Still looking for work queue management stuff

Hey! As I’m trying to get more serious about my music contracting stuff, I’m looking for a better way of managing my projects and requests and so on.

Here’s the criteria I’m going for:

  • Self-hostable (and ideally free)

    I do not want to be beholden to someone company’s capricious whims about the future of their exponential growth platform.

  • Public vs. private vs. shareable items

    It would be super useful for me to be able to link to a page which tells people how much work I have pending and also maybe be able to designate items as whether the public can see the specifics.

    Having a means of letting people also see progress on their specific items would be great, but not a requirement.

    I definitely need to be able to make some specifics or even the project/task names hidden to the public, but I still want people to be able to see that there is something going on even if they don’t know what.

  • Nested items and/or project groupings

    When working on music, I want to be able to see what work needs to be done on a per-project basis, but also be able to see what work needs to be done in general. Ideally this would be a “containment” concept (i.e. sub-tasks of a larger task) and not a “relation” concept. Which is to say, there needs to be actual hierarchy.

  • Freeform text entry for projects and tasks

    Usually client requests come with a whole bunch of information that needs to be browseable, and keeping it associated with the request itself would be stellar.

  • Kanban view

    Being able to see the tasks in terms of a pending/in progress/delivered/complete view where I can move stuff from left to right as it progresses would be super helpful.

    Ideally things in the “complete” column would automatically age out.

  • Priorities and due dates

    Sometimes a task has to get done by a certain time. Sometimes a task is a “nice to have.” Sometimes a task is just a placeholder for what work might eventually need to happen.

Things I’ve tried

So here’s some things I’ve tried and what I don’t like about them:

iCloud Notes

This has been my go-to for general note and project organization stuff and it does provide useful things like inline todo lists. It’s been especially good for my album workflows! It’s also technically self-hostable on the backend (since it can use IMAP as its storage) although I just use Apple’s hosting for it for now.

The main problems:

  • It doesn’t let me see all pending work across all projects
  • It only provides sharing in terms of global read/write at a project level
  • Can only be shared to folks with an Apple account
  • No Kanban view
  • Apple keeps adding AI bullshit that makes things worse

iCloud Reminders

This has also been a frequent go-to for me. It supports tasks and subtasks (and is also “technically self-hostable”), but it lacks in these ways:

  • Sharing has the same issues as iCloud Notes; no shareable web view, any sharing gives the recipient read-write access to the entire list (and if you do a list per project, you lose the “everything to do” view, and then also the list view gets super cluttered too)
  • While it lets you attach “notes” to items, the actual presentation is godawful
  • No Kanban view
  • If you mark something as done, either it disappears right away or you need to show all completed tasks, so either way you either lose information or get a shitload of clutter
  • The UI is uncharacteristically bad for Apple
  • Apple keeps adding AI bullshit that makes things worse

Trello

This gets Kanban right and has a web sharing view, and a lot of furry artists use this for their commission management, but:

  • Very much not self-hostable, and Atlassian has some of the worst tendencies with SaaS
  • I don’t think there’s a way to provide confidentiality on items; if it’s on the Trello, anyone can see what it is
  • No real projects/subtasks (at best you can just link items together with a dependency graph)

JIRA

  • Expensive and proprietary
  • Super complicated to maintain
  • While there’s probably a way to do conditional visibility on shared views, setting that up is not going to be fun
  • also it’s fuckin Atlassian

Hacknplan

  • It’s kinda like JIRA Lite? I think?
  • SaaS
  • Unsure if shared views provide permission stuff; the “Personal+ plan” (7€/month) claims to have “permissions by category and feature” but I’m not sure what that actually means

GitHub Projects

  • Not self-hostable
  • Lacking in the permissions stuff
  • It’s fuckin Microsoft

Notion

  • Expensive and super SaaSsy
  • Feels like Google Sheets with slightly better metadata
  • Built around teams, not around individuals

Gitea projects

This one fits most of my criteria, but:

  • Missing confidentiality
  • Really bad UX (it requires creating an issue, then assigning it to a project separately)
  • No subtasks, just inter-task relationships

Things I should try

Here’s things on my radar but which I haven’t tried yet.

I am also open to other suggestions here, thus this blog post requesting suggestions.

TRAC

TRAC is a good old-fashioned project management tool, similar to Bugzilla. There are Kanban plugins for it, and it definitely provides public views, and is free and self-hostable. It also has plugins for confidential tickets and “subtickets.” So this is also one to check out.

Asana

Suggested by Colin in the comments below. Doesn’t seem to be self-hostable and it’s pretty SaaSsy though. I’m not sure it’d be an improvement over Trello. The free version doesn’t support dependencies at all, and it isn’t clear if dependencies are equivalent to subtasks or just “instead of” like with so many other JIRAlikes.