Kanban Boards for AI Coding Agents: The 2026 Landscape
Search for a kanban board for Claude Code or Codex CLI and you get a list of a dozen tools that look interchangeable and are not. They differ on one question that decides everything else: where does the project state actually live?
There are three answers, and they define three categories of tool.
- Session boards observe. They read the agent's own session files and render them as columns. You do not author the tasks. The board is a view of work that already started somewhere else.
- Orchestrators dispatch. You queue a task, the tool spawns an agent to execute it, usually in an isolated git worktree, and manages the branch and review loop around it.
- Durable ticket boards own the state. The board is a project manager whose data layer is files on your disk. Agents read and write those files directly, so the ticket outlives every session that touched it.
Most confusion in this space comes from comparing a tool in one category against a tool in another. A session board cannot plan work you have not started. An orchestrator's queue is not a project history. Pick the category first.
The three categories, compared
Facts below are each project's own description of itself, checked on 11 August 2026. Details change quickly in this category, so verify against the project before you commit to it.
Session boards: visualise agents you already run
| Tool | Its own description | Where state lives | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claudine | A VS Code extension that "reads Claude Code and Codex session files and renders them as a kanban board", detecting task status automatically | The agent CLI's own session files on your machine | Free, open source, VS Code Marketplace |
| Nimbalyst | "A cross-platform workspace app (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS) where the kanban board is the primary interface for all agent session management" | Agent session data on your machine | Free for individuals, open source under MIT |
Reach for these when you already run agents in a terminal and the only thing you lack is visibility. They add a lens, not a plan.
Orchestrators: queue a task, an agent executes it
| Tool | Its own description | Where state lives | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe Kanban | Plan, prompt and review across multiple coding agents. The site now states: "Vibe Kanban is sunsetting. The project will continue as open source and community maintained." | The tool's own store | Open source, community maintained |
| kanbots | "A kanban board that runs 11 agent CLIs in parallel", covering Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, Amp, OpenCode, Droid, CCR, Qwen and any ACP-compatible CLI | Local SQLite in a .kanbots/ directory, with optional GitHub Issues sync | Open source, MIT |
| agent-kanban (saltbo) | "An agent-first task board" where agents authenticate with Ed25519 cryptographic identities through a central API and a daemon spawns workers in separate worktrees | SQLite via Cloudflare D1 | Source available under FSL-1.1-ALv2, self-hosting permitted |
Reach for these when the bottleneck is throughput: many tasks, many parallel agents, and a branch per task. Note that the best known name in this category is sunsetting, so check maintenance status before you build a workflow on one.
Durable ticket boards: the project outlives the session
| Tool | Its own description | Where state lives | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kanban Pro | A local-first kanban app where every ticket is a Markdown file on your disk and every ticket can host an embedded terminal running the real agent CLI | Plain Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, in a folder you choose | US$0.00, no account |
| Tokanban | "A Kanban board designed for AI coding agents to create, update, and move tasks programmatically while humans review", with agents connecting over MCP tools, a REST API, or a CLI | Cloud hosted, sign-up required | Hosted service |
Both treat the board as the authoritative record rather than a dashboard. They differ on custody: one keeps the record in files you own, the other in a vendor's database behind an API.
Where Kanban Pro fits, and where it does not
Kanban Pro is a durable ticket board. Being precise about that is more useful than claiming to be everything:
- It is not an orchestrator. It does not dispatch agents on your behalf, does not create git worktrees, and does not manage a pull request queue. If you want a fleet dispatcher, an orchestrator is the right category.
- It is not a session viewer. It does not scrape your existing CLI history into columns. Work appears on the board because a ticket exists for it.
- It is a project manager whose file format is the agent's API. Every ticket is one Markdown file with YAML frontmatter. An agent moves a ticket by editing one field. No integration, no MCP server, and no API key are required for an agent to participate, only filesystem access.
The concrete mechanics:
- Embedded per-ticket terminals run the genuine CLI natively. Typing
claude,codex,cursor-agent,aider,amp,opencode,agyorgooselaunches that actual binary. Kanban Pro never wraps, proxies or simulates an agent. - Sessions are auto-briefed. Opening a terminal on a ticket generates a
KP-CONTEXT.mdfile, plus a machine-readable JSON twin, carrying the active ticket, neighbouring tickets, the board's columns, the project's rules files verbatim, the team graph slice, and an identity envelope of environment variables. - Sessions persist and resume. Every ticket-scoped session is stored on disk under
.kanban/sessions/, so a crash or a closed window does not end the work. - Attribution is auditable. Every edit carries
modifiedandmodifiedByin the ticket's frontmatter, and the Activity Feed separates agent changes from human ones. - One file per ticket makes concurrent agents safe. Two agents working two different tickets touch two different files, so there is nothing to merge.
