Wekan: Open-source, trello-like kanban | Hacker News Reader

Wekan: Open-source, trello-like kanban

wekan.github.io

278 pointsjonifico86 comments

If anyone is looking for another open source solution, there's https://github.com/greggigon/my-personal-kanban.

What's neat about the above one is it's a single offline html file that you open in your browser and everything is saved to local storage (but it has a JSON export / import feature for more robust backups).

Of course that means it's really only usable for 1 person, but if you're a solo developer, it's a breath of fresh air to just open a simple html file without needing to run a service to use it.

It's not the prettiest tool but it's very usable. I've been using it to manage a large personal side project. I made a video on that here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/an-open-source-and-fully-offl...

In the same vein -

https://nullboard.io/preview or https://github.com/apankrat/nullboard

I like that a lot. It would be super nice if I could change the background of the items. That way I could color code things that really need to get taken care of NOW.

If you are looking for a personal Kanban application where you can colour the cards, please see: https://www.hyperplan.com

(I am the author)

Thanks! I liked nullboard pretty minimal design and that the tasks can be one line or multiline. Most of the kanaban tools look like post it notes, and I liked that the tasks were mininimal size.

All I was missing is to be able to stick one of 4-8 colors on the background of the box.

I'll have some time to look at hyperplan, thanks for the pointer

-You can colour the background of the card according to any property of the card (e.g. its priority or the date due) -Cards can have any number of properties -You can store various 'views' (e.g. view 1 is x=status,y=person,colour=priority, view 2 is x=person,y=department,colour=due date)

Oh, that's exactly what I was looking for. Most kanban software is centered around multiple users and all the cumbersome setup that comes with that assumption.

So simple and elegant. I have adopted it. Thank you !

I think it is usable enough. Specially if you worry about privacy this is a good tool. A thing most people don't like about Trello is that it is not encrypted on the server side.

I really like this, and after reading about the guy who lost his personal trello to his former employer...I am motivated to try this.

Thank you for this. Not everyone needs to setup yet another service for simple project management.

Wekan uses meteor.js which is really one of the worst frameworks out there. It breaks on so many ocasions and has really bad OS support. Event he current maintainer kind of dislikes the framework... The worst part about metor is that it forces you to use MongoDB!

While I tend to agree from a personal perspective, however the Wekan project especially seems to be able to pump out lots of very nice features at a high rate, thanks to meteor. Additionally to this, we at Cloudron update the app package about twice a week due to that and so far had very little breakage or regressions, compared to other apps. We do not update meteor often though, which is maybe contributing to the stability.

Yes that helps but brings in other problems. For example many many security problems in the thousands of used npm packages of meteor and its dependencies.

Unfortunately thousands of dependencies is not unique to meteor, it is the hallmark of any popular npm package. So even react and vue would have too many dependencies.

I think at a certain point, very restrictive sandboxing is going to be the only way to safely run JavaScript-based projects.

So what is your go-to nodejs framework? and which NoSQL database do you use?

Not the parent commenter, but.. Having only a superficial knowledge of Meteor, I prefer a more modular approach:

- React/Preact with context or hooks instead of Redux

- Micro for server - https://github.com/zeit/micro

- Postgres with Knex for data persistence - https://knexjs.org/

Add authentication, WebSockets, etc., and it starts to look like an ad-hoc framework - except that all layers are generic and replaceable (theoretically) with equivalent features, like using Express or MariaDB.

I'm also quite fond of Next.js, which lets me have all the above. https://nextjs.org/

Thanks, but the issue with the modular, ad-hoc approach is that you need to do a lot of integration and leg work before you get to the domain problem in hand and you'll need to maintain those integrations going forward.

I agree, and that might be the most valuable thing about frameworks like Meteor. It provides a curated developer experience, where most of these common features and integrations are solved.

They tend to have far superior documentation than any ad-hoc approach, making it more suitable for teams. And a whole community that continues to debug, improve, and maintain it.

