Comment by henryball
6 months 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!
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.
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.
+1
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.
Nice project. Some of the workflows could be more keyboard friendly. I started an issue: https://github.com/kanbn/kan/issues/3
Shouldn't this be a "Show HN:" post?
You're right - I thought I had posted it to show HN but obviously not...
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.
WeKan https://wekan.github.io has:
1) Per-board webhooks at board right sidebar / Board Settings / Webhooks
2) Global Webhooks at Admin Panel
See right menu of https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki , scroll down to webhooks part of menu.
It's possible to send board change events like move card as webhooks, for example to some chat:
https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Outgoing-Webhook-to-Disc...
Or to NodeRED:
https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/2017
or to to some PHP webhook receiver like this, that can use Python code to call WeKan API:
https://github.com/wekan/webhook/blob/main/public/index.php#...
https://github.com/wekan/wekan/blob/main/api.py
WeKan doesn’t seem to have an App for iOS https://wekan.team/app/
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This is a cool idea - I've added it to the roadmap!
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.
I don't want to blame you, you have put in a lot of work. My point is, that at the current state, your kanban offers nothing special. It is like the other 1000 kanban boards.
I think you should specialize your board for a selected audience. Not a board for all, that kind of boards we have.
Example: Kanban with special features for game developement. More visual options, images and not only text. Currently there exists only some really overbloated tools.
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?
Scrollbar in Safari looks wrong.
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!
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.
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!
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How does it compare to the existing open-source boards, such as:
https://wekan.github.io/
https://taiga.io/
https://kanboard.org/
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)
I think I found Plane[1], but Eigenboard?
https://github.com/makeplane/plane?tab=readme-ov-file
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Plane is so sick. I think it's better than trello
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Or this one that I've been self-hosting for my team: https://vikunja.io/
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.
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.
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Also https://github.com/plankanban/planka
Planka is not open-source.
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I am using Planka for my personal projects. Works great!
https://github.com/usekaneo/kaneo / https://kaneo.app
also Obsidian with Kanban plugin
Obsidian is not open-source.
and Nullboard: https://github.com/apankrat/nullboard
i don't understand the wave of downvotes but whatever
Thank you, hosted demo with no login required saving to local storage is exactly what i was looking for.
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?
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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