Taiga

What Taiga does

Taiga is built for agile teams and follows Scrum and Kanban closely. In a Scrum project you keep a backlog of user stories, estimate them (estimates can be split by role), plan sprints and follow progress on a sprint task board and burn-down chart. A Kanban project uses a board with swimlanes, work-in-progress limits and an archive for finished stories. A project can switch between the two modes. Epics group related stories across sprints.

Issue tracking sits alongside the agile modules. Issues have their own types, priorities and severities, can be pulled into a sprint, and can be promoted to user stories when they turn out to be real work. Each project also has a wiki, an activity timeline and team dashboards. Statuses, custom fields, tags and role permissions can be adjusted per project. The interface is available in more than 20 languages.

Importing from Jira and Trello

Unlike several tools in this category, Taiga’s self-hosted code includes importers. The production documentation shows how to enable importers for Trello, Jira and GitHub. Each one needs API credentials that the administrator registers with the source service. The backend code also contains importer modules for Asana and Pivotal Tracker. Projects can also be exported and imported between Taiga instances.

Self-hosting Taiga

The recommended method is Docker Compose from the taiga-docker repository, which needs Docker 19.03 or later. The stack runs separate containers for the Django backend, Celery async workers, the frontend, a websocket events service and a service for protected attachments, with PostgreSQL, two RabbitMQ instances and an nginx gateway. A manual install guide for Ubuntu lists at least 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of storage for a small or medium installation. Email, Slack, GitHub or GitLab login and the importers are switched on through environment variables.

Hosted version

The developers run a hosted service at tree.taiga.io. It has a free plan limited to one public and one private project with very little storage, and paid plans with more projects and storage. All plans allow unlimited users. A dedicated private cloud instance and paid support for on-premise installs are also offered.

Limitations

Taiga’s technology is dated. The frontend is built with AngularJS 1.5 and CoffeeScript, and the backend pins Django 3.2, whose extended support ended on 1 April 2024 according to the Django project. The code is split across several repositories (backend, frontend, events and Docker setup), so the GitHub figures shown here cover only the backend. There is no Gantt or timeline view, so classic project planning is out of scope. The importers depend on the source services’ APIs and credentials.

Who it suits

Taiga suits software and product teams that work in Scrum or Kanban and want a free, self-hostable tool that follows those methods closely, with a migration path from Trello or Jira. Teams that need Gantt planning or time tracking should look at OpenProject. Those that want a more modern interface for sprints can compare Plane.