Focalboard

Focalboard is a deliberately narrow tool: board, table, gallery, and calendar views over the same underlying cards, styled after Trello and Notion, with no sprints, no Gantt charts, and no cross-project reporting layered on top. That narrowness is the appeal for a lot of small teams and individuals — it installs as a single binary or Docker container, has zero paid tier, and gets out of the way instead of asking you to configure a full project-management suite just to track a task list.

Under the hood, boards support custom properties and card templates, and there's a direct Trello import for teams migrating off that specific tool. It can run standalone as a personal server, as a self-hosted team edition, or as a plugin inside a Mattermost instance for teams that already run Mattermost for chat.

The fact worth knowing before adopting it: Mattermost, the company that originally built and funded Focalboard, stopped actively developing it in September 2023 and handed the repository to the open-source community. The mattermost-community fork is still open for contributions and the existing codebase is stable, but release cadence has slowed noticeably compared to venture-backed alternatives like Plane or Huly, and the project is openly looking for community maintainers rather than shipping a roadmap. For anyone who wants a free, permanently-simple Trello/Notion-style board and doesn't need active feature development, that trade-off is often fine. Anyone who wants sprints, timelines, or a maintained long-term roadmap should look at Plane, OpenProject, or Huly instead.