Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Nifty

Focalboard is an open source project management and work-tracking tool designed around boards, cards, and customizable properties. It helps individuals and teams organize tasks, plan projects, and collaborate in a shared workspace.

Key Features

• Kanban-style boards with cards for tasks and projects
• Multiple views such as board, table, gallery, and calendar views
• Filters, grouping, sorting, and saved views for focused workflows
• Comments and @mentions for collaboration on cards
• Board permissions for controlling who can view or edit
• Templates and custom attributes/properties for structured planning
• File sharing on cards for centralizing project context
• Archiving and backup snapshots for preserving historical work

Use Cases

• Team project tracking with kanban workflows and task assignments
• Personal task management and planning using a local or small server setup
• Managing roadmaps, OKRs, content calendars, and meeting agendas with templates

Limitations and Considerations

• The standalone Focalboard repository is currently not maintained, which may affect future updates, security fixes, and long-term support.

Focalboard fits teams that want a Trello/Notion-style workflow with flexible views and collaboration features. It is particularly useful when you need customizable boards and permissions without relying on a proprietary SaaS service.

WeKan is an open-source, Trello-like Kanban board application for organizing personal and team work. It provides a real-time, collaborative interface for managing boards, lists, and cards while keeping data under your control.

Key Features

• Kanban boards with lists and cards for visual task tracking
• Real-time collaboration and live updates
• Access controls and permissions to restrict board and user access
• Internationalization support with extensive community translations
• Multiple packaging/deployment options (including container images)

Use Cases

• Team project management and lightweight agile workflows
• Personal task tracking and planning (to-do lists, trips, side projects)
• Replacing hosted Kanban tools for privacy, compliance, or cost reasons

Limitations and Considerations

• Uses MongoDB; insufficient disk space can risk database corruption, so monitoring and backups are important
• Upgrades are important for security due to upstream dependency updates (for example Node.js/Meteor stack)

WeKan is a solid option for organizations and individuals who want a familiar Kanban workflow with real-time collaboration and self-managed data. Its broad platform support and mature feature set make it suitable from small teams to larger deployments.

Planka is an open-source Kanban-style project management tool designed for teams to collaborate in real time. It provides collaborative boards with drag-and-drop tasks, rich Markdown notes, and configurable notifications, while being self-hostable and extensible.

Key Features

• Collaborative Kanban Boards: Create projects, boards, lists, cards, and manage tasks with a drag-and-drop interface
• Real-Time Updates: Instant syncing across all users, no page refresh required
• Rich Markdown Support: Formatted card descriptions with a markdown editor
• Flexible Notifications: Alerts via 100+ providers, customizable to your workflow
• Seamless Authentication: Single sign-on with OpenID Connect
• Multilingual & Easy to Translate: Full internationalization support

Use Cases

• Software development teams track backlogs and sprint work with shared boards
• Cross-functional teams coordinate tasks across design, product, and engineering
• Distributed teams collaborate in real time with task assignment and updates

Conclusion: Planka emphasizes open-source cooperation and self-hosting, with an active community and regular releases. It is well-suited for teams seeking a fast, real-time Kanban board that adapts to their workflows.

Kanboard is an open source project management application focused on the Kanban methodology. It provides a simple, minimal interface for visualizing work, managing tasks, and improving flow using WIP limits.

Key Features

• Kanban boards with configurable columns and drag-and-drop task movement
• Work-in-progress (WIP) limits per column with visual highlighting when exceeded
• Tasks with subtasks, comments, attachments, categories, colors, assignees, and due dates
• Markdown support for task descriptions
• Search and filtering with a simple query language and custom board filters
• Automatic actions to trigger workflow automation based on events
• Multiple authentication backends, including LDAP/Active Directory and OAuth2 providers
• Multilingual interface with extensive community translations

Use Cases

• Managing software or ops work with a lightweight Kanban board and clear WIP controls
• Tracking personal or small-team projects with tasks, due dates, and attachments
• Automating repetitive workflow steps such as assignments or metadata changes

Limitations and Considerations

• The project is in maintenance mode: major new features are not actively developed, with releases depending largely on community contributions

Kanboard is a pragmatic choice for teams that want a straightforward Kanban workflow without a complex UI. It emphasizes clarity, basic automation, and flexible task organization while remaining easy to deploy and operate.

