Your team still plans work in a Trello board owned by Atlassian, a Slack thread that scrolls forever, and a spreadsheet someone swears is temporary. Cards move. Context doesn't. Half the room never saw the update because nobody refreshed the tab.
PLANKA (they write it in caps; the repo is plankanban/planka) is a self-hosted Kanban board that feels like the Trello you remember before the enterprise upsell parade. ~12.6k GitHub stars, drag-and-drop boards, real-time sync without hammering F5, and a Community edition you can run on your own Postgres. There's a paid Pro tier for SSO, calendar views, and mobile polish, but the core "projects, lists, cards, comments" story is free to host yourself.
What it actually does
PLANKA is project tracking on Kanban rails. Create a project, add boards, split work into lists (To Do, Doing, Done, or whatever chaos you prefer), and move cards between them. Assign people, set due dates, run a stopwatch on a card if you're billing time, attach files, and argue in comments where everyone can see it.
Real-time collaboration. Move a card and your teammate's screen updates. No "did you save?" messages. That matters when three people run standup from the same board.
Markdown on cards. Descriptions support a proper markdown editor, not a single-line title field with vibes. Checklists, links, formatted notes — the stuff you'd put in a ticket body.
Notifications everywhere. Community edition hooks into a huge list of notification providers (email, Slack, Telegram, and dozens more via the usual integration stack). Tune what pings you so only blocked cards wake you at dinner.
API and webhooks. Documented REST API and webhooks if you want to open a card from a form, sync status to another system, or script board setup for a new client engagement.
Stack: Node.js app in Docker, PostgreSQL for data, optional bind mounts or volumes for uploads. Fair-code licensing: Community is self-hostable with source visible; Pro adds commercial features and support. Read their license guide before you assume "it's MIT like everything else on awesome-selfhosted."
PLANKA vs Wekan vs "just use GitHub Issues"
We haven't written up Wekan or Focalboard yet. Rough positioning:
- PLANKA — polished Trello-like UX, real-time, strong notifications, active Discord community. Good default when non-devs need boards.
- Wekan — older Meteor-based Trello clone; still works, heavier footprint, different feel.
- Focalboard — Mattermost's Notion/Trello hybrid; great if you're already in Mattermost.
- GitHub/GitLab issues — fine for code, miserable for marketing launches, facility work, or "who's picking up the phone today."
If your bottleneck is visibility, not burndown charts, PLANKA hits the sweet spot without importing Jira.
Why self-host?
Client work stays inside your perimeter. Agency boards list client names, contract notes, and launch dates. That's not data you want on a US SaaS trial that expires mid-project.
Canadian hosting, clear answer. Run PLANKA on a Canadian VPS, keep Postgres backups in the same jurisdiction, and stop hand-waving about where task metadata lives.
Predictable cost. Community edition doesn't charge per seat. Ten users or forty, you pay for the server and your time. Pro is optional if you need SSO or calendar views on phones.
No vendor timeline. Trello's parent changes pricing; other Kanban startups get acquired. Self-hosted Community plus your own backups means the board still loads even if a hosted tier rebrands.
What running it takes
Official path is Docker Compose from the repo:
mkdir planka && cd planka
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plankanban/planka/master/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml
# Set SECRET_KEY (openssl rand -hex 64) and BASE_URL to your HTTPS URL
docker compose run --rm planka npm run db:create-admin-user
docker compose up -dBrowse to BASE_URL, log in with the admin you created, then invite the team. Put TLS in front with nginx or Traefik; Kanban boards over plain HTTP is a bad habit.
Plan 2 GB RAM for a small team install (Postgres + Node). Attachments grow with use — size the volume before you upload every PDF contract to card comments. Back up the Postgres database and any upload volume; that's the whole project history.
If you bind-mount host folders instead of Docker volumes, docs say to chown -R 1000:1000 on those paths so the container user can write files.
Who it's for (and who should skip it)
Good fit: agencies running client projects, internal ops teams, remote standups, anyone outgrowing a shared spreadsheet, orgs that want Trello-shaped workflow without per-user SaaS bills.
Maybe skip it: you need full agile burndown and epics (look at OpenProject or GitLab), you're already standardized on Notion for everything, or you need legal-grade audit trails beyond comments and card history.
Hosting it in Canada
PLANKA is a straightforward Docker on a VPS workload: Compose file, Postgres, HTTPS, nightly DB backups. We host similar boards for Canadian teams who want boards without shipping task data to another country.
Tell us how many boards and people you expect — we'll size RAM and disk before your first "upload full brief PDF to every card" sprint.
