[opensourcedex]

Wekan is a free, open source project & work management project written in JavaScript and released under MIT. It has 21,089 GitHub stars, 3,000 forks and 165 open issues, and was last pushed 8 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #2 of 62 tracked projects in Project & Work Management, and is listed as an open source replacement for 2 paid products, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 13 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

What is Wekan?

What it is

Wekan is an open-source collaborative kanban board application written in JavaScript and built with Meteor. It is licensed under the MIT license and is positioned as a free and open-source alternative to Jira and Monday.com. The project lives in the self-hosted business software and project management ecosystem.

The concrete problem it addresses is the need to see the current state of a project without depending on a proprietary hosted service. The README describes personal todo lists, planning holidays with friends, and team work, all using boards that provide a visual overview and help users focus on important items. Because Wekan is free software, users can install it on their own computer or server and keep control of their data.

Key capabilities

  • Provides a collaborative kanban board interface that gives users a visual overview of project state and helps them focus on important items.
  • Includes a real-time user interface, as stated in the features section of the README.
  • Is distributed as Docker images for GitHub Container Registry, Docker Hub, and Red Hat Quay, with a docker-compose.yml file for container deployment.
  • Supports Sandstorm and Snapcraft packaging, according to the repository topics.
  • Accepts non-English translations through Transifex and accepts new English strings through pull requests to imports/i18n/data/en.i18n.json.

Who uses it and how

  • Individuals and small groups can use it for personal todo lists, holiday planning with friends, or team projects, as described in the README.
  • Companies can operate it as an internal kanban tool, with the README noting that its largest user has 30,000 users in their company.
  • Teams using Docker can run frontend wekan-app containers and a backend wekan-db database server, following the scale guidance for thousands of users.

Getting started

Typical deployment uses Docker images from ghcr.io/wekan/wekan:latest, wekanteam/wekan:latest, or quay.io/wekan/wekan:latest, often with the provided docker-compose.yml file, while the README also points to downloads and one-click installation on various platforms.

When to use it — and when not to

Wekan is a reasonable fit for teams that want an open-source kanban alternative to Jira or Monday.com and prefer to keep board data on infrastructure they control. Self-hosters must operate the Meteor application with MongoDB, provide sufficient disk space to avoid database corruption, and keep Sandstorm or Snap installations updated frequently because old versions can carry security issues. GitHub issues are intended for free and open-source developers rather than general support, so teams needing help may need commercial support.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

WeKan ® - Open Source kanban

Downloads

https://wekan.fi/install/

Docker Containers

image: ghcr.io/wekan/wekan:latest

image: wekanteam/wekan:latest

image: quay.io/wekan/wekan:latest

docker-compose.yml at https://github.com/wekan/wekan/blob/main/docker-compose.yml

Standards

  • WeKan and Standard for Public Code assessment was made at 2023-11. Currently Wekan meets 8 out of 16 criteria out of the box. Some others could be met with small changes.

Code stats

Translate WeKan ® at Transifex

Translations to non-English languages are accepted only at Transifex using webbrowser. New English strings of new features can be added as PRs to master branch file wekan/imports/i18n/data/en.i18n.json .

WeKan ® feature requests and bugs

Please add most of your questions as GitHub issue: WeKan ® Feature Requests and Bugs. It's better than at chat where details get lost when chat scrolls up.

Discussions

IRC

Docker: Latest tag has newest release

You can use latest tag to get newest release tag. See bottom of https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/3874

FAQ

NOTE:

  • Please read the FAQ first
  • Please don't feed the trolls and spammers that are mentioned in the FAQ :)

About WeKan ®

WeKan ® is a completely [Open Source][open_source] and [Free software][free_software] collaborative kanban board application with MIT license.

Whether you’re maintaining a personal todo list, planning your holidays with some friends, or working in a team on your next revolutionary idea, Kanban boards are an unbeatable tool to keep your things organized. They give you a visual overview of the current state of your project, and make you productive by allowing you to focus on the few items that matter the most.

