Focalboard

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 741 words

Focalboard is still the cleanest self-hosted Trello board I have used, and I would not start a new team on it. Both statements are true at once. Mattermost built it, shipped it as a standalone "personal server" from 2021, then stepped back from the standalone editions and handed the project to community maintenance; commits since have been sparse. The Docker image works, it is light, it is MIT-licensed, and the 26,429 stars are real. What you are choosing is a finished product rather than a living one.

The standalone server is the version worth talking about

There are two Focalboards. One is the Boards feature inside Mattermost, which is where most active development went and which Mattermost later moved out of its core into a plugin. The other is the standalone personal server, image mattermost/focalboard, listening on port 8000, storing everything in a single SQLite file by default with Postgres as an option. If you already run Mattermost, use its plugin and ignore the rest of this page. If you do not, the standalone server is what "self-host Focalboard" means, and it is genuinely a one-liner:

services:
  focalboard:
    image: mattermost/focalboard
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./fb-data:/opt/focalboard/data
    restart: unless-stopped

Put a reverse proxy with TLS in front of it because the login form is plain HTTP otherwise, register the first user, and you have kanban, table, gallery, and calendar views of the same cards within minutes. The catalogue's 512 MB minimum is generous; idle it uses a fraction of that.

What it does better than the alternatives

The card model is Notion-flavoured rather than Trello-flavoured: every board has typed properties (select, date, person, checkbox, number), and the views are just filters and groupings over those properties. That means the same set of cards can be a kanban grouped by status for stand-up and a table sorted by due date for planning, with no duplication. Templates for sprints, content calendars, and personal to-do lists come built in. Compared with Planka, which is a more literal Trello clone with lists and cards, Focalboard is the one that scales from a shopping list to a light project database without you fighting it.

What "development has slowed" costs you in practice

Three things. First, integrations: there is a REST API and webhooks are thin, so automation through something like n8n means polling. Second, notifications are basic and email digests depend on the Mattermost side that the standalone build does not have. Third, and the one that matters, dependency updates. A TypeScript front end and a Go back end that receive infrequent releases accumulate CVEs in their dependencies, and an internet-facing board is exactly the kind of low-priority service that gets forgotten. Keep it on a private network or behind an identity-aware proxy such as Authentik, and the risk is small. Expose it raw to the internet and you are running unmaintained software on a public port.

Data export is your escape hatch, and it works

Boards export to a .boardarchive file from the menu, which is a zip of JSON plus attachments, and the same format imports into Mattermost Boards. There are also official importers from Trello, Asana, Notion, Jira, and Todoist in the repository. So the migration path is symmetrical: you can leave Trello for Focalboard today, and if the project stalls further you can leave Focalboard for something else with your cards and properties intact. That is more than the Trello switching guide can say for most of the tools it covers. Take an export with your backups; the SQLite file is the other thing to copy and it lives in the data volume above.

What I'd do

Personal boards, a family, a two-person side project: run Focalboard, enjoy the property-based views, back up the data directory nightly, and keep it off the public internet. It is the most pleasant tool in self-hosted project management at this size, and its slow development barely matters for a tool that already does what you need. A team that will still be growing in two years: start on Planka if you want Trello, or on Vikunja if you want tasks with a calendar and a mobile-friendly interface, because you want a project whose next release is a matter of when rather than whether.