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For personal use I can recommend this Obsidian plugin. It turns a markdown file into a Kanban board.

https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban

...which can go right into git! You can even use it to update your GitHub wiki as Ben Christel does[0].

0. https://github.com/benchristel/benchristel.github.io/wiki/

> Note: Search engines will not index the contents of wikis. To have your content indexed by search engines, you can use GitHub Pages in a public repository.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-proj...

Otherwise it's a lightweight alternative to Obsidian Publish. The disadvantage, that it's limited to a common subset of GFM, Gollum, and Obsidian Markdown.

There doesn't seem to be anything that doesn't exist as an Obsidian plugin!
Okay,so obsidian looks really cool but from what I see on their page it is not open source right?

Any open source equivalents?

IMHO a very capable FOSS competitor for Obsidian is LogSeq (https://logseq.com/). I use Logseq since 6 month and love it. There also exists a Kanban Plugin for LogSeq, which I have not yet tried... https://github.com/hkgnp/logseq-kanban-plugin
Looks Nice! Also interesting to see they are incorporated. Would be cool to watch how they evolve the product while also implementing a business plan.

But from the home page I don't directly get whether this is backed by markdown flat files or some other system, do you know?

Its local markdown flat files.
LogSeq has suffered a lot, imo, since they took venture funding. Their focus has wavered drastically since then, shipping features nobody is asking for that I can only assume are viewed to be differentiating for other PKMs (e.g., canvas) vs making the thing performant, improving the wretched UI, fixing bugs, etc.

Obsidian may not be open source, but it reflects a sane approach to product: small, focused team, profitable company, delivering useful stuff. Clean and tight. It's got a different set of abstractions at its core (document model vs block model) but if you're indifferent to that, Obsidian is where I'd start.

I use this too! I wish there was a better way to self-host keeping a vault up to date on the Android client, though.
I've been using syncthing to do this without any issue.
Yes I second this! Syncthing works really well for keeping Obsidian vaults sync'd across multiple computers
I've found myself running into sync-conflicts while editing my Obsidian Vault in a syncthing folder in the past. Did syncthing work flawlessly OOB in your experience?
I don't use Android anymore but when I did I found the GitJournal app worked well to sync with git, then you could open the files with Obsidian.

That predates plugins being native on mobile apps however, so the built in Obsidian Git plugin might be better now.

Got it synced over laptop, android phone and tablet with syncthing. Whith my home server as 'base' which also backup the vault itself
How does Obsidian work? Is it an app/client only which has its data local?
They have a paid cloud service but by default it just stores markdown files locally. Unlike many apps with that model, they're not at all pushy about their paid services in the app.
Yes, Obsidian by itself reads and creates files in a folder of your choice. The folder is considered a "workspace" and you can create/switch to other workspaces if you want. There's desktop apps and mobile apps. Aside from Markdown files, you can store and display images, audio files and video files (haven't tried that last one though).

However, you can choose to backup and sync your workspace across multiple devices using a cloud service. The most pain-free way to do this is by buying a subscription to Obsidian Vault. This is also a good way to support the development team, since the main product is free. When you store your workspace on Obsidian Vault, you can choose to specify an encryption key, so that theoretically nobody at Obsidian should be able to read your data.

But there's nothing stopping you from using other cloud storage services. There's even a community plugin you can find to use a Git repo for storage.

I tried using Linear before switching to Obsidian Kanban. I found Linear's UX and site structure to be overly complex for my personal needs. Despite following the onboarding process, I found myself clicking too many times to figure out where things are (I acknowledge that this may have been an issue on my side). As a result, I switched to Kanban because I was already using it to store documentation for my projects. For me, it meets the spec as a project management tool and is an improvement over a text-only kanban. I can definitely recommend it.
Assuming "kanban" is the Japanese 看板[1] ("kanban", billboard), the Department of Redundancy Department would like a word with you and Kanboard regarding "kanban board".

[1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E7%9C%8B%E6%9D%BF

Kindly also report the usage of "Chai Tea" ('Chai' means 'Tea' in Pakistan/India, which is where that flavor originated from)
And it's actually masala chai.
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Incorrect assumption. This "kanban" refers to the signalling process you can use to maintain even levels of buffer inventory in processes that are too variable to do prodution levelling.

A board is just one implementation of this signalling process, but by no way implied by it.

