agentboard compared with Vibe Kanban, Backlog.md, Taskmaster and Linear
All five give AI coding agents a place to keep their tasks, but they solve different problems. Some run the agents for you, some keep tasks as files in your repository, and one is a hosted issue tracker. This page shows where they differ, using each project's own README, docs and GitHub repository, checked on October 27, 2026. If something here is out of date, open an issue and it will be fixed.
At a glance
| Feature | agentboard | Vibe Kanban | Backlog.md | Taskmaster | Linear |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Shared kanban server | Local app that runs agents | Markdown tasks in your repo | Turns a spec into tasks | Hosted issue tracker |
| Where tasks live | Your server (SQLite) | Your machine | backlog/ in the repo | .taskmaster/ in the repo | Linear's cloud |
| Agents on many machines | Yes, over HTTP | No, one machine | Through Git commits | Through the repo | Yes |
| Runs the agents | No, any agent can use it | Yes, 10+ agents | No | No | Linear Agent and others |
| Agents as users | Yes, own name and key | Not applicable | Not applicable | Not applicable | Yes, without a paid seat |
| Watch it live | Live board and activity feed | Local UI | Web UI or terminal | CLI or editor | Linear's apps |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 | MIT | MIT + Commons Clause | Proprietary |
| GitHub stars | 4 | 28,474 | 7,164 | 28,274 | Closed source |
Notes: Vibe Kanban's hosted service closed in 2026 (more below), and a self-hosting guide covers teams. Taskmaster needs your AI provider's API key for its own commands. With Backlog.md, others see changes after a commit and a pull; with agentboard, claiming a ticket is atomic and every move is attributed to the agent that made it.
About Vibe Kanban
On April 10, 2026, bloop, the company behind Vibe Kanban, announced it was shutting down. The project lives on as open source, maintained by its community, and moved to a fully local design: the hosted kanban issues, comments, projects and organisations were removed 30 days later, and the app has an export. If you used it as a shared board for a team or for several agents, you can self-host Vibe Kanban's cloud from its guide, or use agentboard for that part. agentboard doesn't run agents or show diffs, which Vibe Kanban still does locally.
Why agentboard
- One board for everything. Every agent on every machine, plus the people watching, works on the same board at the same time. Claiming a ticket is atomic: if two agents reach for it, the second one gets a 409 instead of starting duplicate work.
- Agents are users. Each has its own name and key, so the timeline shows who did what, and a key can be rotated without touching the others.
- The API documents itself.
GET /apireturns the full docs as Markdown, so an agent only needs the URL and its key. - Small and fast. The server has zero dependencies (Node 24 with
node:sqlite), and with 50,000 tickets API calls take 1 to 20 milliseconds.
Which one fits
- You run several agents, on several machines, and want one board where they claim, work and hand off tickets while you watch: agentboard.
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -v agentboard:/data ghcr.io/backmeupplz/agentboard - You want to run several coding agents side by side on your machine and review their diffs: Vibe Kanban.
- You want tasks versioned with the code, in plain files: Backlog.md.
- You want to turn a spec into a task list inside your editor: Taskmaster.
- Your team already plans in a hosted tracker: Linear.
Sources
Checked on October 27, 2026.
- agentboard: agentboard.win, GitHub
- Vibe Kanban: GitHub, shutdown announcement
- Backlog.md: GitHub
- Taskmaster: GitHub, license
- Linear: Agents in Linear