Open Source Task Management Alternatives

Habitica is an open-source productivity platform that applies role-playing game mechanics to personal task management. By tracking habits, daily goals, and to-do lists, the system translates completed tasks into character progression, experience points, and virtual rewards. The platform supports collaborative productivity by allowing users to join parties and complete group quests alongside their individual responsibilities. It is designed for self-hosting, providing users with full control over their data and system configuration through a structured relational database and a standardized application programming interface. The system includes built-in traffic management tools, such as request throttling and client identification, to maintain stability and monitor usage patterns. Developers can coordinate complex server and database components within local environments to facilitate testing and feature development.

Vikunja is a self-hosted task management platform designed for organizing personal and team projects. It provides a centralized system for managing tasks using multiple visualization formats, including Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and tables. The project distinguishes itself through extensive external connectivity, offering a REST API, OpenAPI specifications, and CalDAV synchronization for external calendar integration. It supports sophisticated identity federation via LDAP, OpenID Connect, and Single Sign-On, alongside event-driven automation using webhooks. The platform covers a broad range of productivity capabilities, including hierarchical task organization, natural language input parsing, and time tracking. Collaborative features include role-based access control for project sharing, team membership management, and task-based discussion threads. Deployment options include containerized environments, Kubernetes via Helm, and native Linux packages.

Taskcafe is a self-hosted task management system and collaborative work management platform. It provides a private workspace for organizing work through a variety of interfaces, including Kanban boards, hierarchical outlines, and calendars. The platform is designed for containerized deployment, orchestrating the application, database, and cache to ensure consistent environment management. It distinguishes itself by offering project portfolio dashboards for high-level monitoring and the ability to create public project boards that allow external visitors to view content without authentication. The system covers a broad range of project planning and tracking capabilities, such as timeline charts for visualizing dependencies, shared workspaces for team collaboration, and task-specific activity logs. It also includes automation rules for triggering actions based on task conditions and integration with external version control systems to sync development tasks with code commits.

Super-productivity is a cross-platform productivity tool that integrates task management, time tracking, and data synchronization. It functions as a task management application for organizing daily work through todo lists and timeboxing, while serving as time tracking software to record activity durations and generate worklogs. The project features a synchronization layer that imports tickets and tasks from external project management tools, specifically Jira and GitHub, into a centralized local workflow. Data consistency across multiple devices is maintained through cloud storage synchronization. The application provides capabilities for hierarchical task and project categorization, including the attachment of contextual metadata like notes and bookmarks. It includes tools for workload productivity analysis, work metric collection, and focus and break management to establish work habits. Custom functionality and visual styles can be added through a plugin-based extensibility framework.

This project is a local-first task manager and time tracking tool designed to consolidate work items from multiple external project management platforms into a single, unified interface. By prioritizing local data sovereignty, it ensures that all task lists, time logs, and application states remain on the user's device, providing full functionality in offline environments while maintaining privacy. The application distinguishes itself through a focus on deep work and structured productivity rituals. It integrates distraction-free modes, configurable focus timers, and automated time tracking to help users maintain concentration and monitor effort against specific tasks. Users can capture interruptions instantly via global shortcuts, manage complex projects through subtasks, and visualize their daily commitments using integrated calendar feeds and timeboxing tools. Beyond core task management, the platform offers extensive extensibility through a plugin-based architecture, allowing for custom automation and the creation of specialized service adapters. It supports secure, user-managed synchronization across devices by applying local encryption to data before it is transferred to external storage providers. The system also provides robust reporting capabilities, enabling users to generate client invoices, analyze work performance, and monitor project budgets based on tracked time data. The software is distributed as a cross-platform desktop application that utilizes a native wrapper to provide system-level access and persistent background execution.

Wekan is an open-source, self-hosted Kanban project management tool used for organizing workflows through boards, lists, and cards. It is a real-time web application that allows teams to manage tasks on private infrastructure. The platform distinguishes itself with extensive data migration tools, specifically for importing boards and cards from Trello. It supports enterprise-grade identity integration via LDAP, OpenID Connect, and OAuth2, and offers flexible storage options including PostgreSQL as a primary relational backend and pluggable cloud storage for attachments. The system covers a wide range of task management capabilities, including Gantt chart visualizations, time tracking, and cross-board task aggregation. It includes administrative tools for role-based access control, automated backup scheduling, and programmatic extensibility through a REST API and event-driven webhooks. The application is available for deployment via Docker and supports multi-tenant configurations.

