About KanbanCord

KanbanCord is a kanban board that lives in your Discord server. The idea is simple: your community already talks in Discord, so planning should happen there too. Create boards and columns, add tasks, move them along, assign people, set labels, priorities and due dates, and discuss them in comments, all with the bot's slash commands, without leaving the chat. Updates arrive in the channels you choose and, for your own tasks, by direct message.

Most people never need anything else. The website is there when you want the whole board at a glance, or to fine-tune things: detailed permissions per board and per person, the labels and priority levels a board offers, which features a server uses, exactly which updates you are told about, and the audit log of every change.

You can also open your boards inside Discord itself with the KanbanCord Activity: start it in a voice call to plan together on the same board, or on your own from any text channel. It does everything the website does, and Discord signs you in. See the Activity guide.

It follows your server's Discord roles and permissions from the start, so the right people see and change the right boards without setting anything up twice.

Only what you choose

New servers start in simple mode: boards, columns, and tasks with a title and a description. Assignees, due dates with reminders, priorities, labels, comments and custom permissions stay off until a server manager switches them on with /kanbancord features or in the server settings on the website. Features that are off are not shown anywhere, in Discord or on the website: only the ones you choose appear. Each board can switch features off again for itself, and everyone can hide more for themselves under Preferences → Simple view. Switching a feature off only hides it; nothing is deleted.

Made by one person

KanbanCord is built and run by Ryuji Ly. It is free, has no ads, and does not sell or track your data (see the Privacy Policy). Found a problem or have an idea? Use /report in Discord. Questions, or want to hear about new features? Join the support server. If you would like to help with its costs, see Support.

Find it on Discord

KanbanCord has its own page in Discord's App Directory, where you can add it to a server straight from Discord. Whether the website, the bot and everything behind them are running, and any planned maintenance, is on the status page.

Get started

1. Add the bot to your server.
2. Create a board with /board create, then add tasks with /task create.
3. Run /help to see everything the bot can do.

Questions? See the FAQ.

Translations

The translations of this website were produced with the help of generative AI. Should you notice an error or a wording that could be improved, we would be grateful if you let us know via /report in Discord or by email at [email protected].

How it came to be

KanbanCord started with a university group project in the 2024–2025 academic year. The course required us to use the university's own OpenProject installation, and in practice we only used its kanban board, plus the time logging the course asked for. It was a constant source of friction: it crashed every few minutes, and at its worst, the moment it came back up and you tried to do anything, it crashed again. It also kept logging us out. Apart from the time we spent on campus, our group already coordinated everything on Discord.

Half as a joke, I said I could build a better tool than this mess, and a few of my teammates told me to go for it. I already had plenty of experience building Discord bots with discord.js, so after a few weeks of thinking it over, and partly out of pure spite, I created a new application in the Discord Developer Portal while the project was still running. The idea was simple: a kanban board that lives where we were already talking. That is also why KanbanCord is a kanban tool first, not a complete project management suite: it does the part we actually needed, and does it where people already are.

As a student, I worked on it on and off, with plenty of procrastination in between. About a year into building it, I found out that another bot with the exact same name exists, made by j4asper. Our Discord applications were created just six days apart: theirs on 30 October 2024, mine on 5 November 2024. If you search for KanbanCord in Discord, you may well come across theirs; this website, and the bot you can add from it, are the ones made by Ryuji Ly.

By far the hardest part was the foundation: how boards, columns, tasks and permissions should fit together with Discord's own servers, roles and members. Getting the domain models right took a lot of experimenting and rebuilding: cutting away what wasn't needed and adding the tables and fields my vision called for, as I kept thinking of more the kanban tool could do. Honestly, that was about 80% of the work. Once the structure was settled, the rest came together surprisingly quickly: with a solid design in place, generative AI became genuinely helpful for building features, because it followed the existing structure and there were far fewer large mistakes to find and fix by hand.

The whole project is open source: the bot, the website and the API each have their own repository on GitHub.