Self-hosted Task Management & To-do Lists: what licence are you actually agreeing to

“Self-hosted” and “open source” are not the same promise, and the lists that recommend these projects rarely separate them. This page sorts 26 task management & to-do lists projects by the licence you are actually agreeing to, as read on 2026-08-20.

13 of 26 are permissive: run them, change them, keep your changes to yourself. 9 are AGPL, where serving a modified copy over a network obliges you to publish those changes, which is the clause that catches people who self-host for a team. 1 is not open source at all, carrying a proprietary or restricted-use licence. The remaining 3 are ordinary copyleft.

Project	Licence	What that means	Stars	Maintenance	Language
Super Productivity	MIT	Permissive, no strings	21,468	Active	TypeScript
Wekan	MIT	Permissive, no strings	21,058	Active	JavaScript
Kanboard	MIT	Permissive, no strings	9,806	Active	PHP
Nullboard	BSD-2-Clause	Permissive, no strings	4,145	Dormant	HTML
tududi	MIT	Permissive, no strings	3,275	Active	TypeScript
Tasks.md	MIT	Permissive, no strings	2,180	Active	JavaScript
4ga Boards	MIT	Permissive, no strings	693	Active	JavaScript
dayGLANCE	MIT	Permissive, no strings	114	Active	JavaScript
Task Keeper	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	107	Active	Scala
Focus Flow	MIT	Permissive, no strings	47	Active	Rust
Tellor	MIT	Permissive, no strings	12	Active	JavaScript
Listaway	MIT	Permissive, no strings	9	Active	Go
Taskwarrior	MIT	Permissive, no strings	-	Not measured	C++
Tracks	GPL-2.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	1,239	Active	Ruby
OpenHabitTracker	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	271	Active	C#
myTinyTodo	GPL-2.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	200	Active	PHP
AppFlowy	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	75,767	Active	Dart
Kan	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	5,363	Active	TypeScript
Vikunja	AGPL-3.0, GPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	5,106	Active	Go
Ever Gauzy	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	4,335	Active	TypeScript
Donetick	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	2,494	Active	Go
Jotty	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	1,985	Active	TypeScript
HamsterBase Tasks	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	334	Active	TypeScript
Will Be Done	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	126	Active	TypeScript
Our Shopping List	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	-	Not measured	Docker
Planka	⊘ Proprietary	Not open source, restricted use	12,423	Active	JavaScript

What the licence column means

Permissive (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC): do what you like, keep changes private.
Copyleft (GPL, LGPL, MPL, EPL): changes you distribute must ship their source.
AGPL, network copyleft: the same, and running it for others over a network counts as distribution. This is the one that surprises people who self-host for a team or a side business.
Source-available (SSPL, BUSL, Elastic, Commons Clause): not open source. Reading and self-use are usually fine; offering it as a service is not.
Other / unstated: the dataset lists no licence we could classify. Check the repo before you rely on it.

The Maintenance column is a second, independent check: the age of the most recent commit on the default branch, read from the GitHub API on 2026-08-20. Active is within 180 days, Slowing is 180 to 365, Dormant is over a year, Archived means the maintainer marked the repo read-only, and Not measured means the project is hosted outside GitHub so the check does not apply.

Source data from awesome-selfhosted-data, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Licence family grouping and maintenance status are computed by this site (from the upstream licence fields and the GitHub API) and are not part of the upstream dataset. Licence classification is a summary, not legal advice: check the project’s own LICENSE file before you rely on it. This page is published under the same licence.