Well, I'm with you in the search for such a framework!

FeathersJS + Nuxt/Next (or any front end you want) has been a good combo for me.

Meteor always had a blocking issue for me every time I'd try to use it.

I like FeatherJS as well.

What kind of blocking issues? you mean getting it to run?

Usually it was a feature I wanted to use that was broken. It's been a while, so I forget specifics.

Requiring mongodb was another factor a few times as well. This was before Mongo had ACID transactions or any built-in options to save immediately to disk.

oh no!

I do most of my thinking and planning on Trello boards. It almost feels like a part of my brain.

Ever since Trello was acquired by Atlassian, I've been planning to replace it - in the long term - waiting for signals that Atlassian is degrading my experience. It hasn't happened yet but I am assume that it's a matter of time.

I've been wanting an open source Trello clone with a native desktop client for a while now. Going to give this a try.

First impression: promising but seems a bit clunky/ugly compared to Trello. Hope I can contribute to the development in some way.

I have been using Kanboard for some time now, and can recommend it. There is - as far as I know it - not yet a native desktop client, but the web-interface works quite well: https://kanboard.org/ (not affiliated in any way - just a safisfied user)

It's a php app. All you have to do to run it locally is use the php server:

php -S localhost:8001

Open in your browser:

localhost:8001/index.php

You can also directly access the sqlite database if you want.

Also running this on a raspberry pi I have stuffed somewhere in a closet, it's genuinely great. Web interface even works decently on mobile (mostly use it for viewing and dragging not creating issues).

That looks cool! Does it have APIs?

Edit: yes it has!

I'll be trying this tonight.

While it is maintained by Atlassian, I found this react library really useful for making customized Trello boards for myself https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd

Creating cards that made sense for my use case was fun... I was going to play with adding a card type that I could work on to create notes with my apple pencil, a bit like postit notes... Anyway, a silly side project for me I guess, but worth a look if you're heavily invested in Kanban format

I suppose this only affects you if you have a second account attached to your Trello boards, but there was a thread about Atlassian transferring ownership of personal boards to a company yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873578

It's a specific pitfall that -- for a lot of people -- can be easily avoided, but it doesn't speak to them being friendly towards individual users.

This might change your mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873578

If you're a Teams user, there's Microsoft Planner.

Thanks for this reminder. I wish I could view things in Gantt (rather than just calendar) format.

Github has a basic kanban board and since private repositories are free, it can be used as replacement to Trello.

Gitlab also has kanban boards, which I really like. Sometimes I wish I could just use the kanban boards to manage tasks, without having all the associated software development tools in the UI.

Or maybe, a better idea would be the ability to log in straight to the boards, without having to navigate via projects etc.

If you want a desktop (Windows and Mac) Kanban application you might want to look at: https://www.hyperplan.com

It is commercial software. I am the author.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you organize your thinking/planning a cross boards/projects?

Shameless plug for Mac users:

https://apps.apple.com/app/tidycards/id1285199566

I've been developing this app for the last 3 years.

I really like kanban boards for organizing my work but one feature I really miss in nearly all solutions is a way to schedule my day using existing tasks in a board. And preferably in a stand-alone way rather than adding it to my google calender.

I'm currently using paymo [1], which does a great job at this. Example of what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/3Re9sXn But I'm open for switching to any alternatives.

[1]: https://www.paymoapp.com/

this is not a feature I have ever missed, and I wonder why you would miss it? I move the task I am working on into in progress and when I am done with it I move it into review or done. If I scheduled my day based on tasks, then when task A was not moved from in progress and task B is scheduled to start what happens? It sounds to me like it would be more problematic - sorry to go on about it but I really am wondering because I've never considered I would want to schedule tasks on a kanban board - how do you see it working?

I follow some practices from Cal Newport Deep Work [1]. In this case it is about scheduling your day (see also this blogpost [2]).

