It does have users, I'm running it on my own server. I've found that it's actually not trivial to disable registration (you have to patch the source, there's no configuration option for it).
a) In Wekan standalone version it's possible to disable self-registration in Admin Panel. There is inviting users, user permissions Admin/Normal/Comment only, but not user management yet:
Wekan is pretty much fully community contribution-driven. So the answer for it not having it's own AD/LDAP support at this point is that nobody has seemed interested in actually doing it and submitting a PR.
While I like the idea of having open source alternatives to the popular applications, this one is a pure and simple copy of Trello. This is a bit too much IMO.
Why do you want to selfhost Trello? Are you afraid that somebody at Trello might steal your secret cards, todos, specs, etc. and sells them?
I know self hosting is actually better but it is also work and is the typical information which people put on Trello confidential enough to justify self hosting? IDK and again Trello is free.
> the expectation is that if you're not paying, you're the product.
What are you talking about? In what way are Trello users 'the product'? Are you just repeating a catch phrase that people say about other companies or do you actually know this to be the case?
I don't use Trello myself, but unless something has changed there aren't ads being shown to users (the reasons for the 'you're the product' saying for services like Google or Facebook), I'm not sure what data they could sell that would be worthwhile for a to-do app. What else would make the users 'the product'?
AFAIK they make all their money from their premium services, and since being bought by Atlassian I doubt revenue is at the top of their priority list anyway. Atlassian is full of premium services and Trello seems like a way to introduce all of those users to Atlassian's suite.
It also allows them to sell your data for mining purposes. In the next year we are going to see many AI business buy access to many unique large datasets.
"It's hard to imagine that we would ever consider collecting, let alone sharing, sensitive information with a non-agent third party, but if such a day should come, we will first give you the opportunity to explicitly consent (opt-in) to such disclosure or to any use of the information for a purpose other than the one for which it was originally collected or previously authorized." https://trello.com/privacy
who said anything about confidentiality? i'm talking about long-term viability. if i self-host, i don't have to worry about Trello's business model or changes to the product that i don't like/want. i have control. which is whole point.
There are legitimate reasons for wanting/needing to self-host. For example, in a regulatory environment, I could see managing PHI data (not for clinical treatment, but maybe tracking clinical research). In this case, Trello would either need to sign a BAA or you'd need to self host something.
There are many reasons why self-hosting is the only viable option for some use-cases.
And then there are also data longevity issues, where you'd need the ability to backup and restore your data. If Trello goes away (as a free service), then you have fewer options in the regard.
> For example, in a regulatory environment, I could see managing PHI data
This is exactly why I have a spare box running Wekan in my office at work. We run clinical applications for a hospital; sometimes project tracking+testing involves PHI that we have to be super careful about letting into the outside world.
For some projects you need to self host because of the US protectionist and paranoid export laws for tech. Specially in aerospace, nuclear, some type of sensors, etc...
That or you need a contract that guarantees that the software is hosted outside the US, which Trello won't provide.
Funny cause in the past wekan did get into trouble over the use of a similar logo and stylesheets taken from Trello (iirc).
They've come a long way since and I think with time they can really shape up to become a strong competitor to Trello.
Side note:
When I was working in a corporate environment I was able to setup an instance myself to help organize my tasks. Had I used Trello it would've been against our policy if I potentially left sensitive data on there and hard(read: impossible for me alone) to get permission to use Trello officially.
Trello got so mature, has a great API, is well integrated with Zapier and hundreds of other services AND is free (I still don't know why one should get into the paid plan, even witn bigger teams, the free version is torally fine) that it must be super hard for any clone or competitor to win users.
Trello has been super stagnant for years. It's a dying product.
No swim-lanes, no nested boards, No proper time-stamps. All basic features on several of the competitors.
Dying product? This sounds like blatant propaganda sorry.
Most of the so called clones don't even have basic stuff like using Command-v to paste pictures right from the clipboard directly into some card and you tell us Trello is dying?
Trello is UI-wise the best kanban thing by far. All clones might look like Trello but their usability has so many glitches and is always inferior.
Besides, nobody needs nested boards, just make another board. Moreover, it is common that after a while a board should get archived and a new one should be created instead. Otherwise it gets too messy and I don't want to imagine how 'nested boards' look.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes, would love to hear your opinions instead
I used to hate JIRA until I worked with a company whose admins had taken the time to configure it properly to fit into their workflow - that was actually a very pleasant experience.
If you want to do Kanban right, double down on making it possible to design actual Kanban workflows. Pretty ticket UI with checklists and GIFs must be secondary to this goal.
