PLANKA: A Self-Hosted Kanban Board With a Paid Tier Behind It
Elegant open source project tracking. Self-hosted Kanban for teams — free Community edition, with PLANKA Pro for organisations.
At a glance
- What is it?
- The Community edition is free to self-host and covers boards, cards, real-time sync, webhooks and a REST API. Pro adds mobile layouts, extra views, SSO and exports, but the upgrade is a one-way schema migration. Here is where the line sits and what to check before you cross it.
- Who is it for?
- Adopt PLANKA Community if you want a Kanban board on your own server, with your own database and backups, and you do not need SSO, mobile layouts or export. Do not adopt it if you need a permissive OSI licence, or if you expect to move between Community and Pro freely: the promote is one-way.
- Can I use it commercially?
- Check first. The repository uses a licence we do not classify automatically, so read its LICENSE file before any commercial use.
- Is it still maintained?
- Yes. The repository last received commits 3 days ago.
- What is it written in?
- Mainly JavaScript, according to GitHub's language statistics.
Answers come from the project's GitHub data, last synced on September 15, 2026, and from our analysis. They are not legal advice.
DEEP OPEN-SOURCE ANALYSIS
What PLANKA Community actually replaces
PLANKA is a Kanban board you run yourself. The unit of work is familiar: projects contain boards, boards contain lists, lists contain cards, and cards carry markdown descriptions, attachments, comments, custom fields, due dates and a stopwatch. The README lists real-time collaboration, notifications through more than 100 providers, webhooks, a documented REST API and two-factor authentication as Community features, alongside the line that matters most for budgeting: free to self-host, your database, your backups.
The audience is a team that has already decided it does not want its task data in someone else's account. That decision has a cost, and PLANKA is honest about where it lands. If your team needs a phone layout, a calendar or timeline view, recurring cards, templates, guest roles or SSO, the README puts every one of those in the Pro column, not the Community column. So the free edition is not a trial of the paid one. It is a complete board with a deliberately drawn perimeter around it.
The Community and Pro split, read as a feature table
The comparison table in the README is the most useful page in the repository, because it answers the adoption question before you install anything. On the Community side: boards, lists, cards, real-time collaboration, markdown, attachments, comments, custom fields, stopwatch and due dates, notifications, webhooks, the REST API, two-factor authentication, and self-hosting with your own database and backups.
On the Pro side: phones and tablets, five themes and an accent color, calendar, timeline, map and media views, recurring cards, card and board templates, one card appearing on more than one board, guest roles, SSO through OIDC, PDF and HTML export, and support from the developers without a ticket queue.
Read that list twice, because two entries change how a team works rather than how it looks. A card on more than one board is a data-model feature: in Community, a card belongs to one list on one board, so cross-team work has to be duplicated or tracked elsewhere. Guest roles are an access-control feature: without them, anyone who needs to see a board is a full member of the instance. Neither is cosmetic, and neither can be patched in from the outside without touching the schema.
How the Pro upgrade changes your deployment
Pro is not a separate product you install next to Community. The README describes it as upgrading an existing Community installation in place, keeping your database, your volume and your data. Mechanically, it adds a Valkey service and runs a one-off schema promote.
Two constraints come with that. The promote accepts only certain Community releases as a starting point, currently 2.1.x and 2.2.x, and from any other version it stops without changing anything. That is a safe failure mode, but it means an instance pinned to an older release has to be moved forward first. Second, the upgrade is one-way: there is no downgrade back to Community. The README says to take a backup first, or try it on a copy. The step-by-step guide lives in the customer center once you have a key, and it lists the releases the promote accepts. If you are evaluating Pro, the sequence is therefore: get a key, read that guide, check your running version against the accepted list, then rehearse on a copy of the volume before touching production.
Getting an instance running
The repository does not carry the install commands in its README. It points to the installation guide for Docker production deployments at docs.planka.cloud, to a configuration section for environment settings, and to a development section for running the project locally. The deployment target is a container image published under the plankanban organisation, and the README's own badge reports 8M+ pulls on that image.
Because the exact compose file and environment keys are not in the material supplied here, I will not invent them. What can be said from the README is the shape of the deployment: Docker, your own database, your own volume for uploads and data, and environment-based configuration documented separately. The API is published as a Swagger UI at plankanban.github.io/planka/swagger-ui, which is the reference to read if you plan to drive the board from scripts or an internal tool rather than from the web interface. There is also a hosted demo at planka.app if you want to see the board before standing up a server.
Licence: fair-code, source available, not OSI open source
The repository licence field reads NOASSERTION, and the README explains why. PLANKA is distributed under the Fair Use License (the PLANKA Community License) and the PLANKA Pro/Enterprise License, with a License Guide tying the two together. The README describes the model as fair-code: the source is always visible, you can self-host it anywhere, and you can customize it with your own functionality.
Source available is not the same as an OSI-approved open source licence, and the distinction has practical consequences for some organisations. If your policy requires a permissive or copyleft OSI licence, or if you intend to redistribute a modified version, the two licence files and the guide are the documents to read before you deploy, not after. I am not giving legal advice here, and the README does not summarise the restrictions in prose, so treat the licence text itself as the source of truth. Enterprise licences are listed as available for additional features and support.
Where PLANKA is the wrong tool
The clearest failure case is a team that needs a board on a phone. Mobile layouts are Pro-only, so a Community instance is a desktop experience by the README's own table. If half your team lives in a mobile browser, Community will frustrate them on day one.
The second case is a team that needs SSO. OIDC is Pro-only. A Community deployment authenticates against its own user store with two-factor authentication available, which means every join, leave and role change is manual work for whoever administers the instance.
The third case is subtler and worth stating plainly: the Community and Pro editions are not interchangeable over time. The promote is one-way, so a team that upgrades to Pro and later decides the extra views were not worth the licence cannot step back down to Community on the same database. That is a real constraint on a trial, and it is why the README's advice to try the promote on a copy is not boilerplate.
Finally, there is the support channel. The README states that public support runs through GitHub and Discord, that security issues should be emailed privately rather than filed publicly, and that no public support is offered by email. A team that expects a ticketing queue will not find one in Community.
What a Trello-style board on your own server changes
The obvious alternative for a team that wants Kanban without hosting anything is Trello, or one of the other hosted boards. The difference is not the card metaphor, which both share. It is where the data lives and who operates the service.
With PLANKA Community you supply the database and the backups, and the README treats that as a feature rather than a caveat: self-hosted, your database, your backups. You also take on the upgrade path yourself, including the version window the Pro promote accepts. With a hosted board, someone else runs the schema migrations and you accept their pricing and their data terms. Neither is strictly better. A small team without anyone who wants to own a Postgres instance and a container deployment is better served by the hosted option, and PLANKA's own README offers a cloud plan for exactly that case. A team with an existing self-hosting practice and a data-residency requirement gets the opposite answer.
The narrower comparison is against other self-hosted Kanban tools. PLANKA's distinguishing choice is the Community/Pro split: a genuinely usable free core, with the paid tier concentrated in views, access control and export rather than in the basic board. That is a more defensible line than gating the board itself, and it makes the free edition a real deployment target rather than a demo.
Editorial conclusion
Adopt PLANKA Community if you want a Kanban board on your own server, with your own database and backups, and you do not need SSO, mobile layouts or export. Do not adopt it if you need a permissive OSI licence, or if you expect to move between Community and Pro freely: the promote is one-way. Before committing, read the two licence files and the License Guide, confirm which Community releases the Pro promote accepts (the README names 2.1.x and 2.2.x), and test the upgrade on a copy of your volume rather than your live one.
Community notes