At a glance — how these 4 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 21,111 · JavaScript MIT | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 12,607 · JavaScript | Mainstream | Active | High risk Non-OSI terms restrict commercial or hosted use — read first. Split licence — this rates the core component; read the † text for the separately licensed parts |
| ★ 9,899 · PHP MIT | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 2,154 · Shell MPL-2.0 | Established | Maintained | Medium risk Changes to the licensed files themselves must stay open |
† Licenses marked † were read from the repository's LICENSE file on 2026-09-05 (linked, pinned to the commit we read) because the GitHub API returned no SPDX id for them. Unmarked licenses are the GitHub API's SPDX classification.
The alternatives
wekan
FLOSS kanban, built with Meteor. Official Public Support at GitHub issues only. Official Private Pre-Paid Support at https://wekan.fi/commercial-support/ only. Translation PRs to imports/i18n/data/en.i18n.json, other translations at https://app.transifex.com/wekan/wekan . No telemetry.
wekan/wekan Updated 2026-10-08 Elegant open source project tracking. Self-hosted Kanban for teams — free Community edition, with PLANKA Pro for organisations.
plankanban/planka Updated 2026-10-05 kanboard
Kanban project management software
kanboard/kanboard Updated 2026-10-03 taiga-docker
taigaio/taiga-docker Updated 2025-10-13 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited · star counts quoted in the text (≈) are as of that date; the cards above are refreshed daily
Trello is a deceptively simple thing to replace — the trap is the data migration, not the boards.
Trello looks like the easiest SaaS on this whole site to replace: it is boards, lists, and cards, and every project below does boards, lists, and cards. The honest trap is not features — it is migration, and it is the one thing that genuinely splits this list. Only WeKan has a built-in Trello JSON importer that pulls your cards, lists, and attachments across; the others (Planka, Kanboard) mean either API scripting or a manual rebuild. So the real question is whether your boards are worth importing or worth pruning — answer that first, then choose on feel.
WeKan — the most faithful Trello clone, dated paint
WeKan (≈21.1k★, JavaScript, MIT) is the closest functional match: boards, lists, cards, plus swimlanes and attachments, in a layout a Trello user recognises immediately. MIT licensed — the cleanest terms here. It is also the only option with a built-in Trello JSON importer, which is the single biggest practical reason to pick it: you export each board from Trello and pull cards, lists, and attachments straight in, instead of rebuilding manually. The honest knock is purely cosmetic: the UI feels a generation behind Trello’s current design. If your team cares about behaviour matching Trello and can live with plainer styling, WeKan is the safe pick, and it is actively maintained (see the card’s last-push date).
Planka — the modern-looking one, with a license to read
Planka (≈12.5k★, JavaScript, Fair Use License 1.1) is the pick if the dated WeKan look would lose your team. It is a cleaner, more contemporary Trello-style board — the one that will get the least “ugh, this looks old” pushback. Two honest caveats: it has fewer integrations than the others, and its licence is not open source in the OSI sense — the GitHub API returns no SPDX id, and the LICENSE we read is the Fair Use License 1.1 (PLANKA Community License), with the Pro/Enterprise files under a PLANKA Commercial License. Read it before any commercial deployment; this is the one in this group where the terms genuinely matter. Like the rest, no Trello importer, so you are recreating boards manually.
Kanboard — pick this when it is really about workflow, not pretty cards
Kanboard (≈9.9k★, PHP, MIT) is the option I would reach for when the team is less “designers who loved Trello’s polish” and more “ops/IT who want a no-nonsense board with WIP limits, subtasks, time tracking, and automation rules.” It is lightweight, MIT-licensed, runs happily on a tiny PHP host, and it is the most workflow-serious of the three. It will never win a beauty contest against Planka, and that is fine for its audience.
Leanote is not really a Trello alternative
Leanote turns up in plenty of “Trello alternative” lists, so it is worth saying why it is not one of the cards above: it is fundamentally a note-taking app (Evernote-shaped) with some kanban bolted on, and its GitHub repository last saw a push in November 2023 — well over a year stale. Between “wrong category” and “not actively maintained,” I would skip it as a Trello replacement and choose from the three above.
How to actually move
Start by exporting your Trello boards to JSON (Trello supports this from each board’s menu). On WeKan you feed that straight into its built-in Trello importer for cards, lists, and attachments; on Planka you script the import against its REST API; on Kanboard you accept a manual rebuild for the boards that matter and archive the rest. You will most likely be happier a month later if you treat the switch as a chance to prune dead boards rather than faithfully porting years of clutter into a new tool.
Comparison notes
WeKan self-hosted is the most direct functional replacement for Trello, with a near-identical board, list, and card structure plus swimlanes and attachment support, though its UI feels dated compared to Trello's current design. Planka is a more modern Trello alternative with a cleaner interface but fewer integration options and no official Trello data importer requiring manual recreation. Leanote combines note-taking with kanban boards, which suits teams that mix documentation with task management, but diverges significantly from pure Trello-style kanban workflows.
Migration tips
- Export your Trello board data as JSON from each board's menu and use WeKan's built-in Trello JSON importer to migrate cards, lists, and attachments.
- For Planka migrations, custom scripting via its REST API is required since no official Trello importer exists — budget engineering time for this conversion.
- Trello power-ups integrating Slack, GitHub, and Jira will need manual replacement with equivalent webhook configurations in your chosen self-hosted tool.
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing Trello isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 4 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the project with the most GitHub stars in this list → wekan. 21,111★ — the most of the 4 projects here. Stars measure attention, not quality or maintenance; check the last-push date and the Editor's take before reading more into it.
License & commercial-use notes
When replacing Trello, the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 4 projects here fall into:
- Permissive (wekan, kanboard) — MIT / Apache / BSD / ISC — modify and embed inside a commercial product with no copyleft obligation. The safest bucket for shipping in a proprietary codebase.
- Weak copyleft (taiga-docker) — LGPL / MPL — you can use them inside a larger work, but changes to the licensed files themselves must stay open.
- Source-available (restricted) (planka) — BUSL / Elastic / Polyform / Commons Clause — the source is public but commercial or hosted use is restricted by non-OSI terms. Read the license before any production or commercial use; these are not freely reusable the way an OSI-approved license is.
Split licences: planka (Fair Use License 1.1 (PLANKA Community License) + PLANKA Commercial License (Pro/Enterprise files)). This project is grouped above by the core licence; the separately licensed directories (enterprise or EE parts) are not covered by that bucket — check which files you actually ship.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. Where the API returned no SPDX id, the license marked † was read from the repository's LICENSE file on 2026-09-05; the † links to the exact file and commit we read. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 4 projects
Of the 4 projects listed, 4 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
How do these 4 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
4 of 4 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest closed issues — those two signals are the fastest public check we know of.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last push) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source. Where the API returned no SPDX id, the licence marked † was read from the repository's
LICENSEfile (linked, pinned to the commit we read, with the date checked). - Editorial analysis (the intro, comparison notes and migration tips) is Claude-drafted from Trello's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata — in Claude Code sessions or scheduled routines run under the operator's account. Samples are spot-checked against the upstream repositories; entries are not individually reviewed unless they carry a signature. See what Claude drafts and what the operator writes.
- Editor's take is signed by Yusuke Morinaga. It was drafted in a Claude Code session the operator ran, then read and confirmed by Yusuke Morinaga before publication, and carries the date it was last revised. It is written from each project's README, LICENSE, release history and issue tracker — not from running the project in production; where that distinction matters, the take says so.
- Maintenance signal: 4 of 4 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
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