Open source alternatives to Ping

By GitHub stars it is Vikunja, with 6,042 stars and a commit on 14 Nov. Choose Vikunja when you want private lists and shared Kanban boards without a team size cap, hosted wherever you choose. Next come Kan (5,982 stars) and Kanri (2,088 stars).

Yes. The code of all 4 is public under AGPL 3.0, GPL 3.0 or later or MIT, so you can use them with no licence fee. Running one yourself costs the server and your time to look after it, and some makers also sell a hosted plan.

Start from the job you use Ping for. Choose Kan when you want shared Kanban boards on your own server, with Trello import and an MCP server for AI clients. Choose Kanba when you want simple shared Kanban boards you deploy yourself and can white-label, with the full source code.

All 4: Vikunja, Kan, Kanri and Kanba. Each tool's page says what it needs to run.

3 of the 4 we track had a commit in the last 30 days, among them Vikunja, Kan and Kanri. The quietest is Kanba, last changed on 8 Aug. A recent commit shows the project is kept up, not that it will stay that way.

AGPL 3.0 (2), GPL 3.0 or later (1), MIT (1). MIT, BSD and Apache let you change and reuse the code freely. GPL and AGPL ask you to share your changes under the same licence when you give the software to others, and AGPL also counts letting people use it over a network.

The hosting. Ping's maker runs the servers for you; with an open source tool the updates, backups, security fixes and support are yours, unless you take the maker's hosted plan. Features differ too, so check what each one imports and exports before you move your data.