I really like the feature in paymo to schedule your working day with tasks that do exist in a kanban board. It ensures that you can quickly see what you're working on when picking things to do during the day and it also ensures that everything you do is in a kanban board.

I understand that most people probably don't miss this feature but I have a hard time going back to a system that does not have this.

[1]: https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

[2]: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2015/09/29/deep-habits-three...

I was using paymoapp for a while, it was better than others that I had used in the past. Then I came across clickup.com, it is much better than paymoapp in my opinion. I switched and so far it has been pretty good. It is also cheaper than paymo, if you pay yearly. I still haven't exhausted the free plan though.

Not associated with them, just a happy user.

Microsoft planner is pretty great if you have access to it. You can create cards on a Kanban board but also schedule them and see a calendar and a Gantt chart view of your projects.

Not open source and it's sad

To add to the other alternatives: remember that there's Excel, i.e. spreadsheet software. It's my current method for organizing and monitoring my solo work. Some of the useful features:

- Handling dates, intervals, boolean values.

- Formatting, and conditional formatting. Colors, fonts etc. without the non-utilitarian, "sleek" burden of modern web design.

- Collecting reporting information with SUM(), IF(), COUNTIFS() and friends.

The main benefit is that it's very flexible with only very minimal programming. I can reserve my coding time and stamina for the tasks that absolutely need it.

I chose Kanboard[1] for personal user because it's PHP and supports SQLite. I hate becoming an admin for these kind of apps. Also chose FreshRSS over Tiny Tiny RSS for the same reasons. Works by just uploading a directory to my shared hosting.

[1] https://kanboard.org/

Not open source, but I built KanRails, a Kanban tool that hopes to become a workflow solution. Part Trello, part Pipefy, and making more Power-Ups part of the core (automation, custom fields, etc.).

Check it out at https://www.kanrails.com/. Would love to get feedback from HN!

Anyone using/used this in a team and know if its actually a good replacement for trello?

We have been using it for 3 years now at a small company. There were some minor bugs in the past (mainly UI related), but in general it is a very good replacement for Trello.

We run it in a Docker container with LDAP integration so that people can log in with their Windows accounts. The operating of it has been very straightforward.

I don't really like the name. I think it's meant to be pronounced We-Can, which pretty much sums up Kanban, but I automatically think of Weaken, which then makes the product sound like it's going to hinder your workflow in some way.

Doesn't it sound more like "We can"?

Single data point: before reading these comments, my first reading of the word was pronouncing it "weh-can".

Perhaps "WeKan" or "Weekan" would get the other pronunciation across better, if that's the goal?

I used Wekan a while ago when I wanted to try a kanban board for organizing my personal tasks at work. Trello was out of question since it stores the data externally.

I found the UX on Wekan and Trello were hard to compare, Trello being polished and hassle free while Wekan still felt like work in progress and many things were straight out broken.

This was like a year ago, though, so maybe it has improved since.

On PC, it worked perfectly. On smartphone (Android), it works really bad. That's the reason why I (sadly) had to leave Wekan behind, it just didn't fit my use case because of this.

Trello got other problems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873578

We use this daily in our company. Projects are organized as boards. To solve visibility issues across multiple boards we develop a standalone program to consolidate cards from multiple boards to a user view. There has been issues like CPU usage, UI bugs and build issues but on the whole it is still quite useful.

Development and releases seems haphazard and there are no unit tests. Only eslint.

Can you share the program to consolidate cards? We are also using Wekan in our company and would be very interested in that.

Would like to leave this here: https://github.com/rcdexta/react-trello

Again, this is a pluggable trello-like kanban board built using React and Redux. It's highly customizable, uses event-bus to publish triggers/actions and supports touch devices.

There is also Restyaboard [0] (you have to install it on your server)

It's open source Trello like kanban board. I think there was even 1-click droplet install in DigitalOcean. Haven't used it much, so I can't really comment how good/bad it is.