Things that most actual Kanban flows have that no one has built into a decent product[0]:
- Nested columns in lanes
- Rows for class-of-service
- WIP limits (per lane, per column, and per class-of-service)
- Sub-boards for meta issues
The actual content of each work item is the least important part of Kanban; it could be a hyperlink for all I care. Kanban is about managing the flow, not managing the work.
[0] Please prove me wrong if there is such a product out there!
It’s always surprising to me how many “lean” and “agile” productivity tools completely focus on the artifacts and seem to have skipped the core concepts entirely.
Like most of their IDEs, it's not about UX but about features. And on that point, they have done a lot!
Having used it for some projects as an alternative to JIRA, Trello, GitLab boards, and a few others that I tried, I think it's not perfect, quite hard to use for non-tech users, but much better than most of the alternatives.
The number of details/settings available is great compared to Trello or GitLab. The pricing/hosting is great compared to JIRA. The non-tech usability is much better in JIRA and Trello, but for a tech team, it has many small things/shortcuts like ones you already use in their IDEs which is really great.
There are hundreds of tools like this, and I tried maybe 20 or 30 of them; the thing is, there is no perfect tool out there, and there won't be as use cases for such a tool can be extremely different! YouTrack gets a lot of points right for a tech team from my experience though.
The product I've been working on the last few months has all the things you listed, mostly: http://cwkanban.com/ . It's been a huge help to my own team's workflow.
But it's not general-purpose like Wekan or Trello; it's focused on workflow for managed IT and at the moment only pulls ticket data from ConnectWise, software for managed services providers.
I suppose- mostly I'm unsure to what extent "sub-boards for meta issues" makes sense when card data is drawn from an external source, as in our product.
I agree that this is important. Optimizing and integrating the tools is a fairly significant part of my work, when I am leading a small team. Webhooks and a plugin framework are decent compromises, but there are so many times when I just want to dive into the code to increment a constant, or subclass and extend a method that doesn't have an externally accessible hook.
I really like kanbanflow as a product. For example they also have a pretty nice integrated pomodoro timer with interruption logging.
However the reason I moved back to Trello was the interface was a bit old-fashioned, and I found it hard to get my team on-board on kanbanflow wheras it was really easy to get them going on Trello.
Targetprocess.com had all these features - I loved swim lanes for projects - but the UI was unusably slow (clearly not designed with an app framework at the core) when we tried it two years ago. I've been looking for something better ever since.
It's a bummer because in the current state, Wekan doesn't really provide much real management value. I really wanted to use it for Kanban, because it's one of the flagship applications of the fantastic Sandstorm cloud platform (https://sandstorm.io), to introduce some colleagues to both concepts at the same time... but I guess I will only show them about the later.
Well at least it implements subtasks (checklists)!
Yes, Wekan does not have those features yet. Anyway, Wekan is being actively developed and features added. Wekan is friendly community driven project and welcomes all contributions.
Some have commented on Wekan GitHub issues that they prefer to use Wekan, because some others project management tools are overkill, or don't have the same usability as Wekan. It depends on use case.
Thing is, it's specifically labeled a kanban board. WiP limits are fundamental to kanban. They're why kanban works. People may prefer it to other tools; that's fine, but it doesn't mean it's not missing the point by not being an actual kanban board implementation.
I find rows counterproductive; they make it less obvious how full the board is, and don't help make better decisions. By all means sort each column in priority order so that people picking up a new task know which to pick up first; that's a lot less intrusive and covers the important use case.
Likewise sub-boards and meta-issues. If we're doing agile properly then each card represents a user-facing deliverable. Allowing meta-issues encourages doing the wrong thing.
Limiting work in progress I've achieved by having people assign themselves to cards, and questioning those who are on multiple cards. In the cases where we're violating our work-in-progress limit, I'd rather have the board reflect reality than not.
Is it possible to use Trello extensions and integrate them with only Trello API ? And is it allowed to use Trello extensions outside Trello ? Or would they require separate integration to Wekan ?
For example on Trello templates can not be used outside Trello:
Yeah, I find myself starting new things all the time and never finishing most of them. I've used a WIP limit to try to force myself to finish or explicitly dump projects.
There's a book called "Personal Kanban" about using Kanban to organize your own work. I liked some of the principles it espoused, but ultimately found it awkward to manage returned to a more traditional set of GTD lists.
Have a look at TasksInaBox ( https://tasksinabox.com/ ). What is nice is that besides the usual web and mobile apps, it also has a client living inside Outlook so you can create tasks from emails as they arrive in your inbox.
Kanban is the name of a well-known process management method. The word is Japanese - ?? - literally meaning "signpost" or "billboard" (thanks Wikipedia).
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