Open-source shared board for teams and AI coding agents, with persistent project context.
Backplane is a self-hosted, open-source shared workspace where a team and its AI coding agents work from the same Kanban board. Tasks, project definitions, notes, decisions and shared skills live together so the next person — or agent — picks up work with full context. Any MCP client can read and update the board; runners can execute multi-step work under review.
| Pricing | Open Source |
|---|---|
| Category | Productivity |
| Platforms | web, linux |
| Company | valaris.studio |
| Official website | getbackplane.ai |
When choosing a productivity tool, look first at how it fits the way you already work. The best tools connect with the apps you use every day — email, calendar, documents and chat — instead of becoming one more place to check. Automation matters most where work repeats: summaries, reminders, scheduling and turning notes into tasks are where AI genuinely saves time. Check whether the free tier covers your real usage, how the tool handles your data and privacy, and whether it works on the platforms you live on — web, desktop and mobile. A slightly less powerful tool that your whole team actually adopts beats a feature-rich one nobody opens.
Backplane is a self-hosted, open-source shared workspace where a team and its AI coding agents work from the same Kanban board. Tasks, project definitions, notes, decisions and shared skills live together so the next person — or agent — picks up work with full context. Any MCP client can read and update the board; runners can execute multi-step work under review.
Backplane offers Shared Kanban board for humans and AI tools, Any compatible MCP client can read and update the board, Runners for multi-step work with rules, limits and review, Shared skills preserving how the team works, Self-hosted with Docker and your own PostgreSQL, No telemetry; data stays in your infrastructure, Board health, velocity and stale-work metrics and Role-based workflow prompts (initializer, architect, coder).
Backplane is open source, so the software itself is free to download, use and self-host. Your only costs are the infrastructure you run it on and any paid services you connect to it.
Strengths of Backplane include Free, self-hosted, AGPL core — your data stays yours; Solves the real problem of context lost between agent sessions; Bring your own agents with your own subscriptions. On the downside, Runners are experimental — review before autonomous deployment; Still in Open Source Preview; APIs may evolve.
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