15 Best Free Open-source Kanban managers and Trello Alternatives

We are going to present you with the best alternatives to trial that you can use for your project management or as a productivity tool.

15 Best Free and Open Source Trello Alternatives

1- Focalboard

Focalboard has consistently been a crowd favorite Trello, Notion, and Asana alternative and competitor.

Focalboard is a project and task management tool that helps project managers to define, organize, track and manage work across teams. With Focalboard, you can assign tasks, view progress, have conversations all in one place. It is fast, self-hosted, offers a slick offline desktop app, perfect for kanban beginners, beautiful-looking, and feature-rich application.

As a work management solution that helps you organize work, improve collaboration and manage teams. You can Install Focalboard on Your Synology NAS, and you can use it for recurring meeting agendas.

It is available in 17 languages and it comes in two addition for desktop that are used for your todos and personal projects, and server for the team to collaborate.

You can use it on Windows, Linux, and macOS and written with HTML, TypeScript, Go languages.

Github: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard

2- Lavagna

Lavagna software is another powerful project management tool alternative to Trello. It is used by small teams.

Lavagna was released under the GPL-3.0 license and runs on a Java 8 JVM. Some parts of Lavagna are made with Kotlin. It supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, HSQLDB.

Unlike Trello, Lavagna allows you to customize labels. It has all the advanced features to add tasks, share information with comments and files, assign them to multiple people, collaborate over them, use customized labels, attach files, it has a checklist to define the scope.

Features:

1. Open source
2. Lightweight
3. easy to install
4. easy to use
5. Multiple login providers
6. Power search
7. you can add your own scripts that react on system events
8. you can import your boards and cards from Trello

Github: https://github.com/digitalfondue/lavagna

3- Planka

Planka is another alternative to Trello specifically designed for workgroups. It is a real-time kanban board that helps software teams plan, track, and release great software. You can even evaluate your project timelines and progress by generating automatic reports.

For installing you have to install Docker and Docker Compose.

It is licensed under MIT license and it is built with React and Redux.

Features:

1. Create projects, boards, lists, cards, labels, and tasks
2. Add cardmembers, track time set a due date, add attachments, write comments
3. Markdown support in a card description and comment
4. Filter by members and labels
5. Customize project background
6. Real-time updates
7. User notifications
8. Internationalization

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

4- Restyaboard

The fourth most powerful alternative to Trello on our list is Restya that is great for project and task management. Restya is an open source kanban board that has the ability to create a digital platform with descriptions and classify projects, ability to change permission, comes with edit, sort, delete option.

It is available in the iOS store, easy to import the existing boards from Asana and Kantree to Restya board, the easy transition of work processes from Pipefy to Restya Board.

In addition, Restya has a calendar view, Board Gantt view, Report View, Board members list viewing option, the option of modifying and changing the patterns and textures of the board view.

The best part is it is a tool for enterprise project planning, issues Tracking, documentation, collaborations, your data on your own internal server, and it has complete comparison with Trello in their site.

Rastya Features

1. Starred boards listing
2. Closed boards listing
3. Board list view
4. Board sync with google calendar
5. Board Gantt view
6. Import board from Trello, Taiga, Kantree, Asana, Pipefy, Taskwarrior, Wekan, and monday.com.
7. Card history filtering
8. Button to delete all archived items
9. Card notification and highlight
10. Add board with predefined templates (Bug, CRM, Gemba board, Kanban, Scrum, Todo)
11. Codenames App
12. Attachment Downloader
13. Export CSV App

5- Wekan

Wekan is a project management tool useful for self-education activities with the same features as Trello. It comes with a self-hosted package ready to install on any server of choice. It allows users to collaborate, tracks time spent on tasks or projects, generates issues reporting, timesheets, project planning, and bugs management.

You can run it on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Waken Features

1. Self-hosted
2. Multi-users
3. Unlimited Kanban boards
4. Private and public boards
5. Translated to dozens of languages
6. In-app notification
7. Email notification
8. SMTP email configuration
9. Account manager
10. Layout manager

Github: https://wekan.github.io/

6- Kanboard

Kanboard is a powerful self-hosted project management software that helps with Kanban methodology. It helps to automate project management, resource planning, reduce efforts to focus on your goal, comes with simple installation project accounting, and team collaboration.

This Trello alternative is designed for organizations, companies. It allows you to integrate your employees, task, projects, and resources for transparency and effective utilization.

Kanboard also comes with project management capabilities that make you improve your project’s performance from time, monitoring budget, and margins.

It is licensed under MIT License and written with PHP language.

Features:

1. Simple
2. Visual and clear overview of your tasks
3. Drag and drop tasks between columns easily
4. Limit your work in progress to be more efficient
5. Search and filter tasks
6. Tasks, subtasks, attachments, and comments
7. Automatic actions
8. Translated in 30+ languages
9. Multiple Authentication Backends
10. Free and Open Source software

Github: https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard

7- Taiga.io

Taiga is a team collaboration, agile project management tool for agile developers, designers, and project managers that focus on making collaboration as simple and intuitive as possible. It has a beautifully designed dashboard that makes sure all your projects, task, milestones, and to-dos are displayed in a visually appealing manner.

It is released under the AGPL-3.0 license and Built on top of Django and AngularJS.

