Hi Folks,
I’ve used Ticktick as a SaaS task manager app for years now. There was a time when I had tried almost every productivity app under the sun and Ticktick had the best features and app and a WAY better pricing structure than alternatives like Todoist. Nevertheless, I had growing concerns about privacy and control of my own data as I need to be able to trust my to-do app with information about my life that I don’t want repeated to every advertiser on the internet. Bearing in mind the state of the internet in general, I’ve been slowly cutting away all my SaaS dependencies and it may be close to time for me to say goodby to an app that kept me sane for over a decade of my life. I’d like to move to a self-hosted solution, first for myself and eventually I’ll migrate my family to a shared project on the new solution.
What do you use to stay organized? Why do you like it?
Can you recommend something for my needs?
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Some sort of custom lists logic where I can filter with some sort of typed or gui-button filter to see and save specific views of my tasks/cards, for example “overdue+project:yard+tag:do_it_later”
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Must be source available, but I prefer open-source especially the less shareware-y less crippled versions. There’s a lot of subscription/shareware/FOSS+sub kind of stuff in this space and I’d rather use whatever the neckbeard & fedora FOSS purists use.
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I’m mostly used to the getting things done (GTD) methodology with task managers that use lists, but I am not opposed to using a tool that uses Kanban boards or something else.
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I’m partial to something that I can grow into (more of a accessible but powerful project management tool and less of a simple todo app) but I only need to account for 2-3 users and a few thousand tasks a year with minimal media attachments.
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I prefer something I can deploy via docker though I wouldn’t completely rule out a bare-metal install if the feature set justified it.
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Must have support for recurring tasks natively or via a plugin.
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Bonus points for native android(graphene)/ios apps, but access via webapp is acceptable
I’ve tried a lot of the NextCloud based solutions. I’ve tried Vikunja (which is pretty good and AGPL), and I’m currently messing with Planka which is good, but isn’t open-source which really isn’t where I’m trying to go with this. Kanboard is under the MIT license, but seems to have a steeper learning curve.
I’m looking forward to hearing what the community uses!
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I use Donetick.
I use Obsidian
I use Obsidian in other contexts (e.g. long-term goal setting, journaling, knowledge recall). I tried to use it for tasks, but quickly over-complicated things. I have a lot of tasks and it can be hard to wrangle everything without a bunch of smart lists and tags and such. I may give it another try. I’m making a list of solutions I want to try for a week or two each. This is the core of my daily routine (along with my calendar), so it feels reasonable to over analyze the choice.
My solution is to be disorganised and unproductive. And I am entirely serious.
Vikunja is a great option, but the mobile app is still in development (lots of missing features). I like it, but I have found that using a simple markdown editor like Markor (on Android) and Marktext (on Linux, available on Windows + Mac too) works for me, and I use Syncthing to sync with my laptop. Note that Marktext isn’t being actively developed anymore, but it was the best one I could find that respects the folder structure of my notes. Obsidian is great too, but it’s closed source and having everything in vaults is annoying for me. You might also like VSCodium or Kate, which are code editors that also have markdown highlighting (but not Markdown preview).
However, you can’t easily use custom themes with Markor and Marktext. For Markor, you can only change the background, font, and text colour of the editing mode (not the preview mode!) while Marktext does let you change the font universally, but you have to use one of the prebuilt themes (I found One Dark to be the closest to my system theme). One day I would like to try my hand at making my own cross-platform markdown editor, maybe once I have less schoolwork to worry about.
Have you taken a look at TaskWarrior? It’s pure FOSS, extremely powerful, has multiple self hosting options, multiple front ends, including Android native, and supports everything on your list. Simple projects, fully nested projects with complex dependencies, customizable tags and filters, supports GTD, kanban, or just a basic list of todos. Asynchronous synchronization for devices that can’t connect for long periods for whatever reason. It weakest point is that it’s recurring task model is weird, but there is very active work to fix that.
It also has a huge plugin ecosystem and can pull from things like jira and tons of other issue tracking systems.
It’s also extremely neckbeardy, has a boring website, decent online documentation but a much better man page. TaskWarrior is highly scriptable, with json input/output options if you like. I love it.
