Wekan

Wekan has been the standard open-source Trello clone since 2014, and over a decade of development it has stayed close enough to Trello's feature set — boards, lists, cards, checklists, swimlanes, due dates, and a direct Trello JSON importer — that migrating a team over rarely requires retraining anyone. That's the entire value proposition: if your workflow is Trello and your objection is the price or the data residency, Wekan removes both without changing how anyone works.

Beyond the core board, Wekan supports card templates, custom fields, and several enterprise-relevant authentication backends (LDAP, OAuth2, CAS), which shows up in the kind of internal-IT deployments where Wekan tends to get adopted. It also ships in more than 50 language translations, reflecting its long-running international contributor base.

The honest downsides come from its age. Wekan runs on Meteor and MongoDB, a stack that's noticeably heavier to self-host and keep patched than the single-binary Go or Node tools that have become common in this space (Kanboard, Vikunja). Its UI, while functional, looks and feels dated next to newer entrants like Plane or Huly, and it has never added sprints, Gantt views, or docs — it has stayed a kanban board and nothing more, by design. For teams that specifically want a free, drop-in Trello replacement and don't need those extra layers, that focus is a feature, not a gap. Teams that want more structure around sprints or reporting should look elsewhere in this category.