A free Trello alternative with no account, kept on your own device

Tasks is a board app in the free Workspace: boards of lists, cards with descriptions, labels, start and due dates, checklists, attachments, custom fields and covers, and Board, Table, Calendar and Timeline views. Rules and buttons act on cards the way Trello's automation does. A board exported from Trello as JSON opens here with its lists, cards, labels, checklists, custom fields and comments. There is no account and nothing is uploaded; the boards live in this browser on this device. What it does not do is share a board with other people, or sync between your devices.

What Trello is good at

Trello, from Atlassian, is a hosted service: your boards are kept in its cloud, you sign in to reach them, and anyone you invite sees the same board change as you work on it. That last part is the real reason teams use it, along with the apps on every platform, the integrations with other services, and a free plan that covers a lot. For a team working on one board together, that is hard to do without a server, and this page does not claim otherwise.

Plenty of boards are not like that. A personal to-do list, a job search, a house move, the plan for a thesis, a freelancer's clients: one person, one board, and no reason for the contents to live on somebody else's computer under an account that can be locked, priced up or breached.

What happens here instead

The board is a web page that keeps its data in the browser's own database on your device. There is no sign-up, no server holding your cards, and nothing to switch off when you stop using it. It opens and works with the network off once loaded, can be installed as an app from the browser, and works with a finger on a phone as well as a mouse. The catch is the same one every local app has: another device, or another browser, does not see the board unless you move it there, and clearing the site's data clears the board, so export what you cannot lose.

Trello's features, and which of them are here

Bringing a board across

In Trello, a board's menu offers a JSON export of the whole board. Open Tasks, choose to import, and pick that file. It becomes a new board here with its lists in order, its cards and their descriptions, dates and reminders, its labels in the same colours, its checklists, its custom fields and their values, and the comments written on each card. Attachments stored on Trello's servers come in as links, because the files themselves are not in the export. Importing the same file twice gives two boards rather than tangling one with the other.

Going the other way is just as plain: a board exports as JSON that opens here again, as a CSV that any spreadsheet reads, and its dated cards as an .ics file that Calendar or any other calendar program opens. Open cards with a due date also appear in Calendar on their days.

What is not here

• Working on a board together. This is the big one. There is no invitation, no shared board and no live update when somebody else moves a card. If that is why you use Trello, keep using it.
• Sync. A board lives in one browser on one device. Moving it is an export and an import.
• Integrations. No Power-Ups, no connection to other services, no email-to-board address.
• Reminders with the browser closed. A reminder fires from an open tab of this site. One that came due while every tab was shut is shown as missed the next time the page opens, rather than pretending it is on time.

What it costs

Nothing. Tasks is part of the Workspace, and the Workspace is free for everyone with no account: every feature on this page, saving and exporting included. OBSCURA Pro is for the site's single-purpose tools, and a board never needs it.

Make a board, or bring one. Open Tasks and start a board, or import the JSON export of a Trello board and carry on from where it was.