Looking 4 open-source knowledge base and project management tool 4 personal use | Hacker News Reader

Looking 4 open-source knowledge base and project management tool 4 personal use

4 pointsTheAlgorist5 comments

Apologies for odd title, character limits.

I manage my tasks with Taskwarrior and it's been incredibly productive for me. What it does, it does very well. But there's a lot it doesn't do, and that's the problem I'm facing.

I've realized I need proper project documentation and management features, but I don't want to replace Taskwarrior. Instead, I'm looking to *complement* it with some type of knowledge base that also has project management features (or vice versa). My ultimate goal is to integrate these systems together via automations.

In short, Taskwarrior is lacking when it comes to project documentation.

*My criteria:*

- Must be open-source - MUST work in the browser (so no mention of Obsidian) - Has basic project management features (interpret as you will) - Rich wiki-like document interface (bidirectional links, nice editing UI, etc.) - Supports iframes (to embed my Taskwarrior views or tables) - Has an API for integration - Not too heavy, I am not a business just a guy

*Tools I've been looking at:* Odoo, Silverbullet, Blinko, Logseq, AFFiNE, Docmost, Trillium, Joplin, Dolibarr, Leantime, OpenProject, wiki.js, etc.

*Rejected (either not web-based or too restrictive with paid features):* Appflowy, Logseq (local-first), Capacities, Obsidian, Anytype

Does anyone know if a tool like this exists? I feel like I'm looking for a sweet spot between a wiki and a project management tool, but the choices are overwhelming :'(

The framing of "bad vs none" is interesting but I think the more useful question is: what makes an Agent.md actually good?

From what I have seen, the ones that work well are specific about failure modes rather than capabilities. Instead of "you can search the web", something like "when you search, prefer recent sources and flag anything older than 6 months as potentially outdated."

Constraints and edge cases matter more than listing capabilities. Any agent will try to be helpful. The ones that go wrong usually do so at boundaries the original author didn't think about.

I went down this rabbit hole last year. For a knowledge base, Obsidian is the sweet spot—even if it's not 'open source' in the GPL sense, your data is just Markdown files on your disk, which is the ultimate future-proofing. For project management, I’ve found that a simple Kanboard or even just a 'Todo.md' file inside Obsidian works better for personal use than the heavy enterprise tools like Jira or OpenProject. Keeping everything in one local-first ecosystem reduces the friction of actually using it.

Thank you for your reply.

After hours of digging, I am hesitantly about to try Plane by Makeplane, it's the only one I've found that explicitly advertise itself as a project manager AND wiki, while not looking as entrepreneurial as OpenProject, at first Glance.

As for Obsidian, it fails at being accessible remotely (without extra tools) by nature of being a desktop app, not good when all you have access to is a public computer.

A part of me thinks that maybe I am overreaching and should settle to a simple spreadsheet + wiki system for basic project management.

I remain open for suggestions.

That’s a valid concern for public computers. If you need that hybrid accessibility without losing the 'local-first' spirit, check out Syncthing or Tailscale. They let you access your home machine's Obsidian vault as a network drive securely. It’s a bit more setup, but it beats the 'entrepreneurial' bloat of SaaS tools that might not exist in two years. Sometimes a simple spreadsheet is the best answer, but for long-term knowledge, sticking to plain files is a gift to your future self.

Thanks for the tip. I see myself doing that for my own devices, but public libraries have strict restrictions on their systems, so local stuff is no go, I need a browser frontend.

I've concluded that top recommendations for a "lighter" project management software (with document support) would be something like Plane, AppFlowy, Huly, or Leantime. If neither of those satisfy me, I'll fall back to spreadsheet + Silverbullet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com