Kanboard

What Kanboard does

Kanboard is a small project management tool built strictly around kanban. Each project is a board of columns, optionally split into swimlanes, and each column can have a work-in-progress limit so the board shows when a stage is overloaded. Tasks carry a description in Markdown, tags, a category, priority, complexity or story points, start and due dates, an estimate and time spent. They can have subtasks, comments and attachments, including images pasted from the clipboard.

Tasks can be linked to each other with typed relations such as “blocks”, “duplicates”, “parent/child” or “fixes”, also across projects. Recurring tasks are recreated when a task is closed or moved, and automatic actions handle routine steps such as assigning or changing a task’s color when it reaches a column. A search syntax filters tasks by assignee, due date, tag, column and other fields.

There are two project types: team projects with user and group permissions, and personal projects that belong to one user.

Kanban analytics

Kanboard’s reports follow kanban practice rather than classic project planning. Each project has charts for tasks per user and per column, a cumulative flow diagram, a burndown chart based on story points, the average time tasks spend in each column, and average lead and cycle time. Subtask time tracking records how long people work on items. Together these make it a practical tool for teams that want to measure flow, not just move cards.

Self-hosting Kanboard

Kanboard is a PHP application that needs PHP 8.1 or newer and a web server such as Apache, Nginx, IIS or Caddy; the documentation warns that it does not work with Apache’s mod_security. By default it stores everything in an SQLite file in its data folder, so no separate database server is needed. MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL are supported, and the docs recommend PostgreSQL. Installing from the archive means copying the folder to the server and making the data directory writable; the first login is admin/admin, which you must change.

The official Docker image kanboard/kanboard keeps data, plugins and certificates in volumes. In that image the mail and sendmail transports do not work, so email notifications need SMTP, and installing plugins from the web interface is off unless you enable it. Attachments can be stored on S3 instead of local disk. Login can use LDAP or Active Directory and any OAuth2 provider, and a JSON-RPC API and webhooks connect it to other systems.

Hosted version

None. Kanboard’s website, README and documentation describe it only as self-hosted software.

Limitations

The README says the project is in maintenance mode: its author is no longer building major features and only makes small fixes, while community pull requests are still accepted. Commits were still landing when we checked, but you should not expect large changes. The interface is plain, and the core documentation has no importer for Trello, Jira or other tools. It is a kanban tool, not an issue tracker with configurable workflows or a portfolio planner. Some functions come from third-party plugins, which vary in quality and upkeep.

Who it suits

Kanboard suits individuals and small teams that want a fast, low-maintenance kanban board on a small server and value a stable feature set over new ones. For a Trello-like board with more views and importers, see WeKan. For sprints, issues and roadmaps, look at Plane or Taiga.