Kan is an open-source project management app focused on Trello-style kanban boards for organizing work, tracking progress, and collaborating with a team. It aims to stay minimal and familiar while adding modern collaboration and administration features.

Key Features

• Kanban boards with drag-and-drop cards
• Workspaces and member invitations for team collaboration
• Board visibility controls for viewing and editing
• Labels and filters to organize and find cards quickly
• Comments on cards for discussion
• Activity log to track changes and history
• Reusable board templates
• Trello board import

Use Cases

• Replacing Trello with a self-managed kanban board for teams
• Managing personal or small-team projects with a minimal interface
• Importing existing Trello workflows and continuing them in an open-source tool

Kan provides a clean, focused kanban experience with core collaboration features and practical migration support. It is well-suited for teams that want a simple Trello-like workflow without unnecessary complexity.

Worklenz is an open-source project management platform that combines task management, time tracking, resource planning and basic client/finance features in a single product. It provides a web application suitable for teams that need project planning, collaboration and time-based reporting.

Key Features

• Task management with subtasks, dependencies, attachments and activity logs
• Kanban board and phase-based project views for visual workflow tracking
• Built-in time tracking and timesheets with time reports and per-user/project summaries
• Resource and workload views to monitor team allocation and utilization
• Project templates and reusable task templates for standardizing projects
• Client portal and basic project finance tracking for billing visibility
• Dashboard analytics and project health/estimated vs actual reporting
• Files and comments attached to tasks for team collaboration
• Deployable via Docker with recommended stack components (PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO, nginx)

Use Cases

• Agencies and consultancies managing client projects, deliverables and billing
• Software and IT teams organizing work with kanban, time tracking and roadmap views
• Small-to-medium organizations needing resource planning, workload balancing and project analytics

Limitations and Considerations

• The free tier limits active projects (site notes a three-active-project limit for the free plan)
• Several features (CRM, HR) are listed as "coming soon" on the product site and roadmap
• Import/migration tools from other PM platforms appear limited or pending enhancements

Worklenz targets teams that want an integrated, open-source PM tool they can run themselves or use as a hosted service. It emphasizes a combined feature set (tasks, time, resources, analytics) and provides Docker-based deployment and documented setup for self-hosting.

tududi is an open-source, self-hosted web application for task and project management. It combines a simple personal to-do workflow with project-level organization, focused on privacy, control, and lightweight deployment.

Key Features

• Hierarchical organization: Areas → Projects → Tasks with support for notes and tags for structured GTD-style workflows.
• Advanced recurring tasks: multiple recurrence patterns, completion-based recurrence, parent-child linking, and series editing.
• Subtasks and progress tracking: break down tasks into subtasks with visible progress and navigation between parent/child tasks.
• Flexible tagging and smart filtering: tag-based organization, multi-criteria filters, and quick search to locate items rapidly.
• Project documentation: rich-text notes attached to projects with full search capabilities.
• Collaboration controls: share projects with granular read/write permissions for team collaboration.
• Integrations and API: versioned REST API with Swagger docs and personal access tokens for automation and integrations.
• Telegram integration: create tasks via Telegram messages and receive daily task digests (requires a Telegram bot/token).
• Responsive UI and localization: modern responsive interface with dark/light themes and multi-language support (24 languages).
• Docker-first deployment: distributed as a container image for simple, local or server deployment.

Use Cases

• Personal productivity: manage daily tasks, recurring routines, and long-term projects using Areas and Projects.
• Small team project tracking: share projects with team members, delegate tasks, and track completion metrics.
• Automation and integrations: connect tududi data to other tools via the provided REST API and personal access tokens.