I tried this Kanban plugin and ultimately ditched it. I do think it's superior to the other Obsidian plugin, CardBoard (which has some advantages too, namely that it works great with the tasks already in your Obsidian vault) but I ditched Obsidian Kanban because there was no way for me to just view one card. This is a crucial feature for me - while I'm working I do not want to look at the whole board. I want to focus on just the card I'm working on.
I got around this by making the text in the card a link to another file/page.
This is awesome. This is all I need for personal projects, and I've been looking for a "kanban lite" for a while.
I gotta say thank you! You just introduced me to Obsidian! So far, love the app and the Kanban plugin. The plugin is basic, but gets the job done for my needs. My only gripe is Obsidian isn't open source and will probably deteriorate over the years. But I love how it's all markdown, so I should hopefully be able to transfer my data to something else when that happens.
Have you tried Joplin? It's open source. I liked it very much but ultimately ended up using a folder of markdown files and using vscode to edit them. It works great. The only issue is that long hyperlinks become unreadable.
I have not! I've heard it mentioned before but never looked into it. Thanks for the rec, I'll have to take a look.
I have used it, it's nice and simple, would recommend. Also, very lightweight requirements.
Flexible and really lightweight. Been using it daily for the last year and would recommend it to anyone who is running a small-medium support team or as a planner for your own stuff.
I've been looking for a new Kanban system ever since Restyaboard has slowed down.

Does anyone know how this compares against Taiga or WeKan?

Kanboard is featureful, simple to use, and very fast to load. Hosting wekan was a pain and the UX just sucked compared to Kanboard.

I highly recommend Kanboard or Gitea’s kanban issue boards if you’re already using that.

If Gitea has kanban now, they're a great rec.
The UI/UX of WeKan and Kanboard made it a toss-up for us. I'd give both a demo.
It's also got a decent codebase that's easy to extend via plugins.
I'd like to know, too.

WeKan is absolutely great! But self-hosting it is a bit cumbersome; except when using it as a Sandstorm (sandstorm.io) web app.

Hosting Kanboard is super easy
WeKan is maintained, major features being added, etc.

WeKan has very polished opinionated simplified design, high focus on usability. Less duplicate menus than Trello. More shiny than Kanboard.

WeKan does not have plugins. WeKan has all features included, keeping them all working, options to enable and disable features. Many WeKan Power users use most features of WeKan.

Some Kanboard plugins are not maintained or do not work.

BR,

xet7

Maintainer of WeKan

Oooh this looks similar to the first kanban board I used. I forget its name but I think it went out of business. I love the simplicity and the colors. Look forward to giving this a try!
Yes! I bet it was "Scrumy"? I've looked in vain for something similar (light design, simple colours, basic kanban features).
Tangential: What are popular options for self-hosting project management tools these days?

There used to be Trac or Redmine but people seemed to move on and have settle on hosting solutions (which makes sense). But there must be some self-hosting alternatives. Maybe GitLab? Any tips are welcome.

I used trac in its most basic way (just tickets with comments) for the first time in a long time for a project last year, because a vendor asked to use it. It was really nice especially when it was required to look back a discussion or decision. I don't mind any of these tools, even JIRA if it's not been setup to micromanage, but even then it's not been my experience that you can look back at something from last year and get good information. Yes, it's immutable but as people come and go it's very hard to have the configuration of projects, workflows, etc be consistent enough over time to trust you're looking at the primary source of information.

Self-hosted Gitlab is pretty nice and is a (the?) current de facto standard. I've not used any of the CI features but the wiki, git handling, and issue handling/kanban boards feel like a nice sweet spot of functionality vs simplicity. I have also not used the features related to epics/gantt charts, etc but I personally think a good project manager makes these separately instead of trying to automate reporting based on tickets.

If you need/want self-hosting, and something more comprehensive, I recommend YouTrack (https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/) as an excellent replacement for self-hosted Jira&co. It's not open source, but it's free for <10 users and cheap beyond that.
I used YouTrack from around 2015 (maybe late 2015) til late 2016 at a former employer, and they only used it because a vendor of theirs used it...and everyone loved it; hence started using in in-house. It really was quite comprehensive, fluid, and lovely to work with from a user perspective. But, I'm sorry, nowadays and for some time now, unless something is open source, i either heavily hesitate or avoid using where possible. Mind you, I am not against any entity making money - in fact its quite possible to do so with open source - it is simply that i value the principles of open source. The moiment that jetbrains opens up that source code, i will give them my money to pay them to manage hosting for a YouTrack instance. Separate of my ethics/values, again, i can not deny that the product was rocksolid in so many ways! ;-)
I understand the reasoning, and YouTrack will fail the open-source test. I mention it as an option because we needed a self-hosted project management platform (for regulatory reasons), and I could not find any open-source options that I could put in front of non-tech people with a straight face. FOSS surprisingly skips over this area (maybe because many engineers seem to dislike "project management").
> ...FOSS surprisingly skips over this area...

