Vikunja

Every to-do app eventually forces a question most users never think to ask: who owns your list? With Todoist, Asana, or Microsoft To Do, the answer is someone else’s server, someone else’s pricing changes, and someone else’s decision to retire a feature you depend on. Vikunja’s answer is blunt. You own it.

Developed by Konrad Langenberg and released under the AGPLv3 license, Vikunja (named after the vicuña, the llama’s wild Andean cousin) is an open-source task and project manager built for self-hosting. It ships as a single binary or a Docker container and runs on SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL. That flexibility matters. A solo user can run it on a Raspberry Pi with SQLite in an afternoon. A small team can put it behind PostgreSQL and OpenID Connect single sign-on and treat it as real infrastructure.

Its market position is unusual. Vikunja isn’t trying to beat Todoist on polish or Asana on enterprise features. It targets a narrower and more opinionated audience: people who want a capable, multi-view project manager without a subscription or a third party holding their data. For those who don’t want to run a server, there’s Vikunja Cloud, a paid hosted version that keeps the software open while removing the operations work.

The feature list is long for a project of this size. You get nested projects, List, Kanban, Gantt, and Table views, saved filters across projects, CalDAV sync, a REST API, webhooks, and importers for Todoist, Trello, and Microsoft To Do. It isn’t a toy. Independent coverage is thin, though, and its AlternativeTo rating rests on a small number of reviews. Users praise its flexibility and its stance on data ownership, and they consistently flag two weak points: setup friction and mobile.

• Four Views, One Dataset: The same tasks appear as a List, a drag-and-drop Kanban board, a Gantt timeline, or a sortable Table. You switch perspectives, not tools.
• Quick Add Magic: A natural-language parser picks dates, labels, priorities, and target projects out of a single line of text as you type.
• Rich Task Model: Due, start, and end dates, repeat schedules, reminders, priorities, labels, assignees, subtasks, related tasks, attachments, comments, and a percent-done value.
• Saved Filters: Queries that pull tasks from many projects into one virtual project. This is the closest thing Vikunja has to a “Today” dashboard you build yourself.
• Flexible Sharing: Share projects with individual users, with teams, or through public links for people without an account.
• Open Plumbing: CalDAV sync, a full REST API, webhooks, and importers that lower the cost of leaving a commercial service.
• Deployment Freedom: Single binary or Docker, three database backends, and OIDC login for organizations with an existing identity provider.

The Capture Loop

A task manager succeeds or fails at the moment of capture. If adding a task takes more than a few seconds, people stop adding tasks, and the system decays into a graveyard of stale items. Vikunja’s Quick Add Magic is its main defense against that decay.

You type something like “Renew passport next friday *admin !4 +Personal” and the parser does the rest. It sets the date, attaches the label, assigns the priority, and files the task in the right project, all from one line. It also offers a Todoist-style syntax mode, which is a smart concession to the many users arriving from that app with years of muscle memory.

Recognized tokens are highlighted as you type, so you can see what the parser has picked up before you commit. Natural-language parsing is never perfect, and ambiguous date phrases can land on the wrong day. Still, the loop is designed so that capture stops being a chore. That matters more than any single feature in the rest of this review.

Projects, Views, and the Structure Problem

Vikunja organizes everything into projects, and projects can be nested. A “Work” parent can hold “Q4 Launch,” which can in turn hold “Marketing Assets.” This hierarchy scales from a grocery list to a modest team roadmap without forcing you into a different tool when complexity grows.

The view system is the real draw. Treating List, Kanban, Gantt, and Table as lenses on one dataset rather than separate features is the right design decision. A freelancer can plan a client project in Gantt, run the daily work on Kanban, and audit overdue items in Table, all without duplicating a single task. Trello can’t do this natively without add-ons, and Todoist’s board and timeline features are tied to paid plans.

The Gantt view is functional rather than sophisticated. It shows start and end dates on a timeline. Don’t expect critical-path analysis or resource leveling. Teams that need real project-management dependency tracking will outgrow it. Everyone else will find it does exactly enough.

The most conspicuous gap is a native calendar view. It’s one of the most frequently requested features, and its absence is felt by anyone who thinks in weeks rather than columns. The workaround is CalDAV: point your existing calendar app at Vikunja and let it render the dates. That works, but it means sending users to another app to fill a hole in this one.