Limitations and Considerations

• Storage and scale: the default persistence is a file-based SQLite database and filesystem uploads, which is suitable for individuals and small teams but may limit performance or concurrency for very large deployments.
• Mobile availability: there is no official native mobile application; access is via the responsive web UI or third-party hosting/deployments.
• Operational requirements: production use requires running behind HTTPS and managing session secrets and bot tokens securely; administrators must handle backups and file-permission management.

In summary, tududi is a compact, privacy-oriented task and project manager aimed at users who prefer self-hosting and simple deployment. It emphasizes hierarchical organization, rich recurring-task support, Telegram connectivity, and an extensible API surface for automations.

Nextcloud Deck is a Kanban-style organization and task management app that runs inside Nextcloud. It helps individuals and teams plan projects using boards, stacks, and cards, with collaboration features integrated into the Nextcloud ecosystem.

Key Features

• Kanban boards with stacks and sortable task cards
• Card details with Markdown notes and rich descriptions
• Labels for organizing and filtering work
• Comments for team discussion on cards
• File attachments with embedding into card descriptions
• Activity stream integration to track changes
• Sharing and collaboration, including integration with Nextcloud Circles

Use Cases

• Personal task planning and organizing work in Kanban boards
• Team project coordination with shared boards and comments
• Managing lightweight workflows tied to Nextcloud files and activity

Limitations and Considerations

• Can generate a high number of database queries with many boards, cards, and attachments, which may impact performance at scale

Nextcloud Deck is a practical choice if you want Trello-like Kanban workflows tightly integrated with Nextcloud users, sharing, files, and activity features. It fits especially well for small-to-medium team planning where data should remain inside your Nextcloud environment.

Eigenfocus is a self-hosted project management and time tracking application focused on clarity, ownership, and flexible workflows. It combines issue tracking with multiple ways to visualize work and built-in focus timers.

Key Features

• Projects and issue tracking with markdown descriptions
• File attachments, labels, and comments for issue context
• Kanban board and table/list views for managing work
• Time tracking on projects and individual issues
• Time reports by project and date range
• Focus timers (including Pomodoro-style) and ambient sounds
• Light and dark themes
• Optional HTTP Basic Auth via environment variables

Use Cases

• Managing personal or small-team projects with kanban-based workflows
• Tracking time spent per project/issue for reporting and retrospectives
• Using focus timers alongside task execution for deep-work sessions

Limitations and Considerations

• The FREE Edition is free to self-host but is not open source, and external pull requests are not accepted.

Eigenfocus is a good fit for individuals and teams that want a fast, self-managed PM tool with integrated time tracking and focus features. It is designed to stay straightforward for small projects while offering an upgrade path for more complex workflows.

Ticky is a web-based Kanban-style task and project management system built with ASP.NET Core Blazor. It provides project grouping, customizable boards and columns, and a focused feature set for managing tasks, deadlines and time tracking.

Key Features

• Projects and Kanban boards with customizable, collapsible columns and per-column settings (limits, auto-order, auto-complete)
• Cards with drag-and-drop, subtasks, labels, priorities, attachments and comments
• Time tracking with per-card timers and aggregated column time stats
• Deadlines, email reminders/notifications and configurable SMTP support
• Card linking (Jira-like), activity tracking, board templates and Trello import
• User and role management (board/project-level Members and Admins) and an admin panel for account administration
• App-wide search, filtering, responsive UI and dark mode
• Offline-capable configuration (disable avatar/email services) and Docker-based deployment

Use Cases

• Personal productivity and lightweight project boards for individuals
• Small teams coordinating work with boards, comments, activity tracking and shared attachments
• Recurring tasks and operational workflows using repeat cards and built-in time tracking

Limitations and Considerations

• Primary deployment examples and official Docker artifacts target MySQL; other databases may require additional configuration
• No built-in SSO/OIDC or enterprise identity integrations documented; authentication is primarily local account based
• Real-time collaborative editing (live presence or CRDT-style sync) is not described in the core features

Ticky is focused on providing a simple, opinionated Kanban experience with essential team features and easy Docker deployment. It is well-suited for users who want a lightweight, self-hosted alternative to hosted Kanban services with built-in time tracking and Trello import.