You're not wrong, sadly! While i think there are FOSS options for managing projects, i feel they work only effectively for individuals or very small teams. Maybe also if the small team works in a small (or non-profit) org where there might be less need for corporate style work constraints. But, once you go up a level, and the team gets bigger, or more sophisticated (tech or non-tech, doesn't matter), or even if a small team but operating in a bigger org...that is when many FOSS project management stacks fail to live up to hype. I say as a staunch FOSS advocate, sadly!

Why does it look like that though. I wish open source projects would spend a bit more time on design.
If you don't like it, you're welcome to submit a PR.
I actually like it, apart from maybe text needing a little bit more padding when close to the edges of the cards etc.

The UI is minimalist without feeling like it's lacking, it's usable and the performance is great because it doesn't try to have lots of fancy gradients or animations for the sake of it.

Still using OpenProject because of the nice multi-project feature set there and Jira having rotten my brain, but Kanboard is easily 10x times faster than the sluggish OpenProject experience.

There is a plugin which greatly improves UI and somewhat UX.
Been a while since I used it, but as I recall it was very simple to customize the design. My opinion is that, aside from fonts, functionality trumps design, and there's typically a tradeoff between the two.
I wish people would appreciate other peoples effort a little bit more. As far as I can tell it is a one man project that has been around for a while. It takes a lot of effort to do this.
It is a valid concern though. It's very common to see technically genius projects, that don't get enough attention because their project landing page looks horrible. I kinda don't understand how people can be so skilled, and put so much effort to make a nice thing, and then completely skimp on the design.

E.g. here it wouldn't even take much. It's mostly just padding issues, and having sharp and rounded corners mixed, and maybe the color palette of the tasks could be improved.

I wouldn't call it skimping, maybe the author likes it or can't do better without paying somebody to do it.
I actually appreciate open source projects so much that I get angry when they lose out due to things like this.
The README in the GitHub project repository says:

> “This application is in maintenance mode.”

Source: https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard

I think there are better open-source kanban-style applications out there that are also actively maintained. For example:

https://opensourcealternatives.org/project/planka/

I wouldn't say this is a detractor, based on the comment below what you quoted:

> The author of this application is not actively developing any new major features (only small fixes) > New releases are published regularly depending on the contributions made by the community > Pull requests for new features and bug fixes are accepted as long as the guidelines are followed

So it's more that no new features will be added by the main dev however it is still maintained. Other software like this exists (Miniflux for example) and they work well.

A Project doesn't need a constant influx of new features to be useful or even maintained.

EDIT: Turns out it's made by the miniflux dev which I respect.

Maybe it's my age (after certain number one becomes super lazy..), but self host anything that requires me to install something is too much of an ask. Provide a binary that I can drop on my /remote/ machine and I may consider using it.
Docker containers solved this for me. I can’t remember the last time I installed a web app.
Yes, if I really want the software I will build a Docker image, but still I would prefer not to deal how to config/run Parcel/Webpack/Babel/Esbuild/Grunt/Whatever.
Installing in this case means copying files to your web server.
> Installing in this case means copying files to your web server.

In PHP land, once you have the web server set up with the basics, this is just such a nice easy way to deploy software. I actually run Kanboard on the same server as my WordPress blog and installed it simply by throwing the files into a directory.

The most complex thing you might need to do is add a new database somewhere but I find it so much less overhead than Docker or most other things.

In Php Land I would say <?php $no $thanks ?>

It's the red waving flag of this project. I cannot understand how people are still arguing for this kind of stuff or stick with this dinosaur language at all.

I am sorry but I have such an aversion against the attitude of "we use xy because of historic reasons but hey actually it is really good because the design pattern that has proven crucial over the last 50 years imo is just overhead and you can just put some files here and there copy a bit of that and... "

Php is a fine language nowadays.

I used to work at a company that was heavy on php but had very good practices, and the php runtime was quite good.

Please stop waving the flag!
PHP is a nature stable language and running a PHP program is very simple and cheap
> I am sorry but I have such an aversion against the attitude of "we use xy because of historic reasons but hey actually it is really good because the design pattern that has proven crucial over the last 50 years imo is just overhead and you can just put some files here and there copy a bit of that and... "

I don't understand what your criticism is

My criticism is that php was designed to be a violation to mvc. The <?php> file header already a commitment to mixing front- and backend code (HTML + php in one file) inevitably leading to spaghetti code. The $annotation an inheritance from perl imo also a major distraction. also Laravel, other frameworks and newer php versions might try to tackle some of the historical tech debt embedded into the language but I personally don't see a point in revival of php altogether. I guess my point is to some degree subjectal and shaped by some major crimes I have stumbled upon when debugging. Even though the code in this repo looks fine, the mere use of php is reason enough for me to stay away from it altogether
I mean, you can do MVC in PHP if you want. I used perl long before I used PHP so the $annotation never bothered me.