Since WeKan ® is a free software, you don’t have to trust us with your data and can install Wekan on your own computer or server. In fact we encourage you to do that by providing one-click installation on various platforms.

Requirements

  • 1 GB RAM minimum free for WeKan ®. Production server should have minimum total 4 GB RAM. For thousands of users, for example with Docker: 3 frontend servers, each having 2 CPU and 2 wekan-app containers. One backend wekan-db server with many CPUs.
  • Enough disk space and alerts about low disk space. If you run out of disk space, MongoDB database gets corrupted.
  • SECURITY: Updating to newest WeKan ® version very often. Please check you do not have automatic updates of Sandstorm or Snap turned off. Old versions have security issues because of old versions Node.js etc. Only newest WeKan ® is supported. WeKan ® on Sandstorm is not usually affected by any Standalone WeKan ® (Snap/Docker/Source) security issues.
  • Reporting all new bugs immediately. New features and fixes are added to WeKan ® many times a day.
  • Backups of WeKan ® database once a day minimum. Bugs, updates, users deleting list or card, harddrive full, harddrive crash etc can eat your data. There is no undo yet. Some bugs can cause WeKan ® board to not load at all, requiring manual fixing of database content.

Roadmap and Demo

Roadmap - Public read-only board at WeKan ® demo.

Developer Documentation

We also welcome sponsors for features and bugfixes. By working directly with WeKan ® you get the benefit of active maintenance and new features added by growing WeKan ® developer community.

Getting Started with Development

The main branch uses Meteor 3.5 with Node.js 24.x. See CHANGELOG.md for the latest runtime updates.

To contribute, create a fork and run ./build.sh (or ./build.bat on Windows) as detailed here. Once you're ready, please test your code and submit a pull request (PR).

Please refer to the developer documentation for more information.

First-Time Setup for Development

Prerequisites

Before building WeKan from source, ensure you have:

  • Git - for cloning the repository
  • Node.js 24.x - WeKan requires Node.js 24.x
  • Meteor - the JavaScript framework WeKan is built with

Building WeKan

The build.sh script shows a two-level menu. The top level groups options into categories:

1) Setup   2) Dev server   3) Tests   4) Docker   5) Tools   6) Quit

You pick a category number, then the item number inside it (each submenu also has a Back entry). Building from source is a three-stage process:

  1. Setup -> Install dependencies - Downloads all required Meteor packages and npm modules
  2. Setup -> Build WeKan - Compiles the application
  3. Dev server -> localhost:3000 - Starts the development server at http://localhost:3000
# Clone your fork
git clone [email protected]:YOUR_USERNAME/wekan.git
cd wekan

# Make the script executable
chmod +x build.sh

# Step 1: Install dependencies (Setup -> Install dependencies)
./build.sh
# Press 1 (Setup) and Enter, then 1 (Install dependencies) and Enter

# Step 2: Build WeKan (Setup -> Build WeKan, after dependencies complete)
./build.sh
# Press 1 (Setup) and Enter, then 2 (Build WeKan) and Enter

# Step 3: Run WeKan in development mode (Dev server -> localhost:3000)
./build.sh
# Press 2 (Dev server) and Enter, then 1 (localhost:3000) and Enter

If a dev server is already running on that port, the Dev server options stop it automatically and start a fresh server on the same port.

WSL Users

WSL users can use Snap Candidate. See install docs.

License

WeKan ® is released under the very permissive MIT license, and made with Meteor.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wekan free to use?

Wekan is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Wekan do?

Visual project management with complete data control

What is Wekan written in?

Wekan is primarily written in JavaScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/wekan/wekan, and it has 21,089 GitHub stars.

What is a good open source alternative to Jira?

Wekan is one of the open source options listed as an alternative to Jira, Monday.com. Compare licences, stars and activity side by side on the Wekan profile.