fenbs vs GitHub Projects: a board for people who are not on GitHub

The short answer

If everyone who needs to see the work has a GitHub account and the work is issues and pull requests, GitHub Projects is free, close to the code, and hard to beat. fenbs is for when the work includes people who are not developers — a client, a designer, a site team — and an AI assistant that should be a member with a role rather than a bot account with a token.

Where GitHub Projects is better

• It is next to the code. Issues, pull requests, branches and reviews are the items on the board.
• Custom fields, iterations, table and roadmap views, and workflow automations.
• Free for public and most private repositories, with no extra tool to introduce.

Where fenbs is better

• People without GitHub accounts. A client or a tester joins with an email and a role, and sees a board, not a repository.
• Roles that narrow. Someone can be allowed to file bugs and nothing else. GitHub’s repository permissions are much coarser.
• AI assistants as members. Claude Code, Cursor, Claude and ChatGPT connect over MCP with a browser sign-in, hold a role and sign their changes. On GitHub an assistant usually acts through a token that looks like you.
• AI context on the board: what an assistant should know before touching the work, readable by every assistant you connect.
• Works on a phone, and a non-developer can use it.

Using both

A common shape: engineering tracks pull requests in GitHub, the product and the client track features, enhancements and bugs on fenbs, and the task’s own reference field records the issue number. An AI assistant connected to both keeps them in step.

How to decide in ten minutes

Paste this week's real list into a fenbs board with Add many, connect the AI assistant you already use over MCP, and work from it for a few days. If the board is still true at the end of the week, it is doing the job. If you kept reaching for a field GitHub Projects has and fenbs does not, that is your answer too, and it is a good one.