Kanboard
Hosting

Kanboard is the PM tool I keep coming back to for small projects, internal tickets, and personal task management. It loads in under 200ms, the interface is dense without being cluttered, and the whole application weighs less than the average single-page app's JavaScript bundle. There's something deeply satisfying about software that does its job and then gets out of the way.

I've recommended Kanboard to clients who wanted a Trello replacement after Atlassian's pricing changes, to development teams who needed something between "sticky notes on a wall" and "full Jira instance", and to a few solo consultants who just wanted a private kanban board they owned. In all of those cases the answer was the same: install it on shared hosting, point a subdomain at it, done.

"Kanboard is the rare project management tool that doesn't feel like it's trying to be everything. It's a fast kanban board, hosted by you, owned by you, and it stays that way. If your team has fifteen people or fewer, it's all you need."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

The technical demands are minimal. PHP 8.5 is fine, MySQL 8 is fine, and if you're really watching the resource budget you can run it on SQLite which removes the database server from the picture entirely. I wouldn't recommend SQLite for a team of more than two or three concurrent users (write locking gets in the way), but for a personal board or a tiny team, it's elegant.

What I'd flag for anyone considering Kanboard is the trade-off they've made. There's no Gantt view, no proper time-line scheduler, no resource utilisation dashboards, no native CRM integration, no AI prioritisation. If you want any of those, look elsewhere - Kanboard isn't trying to compete. It's competing with Trello-style boards, not Jira-style enterprise PM, and it does that well.

The other thing worth knowing is that Kanboard's mobile experience is functional but not great. It works on phones, but I wouldn't say anyone enjoys it. There's no dedicated mobile app from the project, though community apps exist that talk to the API. If your team needs heavy mobile use, factor that in.

For self-hosting, Kanboard is genuinely one of the easiest PHP applications I work with. One-click install, edit a config file if you want SMTP for notifications, set up a cron for background tasks if you're using time-of-day automations, and you're done. We've had clients install it on a Friday afternoon and have their team using it on Monday morning with no migration headaches.

For larger setups (50+ active users, big attachment volumes, heavy plugin use), shared hosting still works fine but a managed cloud server gives you the SSH access for cleaner plugin installs and the option to point Kanboard at PostgreSQL if you have an existing database server. For most teams, though, our cheapest plan is more than capable.