Mattermost's board tool, now on its own
Focalboard is an open source board tool in the Trello and Notion-database mold: boards with cards, custom properties, filters, and table or calendar views. It began at Mattermost as a companion to their chat platform and is available as a personal desktop app or a self-hosted server.
Personal boards, and Mattermost users already in Boards
- Individuals who want a private, offline-capable board on their own machine
- Mattermost users who already run the Boards plugin
- Simple team boards where a frozen feature set is acceptable
Zero price, and the licenses behind it
Focalboard is open source and free. Compiled builds ship under an MIT license; the source is available under AGPL-3.0 (with parts under Apache-2.0). There is no hosted service and nothing to pay; you run the desktop app or host the server yourself.
No maintainer since 2024 is the limit that matters
- Mattermost moved Focalboard to community ownership in August 2024 and, as of July 2026, the standalone project has no active maintainer and no feature roadmap
- Releases and security fixes arrive slowly, if at all; evaluate that risk before storing team data in it
- No automations, timeline view, or native integrations to speak of
- The mobile experience is limited
Half a recommendation, and why we stop there
We can only half-recommend Focalboard: it works, it is genuinely free, and it may suit a personal board. For a team tool you expect to still improve next year, choose Plane or Vikunja, which are actively developed.
Reader reviews
What people who actually use Focalboard think of it.
No reviews of Focalboard yet. If you have used it, yours would be the first.
The useful part is the specifics: what you used it for, and where it got in your way.
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