Planka -- a self-hosted kanban board. Projects, boards, lists, cards, labels, due dates, attachments, real-time updates.
Alternative to: Trello Premium at $10/user/month billed annually -- $1,200/year for a team of ten. Trello's free tier caps at 10 collaborators, 10 boards per Workspace and 250 automation runs a month. Asana Starter is $10.99/user/month annually; Monday.com bills in blocks of three seats minimum even for one person.
Cost to run: free licence for internal use. A small VPS running Planka and PostgreSQL together is realistically $8-12/month -- users report the app container sitting around 210-235MB of RAM plus roughly 20MB for Postgres.
Licence: not OSI open source. The PLANKA Fair Use License (Community License v1.1, 2025-05-20) for community code; a separate proprietary PLANKA Commercial License (v1.2, 2025-11-28) for anything marked Pro or Enterprise. Free for commercial use inside your own organisation. Not free to host for third parties.
Runs on: Docker and docker-compose (official), Kubernetes via Helm, or a manual Debian/Ubuntu install. Web only -- there is no mobile client for the board app.
Requires: PostgreSQL, aBASE_URLand aSECRET_KEY. No built-in TLS; front it with your own reverse proxy and domain.
Traction: 12,400 stars · 1,400 forks · 154 contributors · 1,129 commits · 63 releases · 24 open issues · 39 open PRs / 506 closed. The official container has 11.1M downloads across all tags.
Liveness: live -- a security release shipped 2026-08-10 and the last commit is the same day.
Maturity: v2.2.1. The v2.2.0 notes carry the project's own warning: "⚠️ Breaking changes -- read before updating... OIDC/SSO has been removed from PLANKA Community... If your only admin account is SSO-based, you will be locked out."
Links: repo · planka.app · Trendshift peak #1 JavaScript Repository of the Day, 2024-03-18
Figures as of 2026-08-18.
What it does
Planka is a kanban board you run on your own server. Boards hold lists, lists hold cards, cards hold checklists, attachments, comments, due dates and members. Everything updates live for everyone looking at it.
If you have used Trello, there is nothing to learn. That is deliberate -- the interface is a close study of it, down to the drag behaviour.
What it adds is location. The data sits in your PostgreSQL database, on your machine, inside your network if you want it there. For anyone who cannot put client work, case files or unreleased product plans on someone else's SaaS, that is the whole argument.
You get it running with Docker Compose, point a domain at it, put TLS in front, and that is the install.
What it replaces, and what that costs
Project management is sold per person per month and the free tiers are built to run out.
Trello. Free caps at 10 collaborators, 10 boards per Workspace, and 250 automation runs a month. Standard is $5/user/month billed annually. Premium is $10/user/month annually, $12.50 monthly. Enterprise is $17.50/user/month annually -- $210 per person per year.
Atlassian Jira. Standard $7.91/user/month, Premium $14.54/user/month, on tiered pricing that shifts with team size. The free plan stops at 10 users and 100 automation runs a month.
Asana. Starter $10.99/user/month billed annually. Advanced $24.99/user/month. The free Personal tier caps at 2 users.
Monday.com. Basic $9/seat/month, Standard $12, Pro $19, billed annually -- and billing is enforced in blocks of three seats minimum, so a solo user pays for three.
Worked, for a team of ten over one year:
Trello Premium -- 10 × $10 × 12 = $1,200
Asana Starter -- 10 × $10.99 × 12 = $1,318.80
Monday.com Standard -- 10 × $12 × 12 = $1,440
Jira Standard -- 10 × $7.91 × 12 = $949.20
Planka Community, self-hosted -- $0 licence, plus roughly $96-144/year for the VPS and domain
If that team is currently paying Trello Premium, moving to Planka stops a $1,200 bill and starts a $120 one. If the team is currently on Trello's free tier and about to hit the 10-collaborator cap, Planka does not save anything -- it avoids a cost that had not started yet. Those are different sentences and only one of them is true for any given reader.
Planka's own paid tier is where the picture gets more complicated. Pro Self-Hosted is €7.20-€7.90 per user per month, minimum one user. It unlocks custom branding, Worker and Guest roles, calendar and map views, recurring cards, cross-company use -- and OIDC/SSO, which used to be in the free edition. Pro Hosted is €8.50-€9.40 per user per month, minimum five users. Enterprise starts at a 1,000-user minimum. An installation service is sold separately from €469 plus VAT.