Filters as Architecture

Saved filters are where Vikunja stops looking like a hobby project and starts looking like a serious tool. A filter can gather every task across all projects that is due this week, labeled “urgent,” and assigned to you, then present it as its own project with its own views.

This is how power users build real workflows: a “Today” list, a “Waiting On” list, a “Someday” list, all generated from queries rather than maintained by hand. It rewards the time you invest in labeling and dating your tasks. It also requires that investment. Out of the box, Vikunja has no opinion about how you should work. The GTD crowd will love that. People who want an app to tell them what to do next will find it austere.

Collaboration

Sharing is granular. You can share with individual users, with teams, or through public links. That last option is especially useful for showing a client a project board without making them create an account. Comments, assignees, and attachments cover the basics of team coordination.

Vikunja isn’t a replacement for Asana or Linear in a fifty-person organization. There are no portfolio views, no workload balancing, and no time tracking. For a household, a small agency, a research group, or an open-source team, the collaboration layer is adequate, and OIDC support means it can sit behind the identity provider your team already uses.

Self-Hosting: The Real Price

Vikunja is free, but your time is not. User reports consistently mention setup and command-line friction, and that’s fair criticism. Deploying the binary or Docker image is straightforward for anyone who has run a container before. Configuring reverse proxies, email for reminders, backups, and upgrades is ordinary sysadmin work that commercial apps hide from you. Users also report occasional bugs, which is unsurprising for a project of this scope maintained by a small team.

The importers for Todoist, Trello, and Microsoft To Do are a thoughtful touch. They lower the switching cost, which is the biggest barrier any challenger faces. Combined with the REST API and webhooks, Vikunja is one of the least locked-in task managers you can choose. Your data goes in easily and comes out easily.

Vikunja’s web interface is clean, modern, and restrained. It has a light and dark mode, sensible typography, and optional project background images that add some personality without clutter. It doesn’t have the obsessive finish of Things or the dense information design of Linear. Some screens, especially the more advanced filter and settings pages, feel built by engineers for engineers. Functional, but not delightful.

The design is light on hardware. The Go backend is built to run on modest machines, and a SQLite-backed instance for one person or a family needs very few resources. Self-hosted latency depends on your own infrastructure, which is both the appeal and the risk: a fast server on your local network should outpace many cloud apps, and an overloaded home server will not.

On Android, Vikunja’s story is improving but unfinished. The project once described its previous Android app as “alpha at best” and openly recommended the Progressive Web App instead. That kind of candor is rare and welcome, but it says a lot about how much mobile has been neglected. A rebuilt Android app is now available as a beta on Google Play, and the beta label should be taken seriously. Expect missing features and occasional instability compared with the web client.

The PWA remains a reasonable fallback. Install it from Chrome, and it lives on your home screen with an app-like shell. It inherits the strengths and limits of the web interface. List view and quick add are built for a touchscreen. Kanban drag-and-drop gets cramped on a phone, and the Gantt chart on a six-inch display is more a novelty than a tool. Treat your phone as a capture-and-check-off device and do your planning on a larger screen.

Power users have a third option: pairing Vikunja’s CalDAV endpoint with an Android sync adapter and a native task app. It takes more setup, but it can deliver a more polished mobile experience than either official route.

There is no official iOS app. A third-party client exists, but it explicitly calls itself unofficial. Mixed-platform households and teams should factor that in before committing.

Vikunja makes a clear trade, and it’s honest about it. You give up the polish of a commercial app, a first-class mobile experience, and freedom from maintenance. In return, you get data ownership, a deep feature set, and no subscription. For the right user, that is a defensible decision.

Its core is strong. Quick Add Magic makes capture fast, the multi-view model reflects real thought about how people work, and saved filters make it a genuine workflow engine rather than a checklist. Its weaknesses are just as clear: mobile is still catching up, a calendar view is missing, and self-hosting has a real learning curve.

If you are comfortable running a Docker container, or willing to pay for Vikunja Cloud, this is a solid open-source productivity tool we recommend to the right audience. If you live on your phone and want everything to just work, wait for the Android app to leave beta.