0 - https://restya.com/board

the disclaimer about backups is a bit scary... makes me want to use something a bit more reliable/recoverable/version controllable...

> Backups of Wekan database with mongodump once a day miminum required. Bugs, updates, users deleting list or card, harddrive full, harddrive crash etc can eat your data. There is no undo yet.

Taiga is another option that you can host yourself.

https://taiga.io

Have used a self hosted version of Taiga for years at work hooked into Keycloak for SSO. Works perfectly well for us :)

It would be really nice to have something like this that can run locally but meant for a single user. I don't want to have to log in to my own instance or host a bunch of backend services (or even run it in a docker container).

Might be a fun weekend project to learn Rust, actually. :)

Kanboard is very easy to run locally as I explained in my other comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888108

I don't think replacing Trello is a weekend project, but if you want to learn Rust, you can use Kanboard to track your progress.

Kanbanly integrates with GMail and Google Tasks. https://nodetics.com/kanbanly/

Assumption: Most teams which use a kanban system would work just as efficiently with a couple of org-mode files.

That's what I use for my personal stuff that I do. I like being able to cut and paste to reprioritise, etc. Also, when planning, having a real editor makes things go so much more smoothly. However, for people who are consumers rather than producers of the plan, I have found considerable friction about removing their drag and drop, table oriented UI.

I've often thought about writing a trello-like whose backend was simply markdown or org-mode files that was versioned in a real version control system. There is nothing in the Trello UI that really precludes it (and in fact, there was at one point a program that allowed you to talk to the trello API and grab/push org-mode oriented data from Emacs -- I never found it worked particularly well, though).

Here you go: https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web

Org-mode and other text files have the problem that they can only present content in a linear way. Which is fine in a lot of cases and for text documents, but can't hold a candle to a simple Kanban board where you have everything at a glance and nicely structured without scrolling back and forth all the time.

I use org-mode files every day and it's a limitation I feel more and more.

Kanban relies on sensory intuition. Org-mode requires you to build up a whole new epistemological relationship to the elements of an outline. They are pretty different, and Org-mode requires a _lot_ of time investment.

It depends on what you're used to use. "Kanban" systems escape my intuitions.

I'm talking about physically moving cards from one column to another. The skeuomorphism is preserved there.

I would go further and say that plain text (yes, I know org-mode is plain text too) would work just as well.

Each board is a directory. Each column in a board is a file. Each task is a line in the file. Open up the directory in the text editor of your choice. Move tasks with your normal cut & paste commands that you use for everything else. Keep the whole thing in version control.

We use images/diagrams/LaTex/etc to communicate a number of tasks that are inherently visual, not to mention needing somewhere on the cloud to access it centrally.

As a casual org-mode user, I fail to see how org-mode is really relevant for a team-centric tool.

What stops you from using graphics in shared org files?

... Can't tell if you're being facetious or not, but here's a sample trello board that mimics our workflow:

https://trello.com/b/TTAVI7Ny/ue4-roadmap

This is not a good fit for org-mode, despite what any number of org-mode zealots say.

I think from a casual user perspective, knowing how to do it ;-)

I'm not a casual user. The inline images functionality of org-mode sucks in comparison.

What are org-mode files?

Basically, structured text files. See orgmode.org.

org-mode is personal organization "application* that runs inside the emacs text editor.

Some, including me, swear by it as the ultimate personal organizer, note taking, mind dumping application

The font sizes and weights look inconsistent and random.

Send a PR to fix that, the devs will probably appreciate the help.

That's an empty advice.

Vast majority of people will have no desire or time to "send a PR" after seeing it for the first time. And those who will be inclined to do that don't need a public reminder to that effect. But their feedback is still valuable and the "do better and send a PR" remarks achieve nothing but alienating people by looking dismissive of their comments.

How is their feedback useful if no one involved sees it? They may as well have said nothing.

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