Self-hosted to-do list: a Todoist alternative you own with Vikunja

Your to-do list knows a surprising amount about you: your projects, your clients, your health appointments, the personal errands you'd never put in a work tool. It's one of the most quietly revealing datasets you own — and for most people it lives, in full, inside a subscription app on someone else's servers. Vikunja is the self-hosted alternative: a genuinely capable task manager that replaces Todoist, keeps every task on a server you control, and doesn't charge you by the month to organize your own life.

What Vikunja is

Vikunja is an open-source to-do and project management app, and the thing that sets it apart from the many "simple self-hosted todo" projects is that it's not simple in a limiting way. It's a full task manager with the features you'd actually miss if you left Todoist — but it's also flexible enough to grow from a personal errand list into a proper project tool without switching apps.

The core idea: everything is a task in a list, and you can look at those tasks however your brain wants to that day — a flat list, a kanban board, a table, a calendar, or a Gantt chart. Same data, many views.

The features that matter

• Multiple views of the same tasks. List for daily work, kanban for a project's flow, table for bulk edits, calendar for what's due when, and Gantt for anything with a real timeline. You're never locked into one shape.
• The task depth you expect. Due dates, reminders, priorities, labels, assignees, subtasks, task relations ("blocks", "depends on"), attachments and comments. This is where lightweight alternatives usually fall short and Vikunja doesn't.
• Projects and nesting. Organize lists into projects and sub-projects, so personal, work and side-project tasks stay cleanly separated — or combined into one view when you want the full picture.
• Saved filters. Build a "Today across everything" or "Waiting on someone else" view once and it's always a click away — the killer feature for anyone with tasks spread across many lists.
• Sharing and teams. Share a project with others and collaborate, with permissions, so it works for a household or a small team, not just solo.
• Reminders that actually reach you. Due-date reminders by email (and other channels), so things don't fall through the cracks.

Why self-host your to-do list

• Your tasks are private. The full, unfiltered picture of what you're working on and worrying about isn't something to hand a third party. Self-hosted, it's yours alone.
• No subscription for your own productivity. The "pro" features that gate reminders, labels or project counts on hosted apps are just there.
• It won't get worse without your permission. No surprise redesign, no feature moved to a higher tier, no shutdown taking your system with it.
• It's fast. Vikunja is light and quick — a task manager that respects your time by loading in an instant.

Who it's for

Vikunja fits a genuinely wide range:

• The personal GTD crowd: lists, contexts (via labels), saved "next actions" filters, and reminders — a full Getting Things Done setup you own.
• Side-projecters and freelancers: a kanban board per client or project, with due dates and a Gantt view when a deadline actually matters.
• Small teams and households: shared projects for the things everyone's involved in, from a product roadmap to the grocery list.

How it works day to day

The rhythm that makes Vikunja stick: capture tasks fast into whatever list they belong to, then rely on a couple of saved filters — a "Today" view and an "Upcoming" view across all projects — as your daily driver. Boards come out for anything with stages; the calendar and Gantt come out when you're planning rather than doing. Because every view is the same underlying data, you're never migrating tasks between tools — you're just choosing a lens.

How to deploy it

Vikunja is refreshingly straightforward to run: the app plus a database, behind TLS on a domain. It's light on resources, so it's happy on a small box, and there's a web app plus mobile-friendly access so your tasks travel with you. On a VPS it's a quick setup and then the gentle standing duties of updates and backups — and backups matter here, because this becomes the system your day runs on. Or deploy Vikunja in one click with the database and TLS handled, and start capturing tasks in minutes.

First steps

1. Create a couple of projects that match how your life is actually divided — say Work, Personal, and one current side project.
2. Capture everything for a day or two without over-organizing; get it out of your head and into the app.
3. Build a "Today" saved filter (due today or overdue, across all projects) — this becomes your home screen.
4. Turn on reminders so due dates actually surface, and confirm your backups are running.

The bigger picture

A to-do list is a small app with an outsized role — it's the map of your attention. Owning it means the map is yours: private, permanent, and free of the quiet pressure of a subscription. If you're building out a suite of self-hosted tools, Vikunja pairs naturally with a self-hosted notes app and kanban board — and our overview of what self-hosting is and whether it's worth it ties the whole idea together.

Deploy Vikunja → — or browse the full app catalog of tools you can host and own.