republic though...

esskay ・ 2 days ago

Feels like Trello alternatives are the next ToDo list. There's so many of them these days that I struggle to grasp why anyone thinks launching an opensource one and thinking they can turn a profit with a cloud version is ever going to work.

In all likelihood the project will be abandoned in 6 months and the site offline in 12.

  • dabeeeenster ・ 2 days ago

    The market for an on-premise, developer maintained solution is way bigger for a product like this than the cloud version.

    We made the exact same, incorrect assumption with https://github.com/Flagsmith/flagsmith several years ago. The market for data sensitive on-premise delpoyments is a LOT bigger than most people would imagine.

    For Flagsmith, the majority of our revenue comes from on-premise deployments.

    • libraryatnight ・ 2 days ago

      "The market for an on-premise, developer maintained solution..."

      This made me laugh because at work we've been joking, "We've finished moving to the cloud! What now? We must get out of the cloud!"

    • ensemblehq ・ 2 days ago

      Wholeheartedly agree. On-prem is still a major market to play in and have worked on many consulting engagements architecting software that plays nicely. Just curious - how do you guys deploy Flagsmith on-prem? I'm still trying to find a nice deployment pattern that aligns well with both client and vendor.

      • PunchyHamster ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 5 more

        From one deploying stuff on prem:

        Absolute best scenario is single binary with embedded static files (Go is very good at that) that just takes config and/or CLI options (preferably both if it isn't too complex of a config) and works. Or static file that just needs to be pointed at database with certain version

        It can be easily run on VM, it can be easily made with container, it can be easily made into package, or ran in cloud with cloud DB service. All those options are a plus, but the fact it is a single binary makes it easier to make a package or container out of it and deliver that to customers.

        Second best is .deb package that deploys a single service or a container that just exposes a port and that's it.

        DB-wise there is a temptation to provide a bunch of containers that have all of app's dependencies (DB etc.) but that's a LOT of work on both side. On supplier side you have ton of stuff you need to take care of, providing method to do consistent backups, caring about log rotation, handling service restarts if something fails etc. and lastly procedures to recover it from the backup

        And on client side they can't just do same database backup they do for every single other database they know, they have to take app's custom way of backing up and integrate it, or just "copy whole container and hope for best".

        It can be worth it, if your setup is complex enough that asking client to install those dependencies would be a big obstacle (and especially if you need to use different versions than available under Debian/Ubuntu stable), but if you are just deploying container with app and plain PostgreSQL db without using anything special that would need latest version, just let user ship their own DB.

        Also supporting "small" deployment with just SQLite backend is great for demoing stuff to management

        • rollcat ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          How do you feel about SQLite, especially re: backup/restore? Do you just copy the live DB+WAL around, do you bring the service down first, perhaps ZFS snapshots, any horror stories?

  • hliyan ・ 2 days ago

    I think what the industry is missing is some sort of interoperability standard/format for task management. I say this as someone who has been jumping from task tracker to task tracker since the early 2000's -- Trac, Jira, Redmine, Github Tasks, Trello, ClickUp, Linear, and several tools I developed myself. In each case, we rediscover/reinvent/redefine the same things: tasks, subtasks, summaries, descriptions, due dates, statuses, comments, milestones, dependencies etc. If there was some interoperability standard for task trackers, the tool churn wouldn't feel so tedious.

  • bryanhogan ・ 2 days ago

    The amount of high quality Kanban / Trello-like options is low while the need for these is very high. At the same time getting started in building such a tool doesn't require a lot of resources.

    I think it's a good thing and I hope to see one that can replace my Notion Kanban soon.

    • xet7 ・ 2 days ago

      For replacing Notion Kanban, maybe AFFiNE, that is mostly MIT license:

      https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

      But some part of server code license may need checking:

      https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE/blob/canary/packages/...

      • bryanhogan ・ 13 hours ago

        Thanks for the suggestion, I love AFFiNE's approach, but for me it's just not there yet. I'm subscribed to their e-mail newsletter and check up on it from time to time, but for me personally it needs some more progress, e.g. a mobile version.

    • kingkongjaffa ・ 2 days ago

      What makes it high quality in your experience?

      (I’m doing customer research for my own kanban startup) /s

      • bryanhogan ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Well, what makes such a product high quality is highly subjective :D

        But for me personally I'd love a Kanban product that can rival Notion's feature set and simplicity, can be used offline / is local-first, offers some custimzation options, does not force me into a subscription, works well on desktop (Windows) as well as on my phone (Android).

  • mrbluecoat ・ 2 days ago

    Agreed. The AGPL license was the nail in the coffin for me.

