Simple Kanban Board

About

About Simple Kanban Board

A free kanban board that opens ready to type, keeps your boards for as long as you want them, and lets you take them away as a file. It is an independent project, not a company, and there is no server behind it.

Why this exists

Free kanban boards on the web tend to have one of two problems. Either you have to create an account and confirm an email address before you are allowed to type a single card, or you can start immediately but the board is then trapped: there is no way to get it out as a picture, a document or a file, so it only exists for as long as that tab and that tool exist.

This site was built to fix the second problem as much as the first. Getting started without an account is table stakes. Being able to walk away with your board — as a PNG for a slide, a PDF for a client, a CSV for a spreadsheet, a JSON file you can import back later, Markdown for your notes, or a sheet of paper — is the part almost nothing else does.

The three things it commits to

  • It opens ready. The board is on the page when the page loads. The first thing you type is already saved. There is no sign-up, no email confirmation, no onboarding tour and no "create your first workspace" step.
  • Your board does not expire. There is no timer on it and no field anywhere that records when it should be thrown away. Come back in a year on the same browser and it is still there.
  • You can get it out. Six export formats — PNG, PDF, CSV, JSON, Markdown and a real print stylesheet — all generated in your browser, none of them requiring an upload.

How it is built

The site is static. Every page is plain HTML built ahead of time, served by Cloudflare Pages, with a small amount of JavaScript that runs the board itself. There is no backend, no API, no database and no account system — not as a feature that is coming later, but as the architecture.

Your boards are stored in your browser's local storage. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere, the typeface is served from this domain rather than fetched from a font service, and once a page has loaded it makes no further network requests. That is what makes the board keep working when your connection drops, and it is also why the privacy policy is mostly a list of things that do not happen.

What it deliberately does not do

Being honest about this is more useful than a feature list, because the limits follow directly from the design and are not going to quietly change:

  • No collaboration. No shared boards, no assignees, no comments, no mentions. Two people cannot look at the same board at the same time, because there is nothing in the middle for them to look at.
  • No sync between devices. A board made on your laptop is on your laptop. Exporting the JSON and importing it elsewhere is the manual version, and it works, but it is manual.
  • No accounts, so no recovery. If your browser storage is cleared, the board is gone and nobody can restore it. That trade-off is spelled out in the terms, and the export file is the answer to it.
  • No notifications, no integrations, no mobile app. The site works on a phone browser, but nothing pings you, and nothing connects to your calendar or your issue tracker.

If you need any of those, you need a tool with a server, and there are good ones. If you need a board in the next four seconds that will still be there next month and that you can hand to someone as a PDF, this is built for exactly that.

Who makes it

Simple Kanban Board is an independent one-person project. There is no company behind it, no investors and no team, which is also why it can afford to have no server: a site with no backend costs almost nothing to run, so there is no pressure to put your work behind a login and charge you to get it back.

Getting in touch

Bug reports, corrections and template suggestions are all welcome at hello@simplekanbanboard.com. The contact page says what is worth including so a bug can actually be reproduced.

Where to go next