PLANKA

What is PLANKA?

PLANKA is a self-hosted kanban board for organizing projects and tasks. You group work into boards, lists, and drag-and-drop cards — the familiar Trello layout — but you run it on your own server, so your boards and data stay on your infrastructure. It’s built with React and Node.js and ships as a single Docker image backed by PostgreSQL.

What is PLANKA best for?

Teams and individuals who want Trello-style visual task management without a per-seat SaaS bill or handing their project data to a hosted vendor. It suits home labs, small teams, and privacy-conscious organizations that are comfortable running a Docker container and want boards under their own control.

What can PLANKA do?

• Organize work into projects, boards, lists, and drag-and-drop cards
• Sync changes in real time across everyone viewing a board — no refresh
• Write rich card descriptions and comments in markdown
• Attach files, add labels, set due dates, and assign members to cards
• Sign in through OIDC single sign-on and manage project-level access
• Run in 35+ interface languages out of the box
• Deploy anywhere as a single Docker image with PostgreSQL

Where does PLANKA fall short?

• It’s source-available under the Fair Use License 1.1, not OSI open source — the community edition is free to self-host, but the license restricts reselling it as a hosted service.
• Advanced team features — worker/guest roles, SSO-gated access controls, templates, calendar and map views, reporting, and exports — sit behind the paid Pro edition, so the free version is a leaner board than Trello’s or Monday.com’s business tiers.
• It’s a focused kanban tool, not a full work platform: there are no Gantt charts, timelines, or native automation rules, so teams needing roadmaps or workflow automation will find it thin compared to Jira or OpenProject.

Is PLANKA free?

Yes — the PLANKA Community edition is free to self-host, and you only pay for the server it runs on. A paid Pro edition (from roughly €36/month self-hosted, or ~€42.50/month for the managed cloud with a 5-user minimum) adds roles, guest access, templates, advanced views, reporting, and business-hours support. An Enterprise tier covers large deployments.

What does PLANKA replace?

PLANKA is a self-hosted alternative to Trello, and a lighter stand-in for Asana, Monday.com, and Jira when your team mainly needs kanban boards rather than their heavier project-management suites. It does the visual board-and-card job without per-user pricing or storing your data in someone else’s cloud.

FAQ

Is PLANKA open source? Not by the strict OSI definition — it’s source-available under the Fair Use License 1.1. The code is public and the community edition is free to self-host, but you can’t resell it as a hosted service.

Can I self-host PLANKA for free? Yes. The Community edition is free to run on your own infrastructure; you only pay for hosting. The Pro edition, with team roles and premium features, is a paid subscription.

Is PLANKA a good Trello alternative? For visual kanban, yes — same boards-lists-cards flow, self-hosted, with no per-seat fee. If you need Trello’s larger app-integration ecosystem or built-in automation, weigh that gap first. For other self-hosted kanban options, compare Wekan or Vikunja.

What do I need to run PLANKA? A server with Docker and a PostgreSQL database. PLANKA ships as a single Docker image, so a Docker Compose file is enough to get a production board running.