WeKan vs Planka vs Focalboard — Best Open Source Kanban Board
Kanban boards are the default way modern teams visualise work — but the hosted giants (Trello, Asana, Notion) come with subscription fatigue and a copy of your project data on their servers. If you want to own your boards, the self-hosted open-source space offers three standout options: WeKan, Planka and Focalboard. This guide compares them on features, licensing, deployment ease and long-term viability so you can pick the right one.
The Contenders at a Glance
- WeKan — The battle-tested veteran, MIT-licensed and built with Meteor. Huge feature list and permissive licensing, but heavier to run.
- Planka — The modern, polished newcomer. Elegant interface and real-time sync, but distributed under a fair-code licence rather than OSI open source.
- Focalboard — Mattermost’s spin-off with multiple views on top of Kanban. Mature, but the upstream project is now unmaintained — a real longevity risk.
Features Compared
WeKan is feature-rich to the point of overwhelm. Beyond classic boards, lists and cards it adds swimlanes, a calendar view, Gantt charts, custom fields, checklists, subtasks, card dependencies, rule-based automation with webhooks, nine per-board roles, multi-tenancy with organisations and teams, and deep import/export support (Trello JSON/zip, Jira, Kanboard, CSV, Excel). It even supports a table, calendar and stats board view. Because the code is MIT-licensed, commercial use and customisation are completely unrestricted.
Planka focuses on elegance and a familiar Trello-like drag-and-drop. Its highlights are real-time updates across all connected users, rich markdown card descriptions, customisable notifications via 100+ providers, and full internationalisation. The community edition covers the core Kanban flow well; advanced features (worker/guest roles, calendar and map views, recurring cards, global search, a REST API and webhooks, OIDC single sign-on) sit in the paid Planka Pro tier. Note the licensing caveat: it’s fair code under the Fair Use License, not OSI-certified open source.
Focalboard is less of a pure Kanban board and more of a flexible work tracker with board, table, calendar, gallery and goal views — closer to Notion than to Trello. It’s written in Go/React and was designed to be lightweight to self-host. Its oldest editions (v0.6.5 and earlier) are MIT-licensed, while later releases are AGPL-3.0/Apache-2.0. The catch is the project’s status: Mattermost stood it down in 2024 and it’s now looking for community maintainers with no active development.
Licensing and Data Ownership
This is where the three diverge most. WeKan is genuinely free — MIT Licensed and every feature available in the free, self-hosted install. Planka keeps its source visible and the community edition free to self-host, but the richest features and official support require a paid Pro license, and its fair-code licence restricts some commercial uses compared with true OSI open source. Focalboard is open source but effectively frozen — you keep data ownership, but you’d be hosting software no longer actively developed.
Deployment and Running Cost
All three install easily via a single Docker container, which is how most people self-host them.
WeKan needs MongoDB (it now also works with FerretDB on PostgreSQL/MySQL/SQLite), and a Meteor/Node runtime — the heaviest footprint of the three and the most resource-hungry for a small home server. Planka is a React+Node app that ships cleanly behind Docker with a PostgreSQL backend — light and modern. Focalboard is famously light, running as a near single-binary server using SQLite or PostgreSQL, which makes it trivial to stand up even on modest hardware.
Which Should You Choose?
- Choose WeKan if you want the most capable, truly open Kanban tool with no licensing restrictions, you don’t mind a heavier stack, and you’ll use advanced features like automation, swimlanes and granular roles.
- Choose Planka if you value a beautiful, modern interface and real-time collaboration, are comfortable with a fair-code licence, and accept that the most advanced features are in the paid Pro plan.
- Choose Focalboard only if you want a multi-view tracker on very modest hardware and are happy to take on a project that’s no longer actively developed — treat it as stable but frozen.
For most teams wanting a long-term, licence-clean and actively maintained Kanban board, WeKan is the safest pick on paper, while Planka is the friendliest day-to-day if the fair-code model and Pro upsell don’t bother you. Whichever you choose, you keep your data on your own hardware — no subscription, no third-party access.
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