At ten users, Planka Pro Self-Hosted at €7.90 is roughly €948 a year -- which is within a rounding error of Trello Premium. The free edition is the thing that beats it on price, and the free edition is the thing that just lost SSO.
Is it still alive?
Live, and actively developed -- but read the licence before you read the commit log.
Release v2.2.1 shipped 2026-08-10, an emergency security fix for a path-traversal vulnerability, and the last commit to master is the same day. The maintainer opened a 51-comment issue thread on 2026-08-07 and was answering in it through the 17th. The official container image on GHCR was last published seven days before these figures were taken and shows 11.1M downloads across all tags.
One trap worth flagging: the old meltyshev/planka image on Docker Hub still exists with over 500,000 pulls and was last pushed nearly four years ago. The live image is ghcr.io/plankanban/planka.
The bigger story is the licence. Planka was AGPLv3. In release v2.0.0-rc.2, published 2025-05-09, it moved to the proprietary "Fair Use License." The release note said: "For most community version users, nothing will change -- please take a moment to review the new license here."
What the licence actually says, verbatim, is that you may use or modify Planka "(a) for personal, hobby, or educational purposes, (b) internally within your own organization, (c) for private hosting for a typical number of friends, family, or personal projects, (d) to provide free access to non-profit organizations... or (e) public educational institutions." And then: "Sharing accounts/credentials with third parties for business purposes or operating PLANKA as a hosted service for third parties for any commercial gain whatsoever is prohibited."
Internal company use: free. Reselling access: forbidden without a commercial licence. The project does not call itself open source -- its own README says "fair-code... Source Available."
Trendshift records it at #1 JavaScript Repository of the Day on 2024-03-18, back when it was still AGPL.
What people say
Reddit is unreachable from the research sandbox. Two directly relevant r/selfhosted threads exist -- "Planka now has Pro options (and they aint cheap)" and "Planka removing SSO from Community edition" -- and neither could be opened, so nothing from them is quoted and no vote counts are claimed.
Hacker News, on a thread titled "Planka is not open-source." HN shows points on submissions, not on individual comments, so none are given.
"Planka is not open-source."
-- senorrib, opening the thread, 2025-06-02, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44158668
"Its license has strict limitations on what you can use it for. It's not open source in any reasonable sense."
-- kstrauser, 2025-06-02, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159640
"There is fork of Planka with MIT license: https://github.com/RARgames/4gaBoards"
-- xet7, 2025-06-03, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164938
The clearest quantified sentiment is on GitHub rather than in a forum: the v2.2.0 release removing SSO from the free edition drew 20 "eyes" reactions, and the maintainer's explainer issue for it, #1754, drew 51 comments.
The catch
The licence forbids reselling access. You cannot run Planka as a paid or ad-supported service for other organisations without buying a commercial licence. Internal use is explicitly fine.
It is not OSI open source and does not claim to be. "Fair-code," "Source Available," in the project's own README. If your procurement process requires an OSI-approved licence, this fails it.
SSO moved to Pro, and the upgrade locked people out. Version 2.2.0 removed OIDC/SSO from Community. Issue #1759 -- "No warning before the 2.2.0 update deactivated my accounts -- and the license docs never said SSO was Pro-only" -- was closed 2026-08-15. The release notes did warn, in the notes. The people who upgraded without reading them found out afterwards.
A real MIT fork exists. RARgames/4gaBoards forked when Planka left AGPL, is functioning, and pitches itself directly against this kind of paywalling. It also sells its own Pro tier, so it is not a pure-free escape hatch -- but it is a live project, not vapour.
No mobile app. Web only. There is a separate "Notes" companion app in TestFlight beta on iOS and a third-party download elsewhere, which is not the board client.
Feature gaps against Trello. Native iOS and Android apps, Butler automation, and the Calendar/Timeline/Table/Dashboard view set. Planka's calendar and map views are behind Pro.
Credits
Maksim Eltyshev (meltyshev), founder and original lead engineer. Daniel Hiller (daniel-hiller), currently the most active maintainer -- 13 commits in August 2026 alone, author of the v2.2.0 and v2.2.1 release notes and the Pro-licensing explainer. PLANKA Software GmbH of Kempten, Germany, managing directors Nicolaus Berglmeir and Lothar Hinz. The 154 contributors on the repo. The Hacker News commenters quoted above, and xet7 for pointing at the fork. Pricing verified against Trello, Atlassian, Asana, Monday.com and Planka's own pages; peak rank from Trendshift. No X handle for the project could be verified, so none is cited.