I personally like mixing frontend and backend. I get why it's anathema to some, but there are simply tons of use cases where I think the simplicity it offers - being able to capture an entire page of functionality in a single file - outweighs the disadvantages because of the simplicity it offers.

For larger scale applications it's easy to make terrible mistakes leading to spaghetti code - I feel your pain about major crimes and have witnessed a few (and been responsible for some) myself. But this is possible in many languages if you're not using a framework, and modern PHP gives you way more tools to avoid it, even before you look at frameworks, which almost completely obviate the problem.

You could technically use an IMAP server and client as a Kanban board. Make a folder per swim-lane, make a backlog, move e-mails from one folder to another as you get each item done, share the mailbox with your team. IMAP already supports searching, filters, flags, attachments. You can treat a thread of replies as comments on the original item and move them all as a group. Create a custom client to hide the fact that the backend store is basically an immutable log journal of MIME entries.
I don't think a kanban board really needs constant new features.

At some point, it wouldn't be a "kanban" board any more.

In my opinion, the fact that it is feature complete and no big changes are expected is a strong point. It means if I put the time to learn this tool, it will not change on next update and get on my way.
Used it in a project, worked ok. One problem back then was it was desktop use only, using it on a tablet or phone didn’t work well, perhaps this has improved since then.
It's not perfect on a phone, but I use it on my Galaxy Android phone occasionally. AFAIK it works better in desktop mode, depending on what you want to do.
“… is a … software”

Should either be

“… is a … application”

Or

“… is … software”

edit: Maybe I’m just in-a-mood today. Apologies.

Is it an application?
Isn’t it? I would call it a web app.
yes. calling it "a application" is imho a lot worse than using "a software"
I'm pretty sure the ellipsis replaces another word... "a productivity application" or whatever
People in my current industry (healthcare/biotech) often use the terminology "a software" and "these softwares." It irked me at first but eventually I got used to it.

I think it's because every piece of validated software that our company uses, however small, is assigned a unique number (e.g. "SW12345"). They're not all full-blown applications, so we can't call them that. Sometimes they're tiny programs or even just scripts.

Anyway, it's possible the person that wrote this has a background in a similar industry.

This is by the same person who made miniflux! It's a fantastic, minimal (just the right amount of functionality to be good) RSS feed reader. It's how I got here :)

https://miniflux.app/

It looks fantastic but I think they should have chosen sqlite over postgres in this case since it aims to be minimal
Postgres makes sense if you take into account the paid hosting option (which is what I use), which requires multi-tenant support. I agree, SQLite would be way more convenient from a hosting standpoint, but minimalism on the user side does not have to mean minimalism on the hosting side.
Have been self-hosting this on a raspberry pi for the last 2 years, and it has been completely painless. It just keeps chugging along without needing to take a look.
Wow, that certainly explains the minimalist strength of Kanboard.
Unrelated, but I was looking a very long time to re-discover this app (someone else posted it here some time ago). It was impossible to search for, and I haven't bookmarked it. And now I have it. Thank you!
For projects like this you could easily search something like "rss feed selfhosted reddit"
Well, my case is that I like this app's UI (not interested in self hosted RSS), so I wanted to create similarly aesthetic website for my own use, but could not find "the picture" I had in my mind.
oh I was just looking for OSS/self-hosted Kanban software! Is there anything HN recommends that also works well on mobile (iOS)?
Someone else recommend the Obsidian kanban plugin in another comment. Obsidian runs on both desktop and mobile.
I posted the from-scratch kanban board to /prog/ last year.

I should post the patches to fix some of the bugs I've found. It's pretty nice: just an INI file I keep wherever I keep the docs for whatever project.

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I actually ended up making a physical Kanban board at home in a central location. Relatively large corkboard using 3x5 index cards, with a few layers of backlog, in-progress lane with a hard cap of 2 cards, and about 1/3 of the space reserved for done cards. This last bit should be unnecessary in theory but I find psychologically satisfying to look at. This is for shared use by the family.
Can you take a picture of it maybe if not too personal... I was planning to do something similar but ended up using white board with grids I drew myself.
I have too much PII on the cards, but it's just a standard cork bulletin board (about 5x3 feet) hanging in landscape orientation, and then I used long strips of paper to make vertical lanes. The middle of the board is the in-progress lane and this is marked with a neon pink paper to stand out, and a big bold note at the top "In Progress - 2 Max!" . To the left are backlog cards, to the right are finished cards. The kids enjoy moving cards from lane to lane, and we also enjoy looking at the left side together and moving cards around according to priority. Just like PMs at a prioritization meeting :-)

So far it's worked out OK but I feel it's because I am the primary user. When the kids get older or to get the SO to use it more I feel we might need to come up with private sections, or color code the cards or similar and change the in-progress rules. It's still a very fun physical activity kind of like browsing books at a brick-and-mortar store or library.