EDIT: The filter from your example would be written
+OVERDUE +do_it_later proj:yardin TaskWarrior’s filter method.EDITx2: I use Debian Stable, btw. ;)
I’m currently using NextCloud + Davx5 + Tasks.org and am quite satisfied. I think it supports basically everything you are asking for. I’ve also toyed with jtx Board but Tasks.org felt cleaner. I always manage my tasks on my phone, but I know the tasks show up in Thunderbird desktop. Not sure about the functionality though.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m about to sound like a grumpy old man: I’m mildly frustrated with Nextcloud, though I’ve used it for a few years and the calendar sync and file features are pretty good. I’m annoyed not because they did anything that really deserves my annoyance, but for years they resisted the call to be able to select ISO 8601 date and time (e.g. YYYY-MM-DD). Instead I was pushed into the MM-DD-YYYY that’s commonly used here in the States, and only after cobbling together a horrific combo of language and regional formats did I get a Monday-starting week with 24h time and a YYYY-MM-DD date format. despite the days being in a weird language or something. No other piece of software I used tied date and time options so immutably to a single local and then gets defensive in the comments when a bunch of people don’t fit that mold. Most just have a dropdown for each format so you can tailor it to what you use. They also love to put so much whitespace between elements I’m worried I’ll be able ts see only 5 tasks or so without scrolling (common web 2.0 design failure). I’m sure Nextcloud is awesome. I’ve experienced that, but I’m waiting for it to mature a bit more before I dump a bigger workload onto it. Using NC does have one big advantage for me as my NC box is the only one accessible on he web without VPNing into my network.
I also REALLY like that the old Astrid app ties in with tasks.org
jtxboard I’ve heard of, but don’t remember. I’m gonna poke around and see if that one does it for me. Thanks again!
Radicale
Some one just added recurring tasks to Nextcloud, so it will be a much better option for every day use now. Feature should come out soon I think.
I believe Vikunja fits your needs, you have both list and kanban views, open source, categories + tags + deadlines and filters, docker is available, PWA (not sure about an app, I never use apps), recurring tasks, and more (I like staring tasks, OIDC support, subcategories, and I don’t use it but it can also be collaborative)
I’m pretty happy with it to be honest, just try it and see for yourself, I think they have a demo on their website :)I second Vikunja. It’s very customizable. Tasks are saved in Projects, but then there are Saved Filters that can query one or more projects. That should fit your needs well. Fully open-source with a REST API and n8n integration too.
Definitely try the demo! I moved from Taskwarrior to Vikunja (Docker), mostly because I wanted Kanban boards and other GUI features for my GTD workflow.
Thanks for the reply. I have Vikjuna running and it’s honestly pretty similar to TickTick.
The mobile site works great as a PWA and I grabbed the app just to see what they where working on. PWA is great, app is still very much WIP, but not a deal-breaker at all.
I do have one workflow that seems to clash. Perhaps you folks can help me logic something together:
I have a family member who is very list-adverse. They get upset and stressed out with due dates, and missed deadlines, and competing priorities. I still need them to help with chores. I was wondering if there was a way to have tasks in a project regenerate themselves when they are marked complete with a start date x days into the future. The basic idea is that instead of seeing “You didn’t clean the toilet on 1-June-2026.” they would see something like “Clean toilet, task created 10 days ago (with no due date).” Planka showed the number of days since a card was created in the bottom right of the card but didn’t support recurrence (and didn’t appear to be fully FOSS despite being self-hosted). Ideally, someone could go to look at the tasks and instead of seeing “You should have cleaned the sink on 2-JUNE you failure,” they could instead just see all the chores on cards with a number showing how long they’ve been sitting without being done. Know anything like that?
This is possible!
- Create a task and choose the last option, “Set Repeating Interval.”
- Set the repeat mode to “From completion date.”
- Set the repeating interval to 1 hour. (Setting it zero causes issues.)
Whenever the task is completed, the start date will be set to one hour from the current time. To see all the start dates (last completion dates), use the “Table” type view in the Project or Saved Filter. In the top-right, you can adjust which columns are shown. Choose to show the Start Date.
You may need to adjust the date format in the settings so it is “Relative (e.g. 3 days ago)” rather than the exact date.
I use Mindwtr + WebDAV
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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