Wekan

What is Wekan?

Wekan is an open source, self-hosted kanban board for organizing tasks and projects. You drag cards across lists — “To Do,” “Doing,” “Done” — on visual boards, group them into swimlanes, and collaborate in real time. It’s a privacy-focused Trello alternative you run on your own server under the MIT license.

What is Wekan best for?

Wekan fits teams and individuals who want Trello-style boards without handing their data to a hosted SaaS. It’s a good match for privacy-conscious organizations, self-hosters, and anyone under data-residency rules who needs cards, checklists, and drag-and-drop workflows on infrastructure they fully control.

What can Wekan do?

• Boards, lists, and cards with drag-and-drop, titles, descriptions, due dates, comments, and file attachments.
• Swimlanes — horizontal rows that split a board by person, priority, or workstream, something Trello lacks natively.
• Custom fields — attach a dropdown, number, date, or checkbox to cards, then filter and sort by them for a lightweight database-style view.
• Checklists, labels, and colored lists to break work down and categorize it visually.
• Real-time updates so board changes appear instantly for everyone viewing it.
• Per-board and per-card access control with an admin panel for managing users and permissions.
• Multiple deployment paths — Docker, Snap, Sandstorm, or building from source.

Where does Wekan fall short?

There is no undo — a wrong drag, edit, or deletion can’t be reverted, so mistakes stick. The maintainers also warn that database corruption (often from a full disk) can make boards fail to load and require manual MongoDB intervention, making daily backups essential rather than optional.

Its Meteor and MongoDB stack is heavier than leaner kanban tools: production deployments are guided toward roughly 4 GB of RAM, so Wekan is a demanding choice for a low-powered box. Free support is aimed at FLOSS developers, with general help pointed toward paid commercial support.

Is Wekan free?

Yes — Wekan is free and open source under the MIT license, and self-hosting it costs nothing beyond the server you run it on. There’s no paywalled edition or feature gate. A commercial hosted (SaaS) option and paid commercial support are available for teams that would rather not run and maintain it themselves.

What does Wekan replace?

Wekan is a direct stand-in for Trello, covering the same board-list-card workflow Trello made popular while adding swimlanes and custom fields. Because you host it yourself, boards and attachments stay on your own infrastructure instead of an Atlassian account.

FAQ

Is Wekan open source? Yes. Wekan is released under the MIT license — a permissive license that lets you self-host, modify, and redistribute it freely. The full source is on GitHub.

Can I self-host Wekan for free? Yes. Self-hosting is completely free; you only pay for the server. It installs via Docker, Snap, Sandstorm, or from source, and stores data in MongoDB.

Is Wekan a good Trello alternative? For teams that want data ownership and privacy, yes — it matches Trello’s core boards, lists, cards, and checklists, and adds swimlanes and custom fields. The tradeoffs are no undo and the operational care its MongoDB backend needs.

What do I need to run Wekan? A server with Docker (or Snap) and MongoDB. Plan for around 4 GB of RAM for a production instance, and schedule daily database backups, since a corrupted or full database can render boards unloadable.

For a heavier, all-in-one project suite rather than pure kanban, compare OpenProject; for a task manager that adds list, Gantt, and calendar views alongside kanban, see Vikunja.