    • ta1243 ・ a day ago

      Why? Did you want to use it, extend it, and sell proprietary addons yourself?

      I haven't looked much at AGPL, how does it hurt the user?

calrain ・ 2 days ago

I've been testing using AI coding agents by asking an AI acting as a software designer to build a set of kanban style cards as .md files in a directory, designing the work we talked about into cards for AI developers.

It works quite well, and then you can review the cards (as files) and then ask another AI agent running as whatever role is suitable for that card, to pick up the card by name and do the work.

But there is no kanban board, it's just .md files in a folder.

I am continuing to test this, as transfer of context between AI sessions is an interesting challenge, and leveraging md files as if they are kanban / agile style cards, is interesting.

  • karn97 ・ 2 days ago

    What is with you people and the quest of degrading your own while feeling really happy about it like it's some amazing thing?

    • cjbgkagh ・ 2 days ago

      But degrading an other is ok? From the very beginning tech was about making jobs easier, and now it’s easier to make jobs easier, including our own. So I think it’s ethically consistent to be happy about both, even if our own jobs are at risk.

      My rational as to why this is a good thing in general was and remains a focus on generating consumer surplus, it’s this surplus which we as a people derive our wealth. The hope was that the surplus would be sufficient to cover the loss of those that lost their jobs, either in wealth redistribution or in new opportunities.

      What’s different this time is productivity increases are not being met with an increase in demand. This will drastically increase inequality and to a lesser extent civil unrest, and I think both are destructive. I think financialization of the economy did greater damage, and the combination of both is going to really suck. I would prefer we keep productivity improvements and reverse the financialization even if that means pensions are decimated - they are probably going to be decimated anyway. Better to do it in a way that causes less damage.

      • karn97 ・ 2 days ago

        [flagged]

    • calrain ・ 2 days ago

      AI is just a tool, it's no more useful than a non-complaining junior dev that constantly needs direction, but it sure can cut out a lot of repetitive work.

      I am more productive using it, but that is just me.

      • karn97 ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        I use ai myself as stack exchange but this sentiment is extremely common on HN where you have people trying to force ai to do things it's clearly shit for. Not to mention the rust your brain gathers by not doing these little 'mundane' things. LLMS are a useless dead end anyway all these billion dollar corpos building over it, even worse hype than crypto.

        • calrain ・ 2 days ago

          Without making generalisations, I'm trying to leverage LLM as much as possible to see how they can help.

          I know there is a lot of hype about LLM's and I'm genuinely interested in the niches that they can fill, and where they definitely shouldn't be involved in the software development process.

          I would say I'm an expert level programmer in the small field that I work in, and have set up development teams in the past.

          I think that is an advantage to working with integrating LLMs into a dev cycle as I have experience in providing structure with developers, something that LLMs 100% require, without a shred of doubt.

          As the capability of LLMs continues to grow, having some framework around where they are 'almost good enough' will help re-evalutate them as they improve.

          I'm not trying to prove anything to anyone else, just build a reference point for where we are now.

    • stuartjohnson12 ・ 2 days ago

      If automating your job is degrading yourself, then engineers are the most debased of whores.

sfmike ・ 2 days ago

trello has gotten worse and worse actually could charge for features like n8n and more extensibility. Its gotten the opposite of kanban and zen where I just want clean cards it forces weird views and panels and overlays and difficult to find boards now it wants you to switch to other atlassian products from trello as a priority on the left over just trello unfortunately its the classic indie product amazing then eaten by Private equity until just crumbs are left and its just an acquisition vehicle until it turns rotten and shut down as a cost saver.

artur_makly ・ 2 days ago

This may sound sarcastic..but have you considered retrofitting it with LLMs? The #1 problem with Kanbans is CARD-ROT. AI should fix that in a plethora of ways. Shouldn't be too hard to vibe-code that into existing on a mate-fueled weekend !/s

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    I would only consider adding LLMs if they could solve a real problem for users in a unique way that couldn't be easily achieved by automation rules. I'm definitely not against it, but I would have to see a real use case first. MCP support for the API would be a good starting point!

digger495 ・ 2 days ago

[flagged]

  • henryball ・ 2 days ago

    I wasn't even aware you could do that in Trello! I've added WIP limits to the roadmap

px43 ・ 2 days ago

[flagged]

  • digger495 ・ 2 days ago

    WIP limits are the good stuff.

notyouraibot ・ 2 days ago

Just use Linear.

  • henryball ・ a day ago

    Linear is great, but it's not the same as Trello and it's not open source