Restyaboard

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 795 words

Restyaboard has the most faithful Trello import of any self-hosted kanban board and the slowest release cadence of any board still worth listing. Both facts matter equally. If you have 40 Trello boards with attachments, checklists, comments and labels, and you need them on your own server by Friday with the least retraining, Restyaboard will take the JSON export and give people something that looks and behaves like what they left. If you are starting fresh with a small team, Planka is the safer pick and I would not argue about it.

Why it still gets chosen

The project dates from 2014 and was built to be Trello for people who could not put work on Trello: agencies with client data, public bodies, companies with a "nothing leaves the building" rule. That shows in the feature list. Boards, lists, cards, labels, due dates, attachments, checklists, card comments with @mentions, activity feeds, board templates, per-board and per-organisation permissions, an admin panel with user management, and an app store of add-ons that covers Gantt views, time tracking, chat and card ageing. Most self-hosted boards give you kanban; Restyaboard gives you the whole Trello surface, including the parts most teams never touch.

The Trello import is the headline. It reads the board export, keeps lists, cards, descriptions, labels, checklists and comments, and maps members by email. Attachments come across when the export includes reachable URLs. Compared with re-creating boards by hand, it is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight.

The stack behind the interface

The front end is an AngularJS single-page app, which is why the catalogue lists it as JavaScript, and the API behind it runs on nginx, PHP-FPM and PostgreSQL. That combination is why the recommended install is the official Docker image rather than the shell installer: the installer expects a specific Debian or CentOS release and a system PostgreSQL, and diverging from either is where most failed installs start. The image bundles nginx and PHP; you supply the database.

services:
  restyaboard:
    image: restyaplatform/restyaboard:latest
    ports:
      - "1234:80"
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_HOST=db
      - POSTGRES_PORT=5432
      - POSTGRES_USER=restya
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=change-me
      - POSTGRES_DB=restyaboard
    volumes:
      - ./media:/usr/share/nginx/html/media
    depends_on:
      - db
  db:
    image: postgres:15
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=restya
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=change-me
      - POSTGRES_DB=restyaboard
    volumes:
      - ./pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Budget 512 MB of RAM for the pair, more with the Gantt and chat apps enabled. The first login uses the default administrator account; change that password before anything else, then close public registration under settings if the board is reachable from the internet. Mail needs an SMTP server configured in the admin panel or nobody gets notifications, invitations or password resets.

The licence and the cadence are the two things to read first

Restyaboard is released under OSL-3.0, an OSI-approved copyleft licence with a network clause similar in spirit to the AGPL. For running an internal board it changes nothing. For anyone planning to modify it and offer it to outsiders, read the licence, because the obligations are stricter than the MIT or Apache terms of most rivals, and the same company sells a commercial edition.

The cadence is the bigger operational risk. Releases arrive slowly, the interface has not had a redesign in years, and the dependency chain (AngularJS reached end of life in 2021) is not the sort of thing you want exposed to the public internet without a reverse proxy and an authentication layer in front. Put it behind a VPN or an identity-aware proxy and it is fine. Treat it as a maintained SaaS-grade product and it is not.

What Planka, Wekan and Kanboard do better

Wekan has a similar age and a similar Trello-shaped feature list, but ships releases far more often and runs on MongoDB. Planka is the modern option: a two-container compose, real-time updates, OIDC login, a clean interface, and its own Trello importer that is good enough for most boards. Kanboard is the minimalist: plain PHP, SQLite by default, a plugin system, and the fastest interface of the four on a slow server. None of them match Restyaboard's add-on catalogue, and none of them need it.

What I'd do

For a team leaving Trello with a handful of boards, Planka, imported this week, done. For an organisation with dozens of dense boards, a requirement for Gantt or time tracking inside the board tool, and a tolerance for a dated interface, Restyaboard from the Docker image, behind a VPN, with a nightly pg_dump and the media directory in the backup set. Either way, keep the Trello export file; it is the one artefact that moves between all of these tools.