Trello made kanban mainstream. Lists, cards, drag and drop — it is still one of the most intuitive pieces of software ever shipped, which is why hundreds of millions of accounts exist and why "just make a Trello board" is a sentence everyone understands.
It is also an Atlassian subscription now: $5/user/month on Standard, more on Premium, with the free tier progressively tightened (10-board cap per workspace, attachment limits). A 10-person team pays $600 a year for lists with cards on them. Boardly is the same workflow, self-hosted, for $19 once. Here is the honest comparison.
What Trello does well
Trello is still excellent at being Trello:
- The smoothest kanban UX in the business, on every platform — web, iOS, Android, desktop.
- Butler automations — rules, scheduled commands and buttons that genuinely save clicks.
- Power-Ups and integrations with essentially everything.
- Real multi-user features: per-member assignment, notifications, permissions, workspaces.
If your team runs on assignments, automations and mobile apps, Trello's subscription buys real infrastructure.
Where the subscription model hurts
The per-user meter is the sting: kanban is one of the least server-intensive workloads imaginable — a few kilobytes of JSON per card — yet a 10-person team pays $1,800 over three years. Every new hire raises the bill; every plan review pressures the board count. Meanwhile the free tier that made Trello beloved keeps shrinking: 10 boards per workspace, plan-gated exports, file-size caps.
And your boards live in Atlassian's cloud, in Atlassian's format, with JSON export gated by plan. Years of project history — decisions, checklists, attachments — sit behind a subscription and a terms-of-service you do not control. For internal tooling, that is a dependency you never needed to take.
Boardly: the pay-once alternative
Boardly is a $19, one-time purchase. The self-hosted Trello replacement — unlimited boards, your data in one SQLite file. Boardly covers the workflow that made Trello famous: unlimited boards with themes and starred favorites, drag-and-drop lists and cards with exact order persistence, markdown cards with due dates and overdue highlighting, checklists with progress bars, labels, local file attachments, comments with an activity log, filters and search — plus a full-fidelity JSON export (attachments included) Trello would gate behind a plan.
The source code is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/boardly-kanban — free to build and run yourself, forever. Buying the packaged version on Whop gets you the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates. Either way, there is no account, no telemetry and no renewal date.
Head to head
| Boardly | Trello | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | $5/user/mo (Standard) |
| Cost over 3 years | $19 | ~$180/user ($1,800 for a team of 10) |
| Where your data lives | Your machine / your server | Atlassian’s cloud |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited use | 10-board cap free; attachments & export plan-gated |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Who should stay with Trello
Stay with Trello if you need per-member assignment and notifications, Butler automations, or the mobile apps — Boardly has none of those, and for a distributed team juggling phones, they matter. Trello's free tier also remains fine for one small personal board.
Switch if your boards are used by you, a small trusted team, or an agency organizing internal work — and what you actually do is drag cards, tick checklists and attach files. That job does not need a per-seat meter.
Making the switch
Step 1 — Buy once on Whop. One-time $19 — one of the cheapest apps in the suite. Installer, updates and setup support included.
Step 2 — Run it anywhere. Desktop app for personal boards, or docker compose up -d on a $5 VPS for the whole team.
Step 3 — Move your boards in. Create lists, drag cards, attach files, tick checklists. Export everything to JSON whenever you want proof you own it.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/boardly-kanban, always. $19 buys the packaged installer, updates and setup support.
How do team members log in?
One shared password protects the whole install — there are no per-user accounts, permissions or assignee fields yet. That's fine for small teams on a trusted server or VPN; if you need granular roles and member management, Trello still wins there.
Does it have automations like Butler?
No — no rule engine, no scheduled commands. Boardly bets that most Trello boards never touch Butler, and most don't. If yours does, keep Trello.
The bottom line
Subscriptions make sense when a service does ongoing work for you — hosting, syncing, multi-region infrastructure, human labor. They make much less sense when the work happens on your own hardware and the monthly bill is just a toll booth. Boardly is our bet that for this job, most people are better served owning the tool: $19 once, boardly costs less than four months of a single Trello seat — for a team it pays for itself the day you install it.
Boardly is part of OneTimeSuite — 56 desktop and self-hosted apps built on the same principle: your hardware does the work, so you should not pay rent on it. Every app is a one-time purchase with MIT-licensed source on GitHub, no accounts and no telemetry. Want everything at once? OneTimeSuite Complete bundles the whole suite for a single flat $997.
Try Boardly — $19, one time
Signed installer on Whop, or build it free from the MIT source. Your call.
Browse the whole pay-once suite or all comparisons.