Free alternative

Free alternative to Trello

Trello costs €5 a month. Kan does the same job for free, in open source: you install it on your machine or a small server, and you stop paying.

Public entry price, taken from Trello’s website (trello.com). Over a year, that is €60 that stays in your pocket.

What replaces Trello

The main alternative

Kan

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~15 min to installSave €5/mo

Kan takes what made Trello work and stops there: boards, lists, cards you drag around. On each card, labels, a checklist, a due date, attachments, comments and a history of what changed. On top come reusable board templates, filters, a calendar view that Trello keeps for its Premium plan, and an interface translated into French. Moving over does not mean retyping everything: you connect your Trello account in the settings, pick the boards to bring along, and they arrive with their lists, their cards and descriptions, their labels and checklists. Comments, attachments and due dates stay behind. The project is young, started in late 2023, but alive: close to 5,700 stars on GitHub, around fifty contributors, an AGPL-3.0 licence and several updates a week. It even ships an MCP server: Claude can read your boards, create cards and move them for you. Two ways to use it. Online at kan.bn it is free for one person; to work as a team, the Teams plan costs about €7 per member per month. On your own server with Docker, everything is unlocked and the number of members is no longer capped. What is missing against Trello: no mobile app, only the website adapting to the phone, no Butler style automations, and integrations with other tools are announced but not there yet.

Loucash’s verdict on Kan

7/10

Kan does one thing and does it well: Trello style boards, fast and clean, without everything Atlassian has piled on over the years. For a small team paying for Trello Standard or Premium, the saving is immediate once it runs on a server: no more bill per member, and the calendar view is included while Trello sells it as Premium. What I like: the Trello import, which saves retyping everything, and the MCP server. Telling Claude "create a card to chase this client on Friday" and seeing it land on the right board is exactly the bridge between your tools and AI that I am after. What may bite: the project is young and less complete than Trello. No mobile app, no automations, no integrations yet. Comments and attachments do not come over in the import. And online, the free plan only covers one person: for a team, it is your server or the paid plan.

Who it is for: You pay for Trello for a small team, you have a server or are ready to rent one, and your boards are enough without automations. If your team lives in Trello's mobile app or in its automations, keep Trello.

See the full page →See the tool ↗

Kan versus Trello: the match

  • Price

    Kan

    €0 on your server, free online for one person

    Trello

    €5/month per person, €11 on Premium

  • Number of boards

    Kan

    Unlimited

    Trello

    10 per workspace on the free plan

  • Team members

    Kan

    Unlimited on your server

    Trello

    10 at most for free, then each one is paid

Trello ↗

The prompt that installs Kan

Paste this prompt into Claude: it checks the repository, asks you its questions and installs the tool step by step.

Je veux remplacer Trello par Kan, l'alternative open source (dépôt GitHub kanbn/kan, site kan.bn). Demande-moi d'abord si je l'utilise seul ou en équipe, et combien nous sommes. Seul, aide-moi à créer un compte gratuit sur kan.bn. En équipe, installe Kan sur mon serveur avec le docker-compose officiel du dépôt kanbn/kan : dis-moi ce qu'il faut comme machine, génère le secret BETTER_AUTH_SECRET et le mot de passe de la base, règle NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL sur mon domaine, configure l'envoi des mails pour les invitations et explique-moi comment sauvegarder la base. Ensuite, reprends mes tableaux Trello : si Kan tourne sur mon serveur, guide-moi pour créer une clé d'API Trello et la renseigner dans TRELLO_APP_API_KEY et TRELLO_APP_API_SECRET, puis connecte mon compte Trello dans les réglages de Kan et importe mes tableaux. Dis-moi ce qui passe à l'import (listes, cartes, descriptions, étiquettes, checklists) et ce qui reste chez Trello (commentaires, pièces jointes, échéances), et vérifie avec moi un tableau importé. Enfin, branche le serveur MCP de Kan (npx -y @kan/mcp, avec KAN_BASE_URL et une clé d'API créée dans les réglages de Kan) pour que tu puisses lire et modifier mes cartes.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.

Frequently asked questions

Is Kan really free?
Yes. Kan is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Trello, on the other hand, costs €5 a month.
Do I need to code to install Kan?
No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 15 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.
How is it different from Trello?
Kan does most of what Trello does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.
Do I own my data?
Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

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