Kanboard is a self-hosted Kanban project management tool and productivity suite designed for tracking software tasks and team collaboration. It provides a visual system for managing workflows through the use of boards, columns, and cards. The project features an extensible plugin framework and a comprehensive API for programmatic task and project administration. It includes specialized identity management through LDAP integration, allowing for the synchronization of user accounts and group permissions from directory servers. The system covers a wide range of capabilities, including event-driven workflow automation, detailed project analytics such as burn-down charts and cycle time measurement, and granular role-based access control. It also supports integrated time tracking, subtask decomposition, and multi-method authentication including two-factor authentication and reverse proxy support. The application is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL for persistent data storage and can be deployed using Docker Compose.

AFFiNE is a collaborative knowledge base and productivity suite designed as a private-first, local-first platform. It provides an integrated workspace that combines structured documents with an infinite digital canvas, allowing users to organize complex information through a block-based model. By prioritizing local data persistence, the platform ensures immediate responsiveness and data sovereignty while maintaining a distributed state for real-time synchronization across multiple devices. The platform distinguishes itself through a canvas-integrated database engine that enables transitions between free-form whiteboarding and structured tabular views. It utilizes conflict-free replicated data types to manage concurrent edits, ensuring consistent collaboration. Users can extend the workspace with modular artificial intelligence integrations, which use natural language prompts to generate, summarize, and transform content into various visual or structured formats. The software is built for self-hosting, allowing teams to maintain full control over their data and infrastructure. It supports container-orchestrated deployment, providing tools for managing private workspaces, authentication, and production-ready environments. The system is designed to be installed and configured on personal or team-managed infrastructure, ensuring that all sensitive information remains within a private, secure, and scalable environment.

kbar is a React command palette library that gives applications a searchable overlay for finding and executing commands using the keyboard. It includes keyboard shortcut binding, so users can trigger commands directly without opening the palette, and supports nested sub-menu navigation, allowing actions to be organized into hierarchical groups that can be drilled into and back out of with arrow keys. The library differentiates itself through a hook-based API that lets any React component register commands and shortcuts declaratively, alongside a global keyboard listener that handles palette activation and shortcut dispatching from a single point. It maintains an action history stack for smooth navigation between menu levels, and applies priority-based sorting so frequently used commands surface earlier in search results. State is shared across the component tree via React Context, enabling all descendants to read and update the palette without prop threading.

Focalboard is an open-source project management tool and collaborative task organizer. It functions as a kanban board system where users define, track, and update project tasks within a shared digital workspace. The platform is designed for self-hosted team collaboration, allowing organizations to manage project goals and workflows on their own private infrastructure. It provides a visual environment for mapping out complex projects and coordinating team efforts without the use of proprietary software. The software covers project task management and visual workflow organization through the use of boards, lists, and calendars. These tools enable users to monitor progress across teams and organize tasks by status and ownership.

Taskbook is a command-line task manager and local plain-text organizer that provides a terminal user interface for managing to-do lists, project boards, and notes. It functions as a CLI Kanban board, allowing users to group actionable items and informational snippets into categorized boards. The tool emphasizes local data organization by storing information in local files with customizable storage paths. It supports a Kanban-style workflow where tasks are organized into boards and tracked through pending, in-progress, and complete states. The system includes capabilities for prioritizing tasks with numeric levels, marking favorites, and visualizing items via a chronological timeline. Users can search and filter entries, assign descriptive tags for categorization, and recover deleted items through an archive-based recovery system. Operational preferences and data directories are managed through a configuration file.

Logseq is a privacy-focused, local-first knowledge base designed for personal information management and networked thought mapping. It functions as a bi-directional graph editor that organizes content into hierarchical, outliner-based structures, allowing users to connect related concepts through automated backlinking and visual relationship mapping. The platform distinguishes itself by maintaining all user data in plain text markdown files stored directly on the local device, ensuring offline availability and long-term portability. It employs a logic-based query engine to perform complex relational searches across the graph of notes and metadata, while a content-addressable storage model ensures data integrity for every information block. The application supports a broad range of information management tasks, including academic research synthesis and structured project documentation. Users can extend the core functionality through a sandboxed plugin system that allows for custom interface components and data manipulation. The software is documented through a dedicated resource library to assist with setup and configuration.

Focalboard is a self-hosted project management tool designed for tracking tasks and organizing workflows on private infrastructure or local hardware. It functions as a cross-platform collaboration solution, providing a unified environment for distributed teams to manage data while maintaining full control over security and storage. The platform distinguishes itself by offering both a server-based deployment model and a standalone desktop productivity application. By packaging web-based tools into native shells, it enables reliable offline access and a dedicated workspace for individual users. The system ensures data consistency across multiple clients through real-time synchronization and maintains predictable state transitions using a centralized, immutable data store. The application is built on a component-based architecture that manages local view logic and data binding. It supports various deployment environments, including local hardware and containerized setups, and provides a standard interface for interacting with core business logic. The project includes integrated testing suites to verify code integrity and system stability.