Thank you for the visualization. I will test this out, maybe with magnet board. :)
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I've not bothered with a physical board, but I have a massive Trello board. For teams I strongly recommend specialized boards for projects and processes -- the process to migrate a MySQL database will be dramatically different than building an LLM.

But for personal stuff, fitting everything into one work flow is fine. If folks are wondering how to use Kanban for personal needs, I currently have 7 columns:

Dumb ideas: 62 cards

Backlog of Doom: 100 cards

Not Yet: 38 cards

Weekly recurring: 8 cards

Doing: 4 cards

Review: 4 cards

It Is Done: 1 card

Dumb ideas is a holding tank for wild ideas, usually low priority or high risk. To pick a few examples: trial adopting tiling windowing managers, buying an IPv4 block, and terraform for social media profiles are all on there. Also: "self-hosted Trello alternative." Basically things go here so I can remember I decided that idea was _not_ a good one, so I dont get into any "I thought I had a card for this" create-delete-create loop.

Backlog of Doom is your standard backlog. Lots of video games, books and software projects here.

Not Yet is basically a way of hiding things that are scheduled for later. This is almost entirely TV shows awaiting new seasons, but also a few tasks filing taxes, selling shares etc.

Weekly recurring is essentially a tighter loop of that, plus some information gathering tasks ("look for new books at the library on $topic", "review the top posts for the past week on /r/$subreddit".

Doing is as expected.

Review is a catchall for things that benefit from double checks -- financial transactions, followup communications with insurance, etc. If I wanted I could also use it for book reviews.

Done is as expected, but has a butler cleanup task to archive cards.

I've also got labels for Games, Shows, Reading, Money, and a few others.

I hold strict to: Backlog, Next, Now, Completed
Yea, each addition was lined with good intentions -- I don't want to prioritize the entire backlog but do want to filter out the worst ideas and the "hurry up and wait" stuff.
Sounds like one of those places where adding a new category can solve all categorisation issues except having too many categories.

Same principle holds for layers (of management, abstraction), levels of indirection etc.

A category for everything, including categories.
Let me guess: When you have a task to start say filing a pile of unfiled mail, bills etc, you start by sorting it into other piles and then run out of time, over time those piles grow, then at some point get combined then (after a suitable grieving period) you have a task to tackle this pile, so you start by sorting it into piles...
I totally understand the concern about organization paralysis, but the point is to keep it simple, focused, and relaxed. By writing things and ideas down in an organized way I don't have to track it in my head, and I can get back to what's important. Or at least procrastinate on something useful. I suppose it looks complicated from the outside, but has really only grown slowly over a decade.

Also: I have most bills on autopay, and transactions created 90d in advance in GNUCash. I do also have piles of mail in the form of a filing cabinet and labeled folders. I've actually been experimenting with letting the mail pile up in an inbox and filing it away once a month just to prove to myself the system works enough that I don't have to monitor it daily.

I also use a physical Kanban board on my kitchen fridge with Post-its. I have four columns (To Do, In Progress, Blocked, and Done) and three swimlanes (Everything Else on top, Books in the middle, and a Recurring lane at the bottom, where some cards temporarily park in Blocked until needing to happen again). The Done column works a little bit differently from a traditional Kanban, where it's reaped on a rolling basis - e.g. I work my way down the fridge, then start replacing the post-its at the top.

An interesting feature-not-bug is that my In Progress column is capped at four tickets, physically, by the ice maker.

We use it professionally at work, great enough tool!
Thanks for sharing. I’ve been lashing a bit with openproject and tuleap, and while the latter is fascinating the lightbulb of what kanban provides me over and above agile has me craving it.
This functionality is also built in to Gitea if you already self-host that.

Tiny benefit is that Gitea is written in Go (and does other stuff) and this is a PHP app.

Less can be more. I'd use this over JIRA any day.
This runs on a subdomain of mine and it is my homepage. Excellent and simple and just works out of the box.
Nice! For a less bare bones OSS Kanban board, I like https://www.taiga.io/
Are you on the Free hosted plan or do you self-host? Regardless of your choice, how’s your experience been?