Free Kanban Board Tools: What You Get Without Paying

You can run a real kanban board without paying. Trello, GitHub Projects, Jira, ClickUp and Notion all have free plans with a board view and no time limit, and open-source boards such as WeKan and Kanboard cost nothing to license if you host them yourself. The difference is where each free plan stops: the number of people, the number of boards, automation runs, the extra views, storage, or permissions. Pick the free kanban board whose limit you will not reach in the next six months, and check what happens to your board when you do.

This is a description of what each free plan includes, from each vendor’s own help pages as of October 1, 2026, not a ranking. Free plans change, so read the vendor’s page again before you move a team. If you are choosing paid software and want buying criteria instead, see kanban board software: what to look for.

What a free kanban board usually limits

• People. A cap on members or collaborators per workspace is the limit small teams meet first, and it often counts guests and pending invitations too.
• Boards or containers. A cap on open boards, spaces or lists, which matters if you keep one board per client or project.
• Automation. A monthly allowance of rule runs or actions, so automations that move cards for you can stop partway through the month.
• Views. The board itself is free nearly everywhere; calendar, timeline, table and dashboard views are often paid.
• Storage and history. Smaller attachments, less total storage, shorter page or activity history.
• Permissions. Free plans tend to have simple roles, so on some of them almost everyone can change almost everything.

Hosted free kanban boards, vendor by vendor

Trello

Trello is the board most people picture when they hear kanban, and its Free plan covers lists, cards and Power-Ups for a small group. The limits are on collaborators and open boards per Workspace, monthly automation runs (Trello now calls its automation tool Automation rather than Butler), and attachment size; calendar, timeline, table, dashboard and map views are Premium. The part to know before you invite people: Atlassian’s page on free Workspaces↗ (opens in a new tab) says that once a Workspace goes over the collaborator limit, its boards become view-only and automations stop working until you remove people or upgrade. Our guide on how to use Trello covers the basics, and the Trello alternative page sets it beside fenbs.

GitHub Projects

GitHub includes Issues and Projects for every account. A project has table, board and roadmap layouts built from your issues and pull requests, built-in workflows that move items for you, and a column limit you can set per view. The column limit is advisory: GitHub highlights the column when it goes over, but nothing stops anyone adding more. It is a strong free board when the work already lives in GitHub, and a weak one for people who never open it. See GitHub Projects as a kanban board for the setup.

Jira

Jira’s Free plan, which Atlassian describes↗ (opens in a new tab) as “for small teams to plan and track work more efficiently,” includes Scrum and Kanban boards, a backlog, agile reporting and customizable workflows. It caps users, storage and automation, supports you through the Atlassian Community rather than a support team, and keeps space roles and advanced permissions for paid plans. Jira Cloud now calls issues “work items” and projects “spaces,” so expect both words in its help pages. For running the board well, see Jira kanban best practices.

ClickUp

ClickUp’s Free Forever plan includes the Board view alongside lists, docs and a calendar. Its help center publishes a limit page for almost every feature: Spaces, lists, folders, dashboards and automations each have a free-plan ceiling, and ClickUp’s storage page↗ (opens in a new tab) shows Free Forever with a small fixed storage allowance against unlimited storage on every paid plan. Attachments, docs, cover images and screen recordings all count toward it, so a board with lots of screenshots fills it quickly.

Notion

Notion is not a kanban tool first, but any database can be shown as a board, with columns grouped by a status or select property. The free plan is generous for one person and tighter for a group: Notion’s block usage page↗ (opens in a new tab) says a Free workspace with one owner has unlimited blocks, while a workspace with two or more owners is capped and must upgrade to keep creating content. Page history on Free is short. You build the board yourself, which is the point for some teams and the drawback for others.

Microsoft Planner

Planner is free in a narrower sense: basic plans, with a Board view where buckets are the columns, come with most Microsoft 365 business subscriptions, so many teams already have it without a separate bill. Premium plans with timelines, task history and goals need a Planner license. Neither documents a WIP or bucket limit. The details are in Microsoft Planner as a kanban board.

Open-source and freeware kanban boards

An open-source board has no plan limits because there is no plan. You install it on your own server or cloud account, and the cost moves from a subscription to your time: installing, upgrading, backing up and patching. Check two things before you commit: the license, and whether anyone still maintains the code.

• WeKan. A self-hosted kanban board with boards, lists, swimlanes, cards and work-in-progress limits on lists, under the MIT license. WeKan’s site↗ (opens in a new tab) stresses self-hosting for full control over your data, and the project is under active development, with new releases in late September 2026.
• Kanboard. A deliberately minimal self-hosted board, also MIT-licensed, with WIP limits per column and automatic actions. Its GitHub repository↗ (opens in a new tab) says the project is in maintenance mode: the author is not developing new major features, only small fixes, while releases continue from community contributions. That suits a team that wants a stable, small tool; it does not suit one waiting for new features.
• Focalboard. Once a common self-hosted Trello alternative, its repository now says it is not maintained. Do not start a new board on it.
• Broader tools. OpenProject, Plane, Taiga and Redmine all include boards inside larger project management suites; free project planning software covers them.

“Freeware kanban” sometimes means a desktop app that keeps the board on one computer. That works for one person, but a board nobody else can see gives up most of what makes kanban useful for a team: the shared picture of who is doing what.

How to tell which limit will bite

1. Count everyone who will need to move a card in six months, including clients and contractors, and rule out every free plan below that number.
2. Count boards. One board per client or product reaches a board cap faster than one shared board with categories.
3. Read what happens at the limit. View-only boards, paused automations and blocked content creation are very different from a polite upgrade prompt.
4. Check export before you load real work, so moving later is a copy and not a retyping job.
5. If an AI assistant will work on the board, check how it gets in: an MCP server, an API token, or nothing.

For the wider buying questions, such as WIP limits, swimlanes, roles, history and AI access, see the sister guide, kanban board software: what to look for.

Where fenbs fits

fenbs has a free plan too: your own board, with no card and no trial clock, a limit on how many tasks are open at once (completed and archived tasks do not count), your AI context, and as many AI assistants as you want to connect over MCP. Sharing a board with a team, with roles and the full history of who changed what, is a paid plan; the details are on pricing.

The board itself is fixed and simple: four lanes (To Do, Next Up, In Progress, Completed), three kinds of task (feature, enhancement, bug) and priority from 1 to 10. It has no WIP limits, swimlanes, custom columns, due dates or a settable assignee, so if your free board needs those, one of the tools above is a better fit.