Best Kanban Board for Claude Code and Codex CLI: 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.
Which boards support both Claude Code and Codex CLI
Most people arrive at this question because they run both. Fewer tools do than the marketing suggests: several of the best known boards are single-CLI. Support below is each project's own stated support, checked on 1 and 2 September 2026.
| Tool | Claude Code | Codex CLI | Other CLIs stated | Platforms | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kanban Pro | Yes | Yes | Cursor Agent, aider, Amp, OpenCode, Antigravity, Goose | macOS, Windows, Linux | Durable ticket board |
| Nimbalyst | Yes | Yes | Not stated | macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS | Session board |
| Claudine | Yes | Yes | Not stated | VS Code | Session board |
| Vibe Kanban | Yes | Yes | OpenCode and others | Desktop, open source | Orchestrator |
| kanbots | Yes | Yes | Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, Amp, OpenCode, Droid, CCR, Qwen, any ACP-compatible CLI | Desktop, open source | Orchestrator |
| Conductor | Yes | Yes | Cursor | macOS only | Orchestrator |
| Kanban Code | Yes | No | None, Claude Code only | macOS, Windows | Session board |
| Signboard | Any agent that can call its MCP server or CLI | Same | Same | macOS, Windows, Linux | Durable ticket board |
| Imdone | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated | Desktop, VS Code, Obsidian, CLI | Durable ticket board |
| VS Code Agent Kanban | No | No | GitHub Copilot only | VS Code | Durable ticket board |
| Tokanban | Any agent that can call MCP, REST or its CLI | Same | Same | Hosted web | Durable ticket board |
If you run both CLIs, that table is the first filter. The second filter, and the one that matters in six months, is where the board keeps your project state.
The three categories, compared
Facts below are each project's own description of itself, checked on 11 August 2026, rechecked on 1 September 2026, with Signboard and Imdone added on 2 September 2026. Details change quickly in this category, so verify against the project before you commit to it. Two tools that appear in other roundups, CodeAgentSwarm and agent-kanban.io, are left out because their own sites would not serve us a page to quote on either date, and we will not describe a product from someone else's summary of 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". Its own site states "Claude Code and Codex sessions live on the same kanban board with the same phases, tags, and worktree isolation" | Agent session data on your machine | "Free for individuals", open source |
| Kanban Code | "A beautiful kanban board for managing Claude Code sessions", linking each card to its Claude session, git worktree, tmux terminals and GitHub pull request | Sessions discovered from ~/.claude/projects/; its own settings and card links in ~/.kanban-code/ | "Apache 2.0, Kanban Code is free software" |
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. Note the platform and CLI limits: Kanban Code is Claude Code only, so it is the wrong choice if half your work runs in Codex.
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 |
| Conductor | "Run parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in isolated workspaces" on your own machine, then "review and merge their changes" | Not stated on its site | Not stated on its site; Mac only |
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 |
| Signboard | "A local-first productivity app with Kanban, Table, and Planner views that writes Markdown files". It ships an MCP server so "agents read, plan, and update local boards through structured tools", plus a CLI for "scripts, imports, and automation" | "Each card in Signboard is a Markdown file in a folder on your computer" | MIT licensed, "Free for personal use", "Commercial use $49" one-time |
| Imdone | "Keep Your Plan Next to Your Code". "Requirements, tasks, and decisions live in markdown files right in your repo", and it also finds "TODO, FIXME, and HACK comments in your code" | Markdown files inside your own git repository | Not stated on its product page |
| 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 |
| VS Code Agent Kanban | A VS Code extension keeping "persistent, markdown-based task records" on a plan, todo, implement workflow. It states plainly that it "doesn't bundle its own agent harness" and drives GitHub Copilot's agent mode instead | Markdown files with YAML frontmatter in .agentkanban/tasks/; "the entire .agentkanban/ folder is designed to be committed to version control" | Open source on GitHub, licence not stated on its product page |
All five treat the board as the authoritative record rather than a dashboard. They differ on custody: four keep the record in files you own, one in a vendor's database behind an API. Signboard and Imdone are worth knowing about precisely because they are close to Kanban Pro on the thing that matters most in this category. Signboard also makes one card one Markdown file on your own disk, and Imdone puts the same records inside your git repo next to the code they describe. This is the clearest evidence that the file-as-ticket model is a recognised category rather than one vendor's idea. VS Code Agent Kanban says the same thing from a third direction, though it is scoped to one editor and one agent, so it does not help a Claude Code or Codex user.
Within the file-based group, the real split is how an agent reaches the board. Signboard and Tokanban expose the board to an agent that runs elsewhere, through an MCP server, a CLI or an API. Kanban Pro inverts that: the agent runs inside the ticket, in an embedded terminal, so there is no server to connect and no tool schema to learn. Both are legitimate designs. Which one you want depends on whether you would rather your agent call the board, or work inside it.
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.
- It is not open source, and it is not the only file-based board. Signboard is MIT licensed and also stores each card as a Markdown file on your own disk. If an open source licence is a hard requirement, that is the closest equivalent and you should look at it. What Kanban Pro commits to instead is an open format: plain Markdown and YAML in a folder you chose, with no database and no proprietary container, so your project stays readable by any editor and any agent whatever happens to the app. It is also free for commercial use, with no sponsorship tier.
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. Among the file-based ones, decide whether you want the agent to call the board through an MCP server or CLI, which is Signboard's model, or to run inside the ticket itself, which is Kanban Pro's. If you want the plan to live in the repo beside the code, Imdone does that specifically.
- 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. If you also run Codex CLI, the field narrows: Kanban Code and VS Code Agent Kanban are single-agent tools, so check CLI coverage before the feature list.
Which kanban boards support both Claude Code and Codex CLI?
By each project's own stated support, checked on 1 and 2 September 2026: Kanban Pro, Nimbalyst, Claudine, Vibe Kanban, kanbots and Conductor all cover both CLIs. Two widely recommended boards do not. Kanban Code is Claude Code only, and VS Code Agent Kanban drives GitHub Copilot only. Of the boards covering both, Conductor is macOS only, while Kanban Pro and Nimbalyst run on macOS, Windows and Linux. A third group is agent-agnostic rather than agent-integrated: Signboard and Imdone name no CLI at all, because they store cards as Markdown files and leave it to whatever agent you point at the folder. That covers both CLIs in practice, but check it yourself rather than reading it as a stated feature.
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, and the agent runs inside the ticket in an embedded terminal. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Signboard stores cards as Markdown files and additionally ships an MCP server, so an agent can either edit the files directly or call structured tools. The practical question is not whether MCP exists but whether the board still works when the integration does not.
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 states it is free for individuals, Kanban Code is Apache 2.0, kanbots is MIT licensed, Signboard is MIT licensed and states it is free for personal use with a $49 one-time sponsorship for commercial use, and Kanban Pro costs US$0.00 with no subscription, no purchase, no trial expiry and no account, commercial use included. 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.