Features:

1. Customization to fit your workflow including EPICS and sub-tasks
2. Multiple workflows with Swim lanes
3. Extensive filter options and search function
4. WIP limits
5. View options like zoom level and user story archive function
6. Possibility to switch over to Scrum and vice versa
7. Customization of issue types, priorities and severities
8. Function to promote issue to user story
9. Extensive filter options and search function
10. Custom real time reports in your own data editor with CSV URL link

Github: https://github.com/taigaio/

8- Bz Kanban Board

Bz Kanban Board is a powerful, yet simple project management tool for Bugzilla. It allows you to visualize bugs from any Bugzilla. This tool works to compliment the Bugzilla workflow.

It is implemented as a client-side application that using Ajax and released under the MIT license.

Github: https://github.com/leif81/bzkanban

9- Donko

Donko is a powerful kanban web application, Trello alternative, with various customizable widgets.

With project management features, Donko helps you create, plan, collaborate, and customize your projects and tasks.

It is a simple and open source application licensed under the MIT License.

Github: https://github.com/HigorLoren/donko

10- Kanbanara

Kanbanara is a web-based Trello alternative and competitor that used the Kanban methodology.

It is open-sourced under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 .written in Python and utilizes CherryPy as its web framework and MongoDB as its NoSQL database system.

Features:

1. User-definable workflow with custom states
2. It supports the story, enhancement, defect, task, test, bug, and transient cards
3. Support for ghost cards
4. It supports hierarchical workflow
5. Global filter
6. Backlog pyramid
7. Report generator
8. Routine card manager
9. Pair programming
10. Support for continuing cards from one project to another
11. Full documentation in HTML and EPUB formats

Source code: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kanbanara/

11- Leantime

Leantime is another project management tool for innovators with a robust set of features. This Trello alternative allows users to manage projects from ideation to delivery.

The tool also provides the ability to track time with ease, plan your long-term roadmap, ​​develop your ideas into strategies using the Lean Canvas, it has the ability to collect, collaborate ideas.

It is licensed under the GPL-2.0 license and written in PHP, Javascript with MySQL.

Features:

1. Task management using kanban boards, table and calendar views
2. Idea boards & idea kanban boards
3. Research boards using the Lean Canvas
4. Milestone management using Gantt charts
5. Timesheet management
6. Retrospectives
7. Project dashboards
8. Project reports
9. Multiple user roles (client, team member, client manager, manager, administrator)
10. Two-Factor Authentication
11. Integrations with Mattermost, Slack & Zulip

Github: https://github.com/Leantime/leantime

12- multikanban

multikanban is a team collaboration tool that focuses on making and translate your ideas into real projects. It has a beautifully designed dashboard for multiple personal projects that makes sure all your projects, task, milestones, and to-dos are displayed in a visually appealing manner.

It is a frontend javascript application.

Features:

1. Visualize the workflow
2. Limit work in progress
3. Divide and conquer
4. Prioritize
5. Do a little bit every day
6. Think about what's next
7. Simple and fast
8. Multiple projects
9. Task prioritization
10. Sort by date of creation
11. Sort by date of completion
12. Task log

Github: https://github.com/mezod/multikanban

13- TaskBoard

TaskBoard is a Trello alternative and that keeping track of things that need to get done. the main purpose of this app is to provide a simple and clean interface to a functional and minimal application for keeping track of tasks.

It allows users to break down large projects into simple tasks. Users can assign tasks, manage, allows for easy status checks, and more.

It is licensed under the MIT license and works on almost any web host (only needs PHP w/SQLite pdo).

Features:

1. Free, Open-Source (MIT License), and Self-Hosted
2. Easy install - just copy to web host and go!
3. Unlimited boards (projects)
4. Multiple languages
5. Customize columns within boards and persistent expand/collapse per user
6. Tasks allow custom colors, categories, assignees, Markdown descriptions, attachments, and comments
7. Tasks display the complete history of activities for admins
8. Easy customization
9. Basic User management (admin, board admin, and regular users)
10. No external dependencies
11. Creates SQLite database on first use
12. RESTful API

Github: https://github.com/kiswa/TaskBoard

14- Kanban Board App

Kanban Board is a Trello alternative and competitor. Just like your typical project management tool.

Kanban is aiming to do what other project management tools claim to do by reducing workload and automate redundant tasks to maximize productivity.

It is licensed under ISC license and written with TypeScript.

Features:

1. Manage tasks with multiple boards
2. Manage tasks in team/story lanes
3. Synchronize multiple device boards with CouchDB remote server
4. Customize the appearance and behavior of the board and kanban in the configuration editor view
5. Write kanban in Markdown syntax
6. Add QR Code to kanban
7. Calendar view
8. Dark mode

Github: https://github.com/shellyln/kanban-board-app

15- Taskell

Taskell is a command-line kanban board/task manager with a robust set of features for Mac and Linux. This Trello alternative allows users to manage projects.

Features:

1. Per project task lists
2. vim style key-bindings
3. Stored using Markdown
4. Clean diffs for easy version control
5. Support for sub-tasks and due dates
6. Trello board imports
7. GitHub project imports

Github: https://github.com/smallhadroncollider/taskell#readme

Conclusion

Such services don’t have to cost huge amounts of money since open-source solutions are available. We reviewed 15 Free And Open-source Trello Alternatives tools, which are all available for you to choose from.

If you have any other recommendations for this list or comments in general, we’d love to hear them below!