Open-source alternatives to Trello

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 (20.9k stars, 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 by hand. 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 (pushed 2026-05-20).

Planka — the modern-looking one, with a license to read

Planka (12k stars, JavaScript, NOASSERTION) 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 card license is NOASSERTION (Planka changed its licensing terms — read the current LICENSE 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 by hand.

Kanboard — pick this when it is really about workflow, not pretty cards

Kanboard (9.6k stars, 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 four. It will never win a beauty contest against Planka, and that is fine for its audience.

The fourth entry is not really a Trello alternative

Leanote (11.7k stars, JavaScript) appears here, but it is fundamentally a note-taking app (Evernote-shaped) with some kanban bolted on — and its last commit on the card is 2023-11-27, 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. The teams that are happiest a month later are the ones that treated the switch as a chance to prune dead boards rather than faithfully porting years of clutter into a new tool.