Self-hosted Trello alternative: boards you own with Planka

A kanban board is where a lot of teams actually live -- the standup, the backlog, the "who's doing what this week." That makes it a strange thing to rent. Trello was the tool that made boards feel effortless, and then it got folded into Atlassian, the free tier kept getting narrower, and the per-user pricing started to bite the moment a team grew. Planka is the version you host yourself: the same lists-and-cards flow, real-time and full-featured, running on a server that belongs to you.

What Planka is

Planka is an open-source kanban board -- projects, boards, lists, cards -- built to feel like the Trello you remember rather than a stripped-down clone. It's a real React and Node application backed by PostgreSQL, actively developed, and the community edition you self-host carries no artificial limits: unlimited boards, unlimited cards, unlimited members, no "you've hit 10 boards on the free workspace" wall, no per-seat invoice, no metering of attachments. You run one instance and everyone you invite works from it.

I'll be straight about the pricing, because that's the point of a post like this. Planka now has a paid Pro edition too, and a handful of extras -- calendar and map views, custom fields, recurring cards, single sign-on, in-app branding -- live there. But the core Trello experience is entirely in the free, self-hostable version: lists and cards, drag-and-drop, real-time sync, labels, due dates, checklists, comments, attachments, and multiple board layouts. Where hosted Trello caps the free workspace at ten boards and prices the rest per user per month, Planka's community edition drops the per-seat model altogether. Add a person, and the bill doesn't move.

One honesty note on the licence, since ownership is the whole pitch: Planka is fair-code rather than strictly open source. You're free to run it for your own team -- a company, a non-profit, a school -- and the one thing the licence asks is that you don't turn around and resell Planka itself as a hosted product. For self-hosting your own boards, that restriction never comes up.

The features that actually matter

• Boards, lists, and cards with drag-and-drop. The core loop is exactly what you'd expect: drag a card between lists, reorder on the fly, and every move sticks. It's the Trello muscle memory, intact.
• Real-time collaboration. Planka is genuinely live over WebSockets. When a teammate moves a card, renames a list, or drops a comment, you see it appear -- no refresh, no stale board.
• Labels, due dates, and filtering. Colour-code cards with labels, set due dates, and filter a busy board down to a single label or member when it gets noisy.
• Checklists and tasks on cards. Break a card into a task list and tick items off as you go, so a single card can carry a small workflow instead of spawning ten more.
• Attachments, comments, and markdown descriptions. Attach files, talk it out in comments, and write properly formatted descriptions in markdown instead of flat plain text.
• Member assignment and a per-card activity log. Assign people to cards and read the full history of what changed and when. Nothing happens silently.
• Multiple board layouts. Beyond the classic kanban columns, the same board can render as a grid or a plain list -- your choice of how to look at the work, not one fixed view.
• Notifications that find you. Point Planka at email or one of its hundred-plus notification services, so a due date or a fresh comment reaches you where you already are instead of only when you happen to open the board.

Why self-host it instead of the hosted version

Your boards are your data. Everything -- card contents, attachments, comments, who's working on what -- sits in a PostgreSQL database on your server. It isn't mined, isn't training anyone's model, and isn't one acquisition away from a new pricing page. You can export it, back it up, and read it whenever you like.

The cost doesn't scale per seat. Hosted kanban is priced per user per month, so the bill grows every time you add a person -- and a board tool is only useful when everyone's on it. Self-hosted, the cost is the server. Ten people or fifty, the price doesn't move.

Control and access. It's your instance, your URL, your login. You decide who has access, which projects exist, and how long history is kept. No workspace admin you don't control, no feature that vanishes because a tier was retired.

Who it's for

Small teams and agencies who lived on Trello's free tier and watched it shrink -- Planka gives back the unlimited boards without the per-seat invoice.

Privacy-minded and regulated shops -- legal, healthcare, anyone who can't have client work sitting in a third-party SaaS. On your own server, the board never leaves your control.

Homelabbers and personal planners who want one clean place for projects, reading lists, and household logistics without signing another account up to another subscription they'll forget to cancel.

The honest setup notes

Running Planka yourself is real infrastructure, and we'd rather say so. It needs a PostgreSQL database alongside the app, and that database is the thing you must back up -- along with the attachments volume, since files don't live in Postgres. It wants a secret key and a correctly set base URL at startup; get the URL wrong and logins and links misbehave in confusing ways. Email notifications need SMTP wired up, which means credentials and a sending domain that won't land in spam. Major versions occasionally change how data or config is laid out, so it pays to read the release notes before you pull a new tag rather than after. None of this is exotic, but it's yours to keep patched, backed up, and upgraded as new versions ship -- and a board everyone depends on is exactly the thing you don't want to discover was never being backed up.

Or let us run it. On Caliber Node, the database, the storage volume, the secret, and the version bumps are handled -- you get the board, not the maintenance.

Deploy it in one click

Rolling your own means a Docker Compose file, a Postgres container, environment variables to generate, a reverse proxy with TLS, and a backup routine you write and test yourself. That's a fine weekend if you enjoy it. If you'd rather just have the board, you can deploy Planka in one click on Caliber Node: we provision the app and its database together, terminate TLS, keep it updated, and hand you a working URL. Your data stays exportable and the logs stay yours -- managed doesn't mean locked in. You get the ownership of self-hosting without spending the afternoon assembling it.

First run

1. Deploy Planka from the Caliber Node app catalog and open the URL when it's ready.
2. Sign in with the initial admin account and set your own password.
3. Create your first project, then add a board inside it.
4. Add a few lists -- something like To do, Doing, Done -- and drop in your first cards.
5. Invite a teammate, assign a card, set a due date, and watch the change land on their screen in real time.

That's a working board in a couple of minutes, with nothing metered behind it.

The bigger picture

The place your team plans its work is core infrastructure, not a feature you should be renting by the head. When it's hosted for you and priced per seat, someone else decides what it costs and how long your history sticks around. Owning it flips that: the boards, the cards, and every decision recorded on them stay with you. Planka makes that ownership genuinely pleasant -- it looks and moves like the tool people already know, without the per-seat bill attached.

Deploy Planka in a few minutes →

Or browse the full app catalog to see what else you can own.

One-click self-hosted apps, managed for you -- real logs, SFTP, and your data always exportable. Never a black box.