Kanboard — The Complete Guide: A Simple, Free Kanban Board for a Small Engineering Office
Kanboard does one thing: a board with columns that tasks move between. It is installed on your own server — even modest shared hosting is enough — and opened in the browser. The licence is MIT.
Kanboard
Kanboard Project
A very simple Kanban board — what is in progress, what is waiting and what is done.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Kanban board — columns per stage, with tasks dragged between them.
- Work-in-progress limits — a maximum number of tasks per column, so they do not pile up.
- Subtasks and files — detail and attached documents for each card.
- Time logging — how many hours went into each task.
- Flow reports — how long a task stays in each stage.
What to know
There is no Gantt chart and no resource management; for schedule planning, ProjectLibre is the better choice. The project is officially in maintenance mode: it is stable and receives fixes, but no major new features are expected. For a small office that wants to see at a glance what is in the lab, what is with the client and what awaits approval, it is enough.
Related tools
For task management with four views including Gantt — Vikunja. For full issue and change-request tracking — Redmine. For a broader project management system — OpenProject.
Vikunja
Vikunja
Task management with four views — list, Kanban, Gantt and calendar.
Get it from the vendorRedmine
Redmine Project
Task and issue tracking for an engineering project — with Gantt, time tracking and documentation.
Get it from the vendorProjectLibre
ProjectLibre
An open-source alternative to Microsoft Project — Gantt, critical path and resource management.
Get it from the vendorOpenProject — Community Edition
OpenProject GmbH
Team project management in the browser — Gantt, tasks, documents and time tracking, self-hosted.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Kanboard is the easiest way to bring a Kanban board into the office, with no subscription and no complexity.