- Six views over the same data: Board, List, Table, Calendar, Notes and Gantt.
Platforms and price: macOS 12 or later on Apple Silicon (M1 to M5) and Intel, signed and notarised with an Apple Developer ID; Windows 10 build 1809 or later and Windows 11; Linux as an AppImage on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, community tested rather than formally supported. Kanban Pro costs US$0.00 with no subscription, no purchase, no trial expiry and no sign-up. It has passed 4,100 downloads, and its launch post was the number one post on r/MacApps in July 2026. Full detail is on the pricing page.
How to choose in one pass
- You already run agents in a terminal and just want to see them. Take a session board. Claudine if you live in VS Code, Nimbalyst if you want a standalone app.
- You have a queue of well-specified tasks and want agents working them in parallel on their own branches. Take an orchestrator. Check maintenance status first.
- You want the ticket to be the durable unit, readable by any agent and any human, still there in six months. Take a durable ticket board. Choose files on your disk if custody matters, a hosted API if it does not.
- Your team is humans and agents on one board. Ask how a human edits a ticket when the tool is offline. A Markdown file answers that; a proprietary database does not.
- You care about lock-in. Ask what happens to your project when the tool shuts down. This is not hypothetical in this category: the most widely cited orchestrator of 2026 announced its own sunset. Plain files survive their editor.
The pattern underneath
The reason plain files keep winning for agent work is not aesthetic. An agent's context window is small and its memory is short, so the durable record has to live outside the model. A Markdown ticket with a checklist, a link graph and an activity log is a memory layer that is human-inspectable, diffable, version-controllable and readable by any model with filesystem access, with no vector database and no embedding pipeline in between. The argument in full is in The Agent Memory Layer, and the mechanics of running agents from tickets are in Run Claude Code from Kanban Tickets.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best kanban board for Claude Code?
It depends which of three jobs you need. To visualise Claude Code sessions you already run, a session board such as Claudine or Nimbalyst reads the CLI's own session files. To queue tasks and have agents execute them in parallel worktrees, an orchestrator such as kanbots fits. To make the ticket the durable record that agents read and write directly, a durable ticket board such as Kanban Pro stores each ticket as a Markdown file on your disk and can launch the real Claude Code CLI in an embedded terminal on that ticket.
What is the difference between an agent orchestrator and an agent task board?
An orchestrator dispatches work: you queue a task and it spawns an agent, usually in an isolated git worktree, then manages the branch and review loop. A task board records work: the ticket is the authoritative unit and agents read and update it. Orchestrators optimise throughput across many parallel runs. Task boards optimise durability and shared understanding across sessions, agents and people.
Is Vibe Kanban still maintained?
Vibe Kanban's own site states that it is sunsetting and that the project will continue as open source and community maintained. If you are choosing a tool now, check the current maintenance status rather than assuming the hosted service is running.
Do AI agents need an MCP server or an API to use a kanban board?
Not always. Boards that store state in a database expose it through MCP, a REST API or a CLI, so the agent needs that integration and its credentials. Boards that store state as files on disk need nothing beyond filesystem access, which every mainstream coding agent already has. Kanban Pro takes the second approach: the file format is the interface.
Can multiple AI agents work the same board at once?
Yes, if the storage layout allows it. The safety of concurrent writes depends on granularity. A board stored as one file per ticket lets agents work different tickets simultaneously with nothing to merge, whereas a board stored as a single file for the whole project invites conflicts as soon as two agents write at once.
Is there a free kanban board for AI coding agents?
Yes, several. Claudine is free and open source, Nimbalyst is free for individuals under MIT, kanbots is MIT licensed, and Kanban Pro costs US$0.00 with no subscription, no purchase, no trial expiry and no account. Hosted options generally require a sign-up and a plan.
Which agent CLIs can run inside a kanban board?
Coverage varies by tool. kanbots states that it runs 11 agent CLIs in parallel, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, Amp, OpenCode, Droid, CCR, Qwen and any ACP-compatible CLI. Kanban Pro's embedded terminal recognises Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor Agent, aider, Amp, OpenCode, Antigravity and Goose out of the box, and because it is a real shell, any CLI you can install you can run.