// the find
kanbn/kan
The open source Trello alternative.
Kan is a self-hostable Kanban board app — essentially Trello without the SaaS lock-in. It's a Next.js monorepo with tRPC, Drizzle ORM, and Better Auth, targeting teams that want to run their own project management tool. Reasonable choice for small teams burned by Trello's pricing or data residency requirements.
The tech stack is coherent and modern — tRPC gives you end-to-end type safety without a separate API schema, and Drizzle keeps migrations close to the code rather than a separate migration tool. The Docker Compose setup with a dedicated migrate service that gates the web container is done correctly; migrations run exactly once before the app starts rather than at app boot. The MCP server exposing 46 tools is genuinely useful — you can manage boards from Claude or Copilot without context-switching. Trello import is there on day one, which removes the biggest adoption friction for anyone actually switching from Trello.
AGPL v3 is a real constraint for anyone wanting to embed this in a commercial product — the license requires source disclosure for any networked use, which will block some enterprise self-hosting scenarios. The 'Integrations (coming soon)' feature listed in the README is a dead link to a roadmap, meaning the integration story is vaporware right now. There's no mention of end-to-end encryption or audit logging, which matters if you're selling this to compliance-heavy teams as a Trello replacement. The Railway deployment partnership means the one-click path routes you through a third party with a referral code baked into the button — not evil, but worth knowing it's not neutral infrastructure.