Focalboard has no limits and no maintainer

Focalboard scores 55, the bottom of our Usable band, and it is the only tool on this page where the score has almost nothing to do with pricing. Generosity sits at 70 because nothing is metered and there is no paid tier to be upsold to. Freedom is 62, which looks low for a project with MIT-licensed builds, AGPL-3.0 source and no account required, and the reason is deliberate: free forever means less when nobody is fixing anything.

Feature depth at 34 is the lowest number in this category. Boards with cards, custom properties, filters, and table or calendar views is a competent Trello-style tool and a short list against free tiers that include sprints, backlogs or Gantt charts. With no active maintainer, that list is also final, where Plane and Vikunja are still shipping. The score is judging a frozen product, not a cheap one.

There is genuinely nothing to report on quotas. No user limit, no board limit, no storage tier, no branding, no card, no upgrade path. On the usual axes this page measures, Focalboard is the freest thing in project management.

The limits are elsewhere, and they are the ones that matter:

• No active maintainer. Mattermost moved the standalone project to community ownership in August 2024, and there has been no release since June 2024 (as of July 2026).
• Security fixes arrive slowly or not at all. That is a real string attached to team data you expect to still have next year.
• No feature roadmap, so the current feature set is the permanent one.

What that permanent set covers: boards, cards, custom properties, filters, and table or calendar views. What it does not: automations, timeline views, native integrations of any consequence, and a mobile experience worth relying on.

You also run it. The desktop app is the easy route and needs nothing from you beyond installing it; the server route is self-hosting with the usual backup and uptime work, on software nobody upstream is patching.

Nothing renders under this section for a reason. Focalboard has no plans, no paid tier, no hosted service and no company selling it. Compiled builds ship under MIT, the source is available under AGPL-3.0 with parts under Apache-2.0, and that is the whole commercial picture.

For a site about free software that reads like the ideal outcome, and in one narrow sense it is. There is no counter, no seat maths and no upgrade prompt, ever. Read it the other way, though, and the absence of a business model is precisely why the project stopped moving. Mattermost had no revenue reason to keep the standalone app alive, so it did not.

The practical consequence is that there is no support to buy either. If something breaks, your options are the community, the source code, or a different tool. Budget accordingly, particularly if the boards would hold anything you would be upset to lose.

Yes, without qualification, and we are departing upward from what a score of 55 usually signals because the score is measuring an abandoned roadmap rather than a paywall. Nothing counts, nothing expires and nothing costs money, now or later. The honest answer to "is Focalboard free" is the shortest one on this site.

The question worth asking instead is whether you should use it. For a personal board on your own machine, offline, with no expectation of new features, it works and it is pleasant enough. For a team storing work you expect to keep past this year, we would not, and neither would we recommend it in our alternative lists, because software nobody patches is a risk that grows every month.

If the appeal was self-hosted boards with no seat cap, free Focalboard alternatives points at the maintained options, and Vikunja's free plan is the closest active equivalent for a small self-hosted setup. For the full ranking, see best free project management tools.