Task-first kanban flow
Treating each agent run as a card you drag across a board is a genuinely clean mental model.
Updated April 2026
· a comparison we tried to keep honest
Claudete
VS
Vibe Kanban
Claudete vs Vibe Kanban
Bloop wound down on 10 April 2026, and Vibe Kanban lives on as a community-maintained, Apache-2.0 project. It still works. It's still free. The real question is different: volunteer maintenance, or a tool that ships weekly — running on the AI subscriptions you already pay for.
The short version
First, the part nobody says out loud
Vibe Kanban didn't die. Its company did. The project is now in community hands under Apache-2.0, and roughly 30,000 monthly users are deciding what that means for them. Here's the fairest summary we can write while also being the competitor.
Vibe Kanban
Community-run
Volunteer-maintained
- Still works today — nothing stops functioning
- Free and open source under Apache-2.0
- Genuinely good kanban + git-worktree workflow
- Bloop, the company behind it, wound down 10 Apr 2026
- Fixes and features now depend on volunteer PRs
- When a CLI update breaks something, there's no on-call team
Respect to the Bloop team — Vibe Kanban moved this whole category forward.
Actively shipped
Claudete
Shipping weekly
Full-time development
- Weekly releases from a full-time developer
- Multi-vendor: Claude Code, Codex, Grok & OpenCode
- Runs on the subscriptions you already pay for — no API keys
- Usage meters, resource monitor & provider status alerts built in
- Free forever for up to 3 instances
Feature by feature
Side by side, honestly
Both tools orchestrate coding agents on your machine, on your existing subscriptions. They just take very different bets on how you want to work — and on who keeps the lights on.
| Capability | Vibe Kanban | Claudete |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance model | Community volunteers (Apache-2.0) since April 2026 | Full-time development, weekly releases |
| Price | Free, open source | Free up to 3 instances · $39 once for unlimited |
| Runs on your existing AI subscriptions | Yes — drives local CLIs, no API keys | Yes — drives local CLIs, no API keys |
| Agents supported | Claude Code, Codex, Gemini and others | Claude Code, Codex, Grok & OpenCode |
| Workflow model | Kanban cards with a git worktree per task | Live tiled terminals with tabs, search & status filters |
| Interface | Local web app in your browser | Native macOS app |
| Broadcast one prompt to every agent | Card-by-card prompting | One message hits the whole fleet |
| Shared chat rooms with @mentions | Not available | Rooms, broadcast & per-agent @mentions |
| Usage meters (5-hour / 7-day windows) | Not built in | Live in the sidebar, with reset countdowns |
| Live CPU & memory per instance | Not built in | Summed across each whole process tree |
| Provider status alerts | Not built in | Live Anthropic, OpenAI & xAI health with alerts |
| Real interactive shells beside agents | Follow-up terminal per task | Full zsh/bash shells, tiled in the same grid |
| Git worktree task board | Yes — its signature feature, and a good one | No board — grid, tabs and chat instead |
| Open source | Yes, Apache-2.0 | Closed source — free tier is free forever |
The Vibe Kanban column describes the open-source project as of April 2026. If we got something wrong, email [email protected] and we'll correct it — an honest table is the whole point of this page.
Credit where due
What Vibe Kanban still does well
We're not going to pretend the other column is all minuses. If these four things are why you picked it, they're still true today.
Git worktree isolation
Every task gets its own worktree, so parallel agents never trample each other's diffs.
Open source, forkable
Apache-2.0 means the code can't disappear. You can read it, patch it, or fork it yourself.
Completely free
No license, no cap, no upsell. For a solo tinkerer that may be all the argument needed.
If that board-driven flow is how your brain works, keep it. Claudete runs happily alongside Vibe Kanban — same repos, same CLIs, same logins. This isn't an either/or.
The difference you feel
Live terminals, not cards.
Vibe Kanban shows you the state of a task. Claudete shows you the agent itself — every session tiled live in one window, so you watch the work happen instead of waiting for a card to move.
- Watch every agent in real time Full live terminals in a tiled grid — no clicking into a card to see what happened.
- Telemetry built in Usage windows, per-instance CPU and memory, and provider health — things a task board never tells you.
- Shipped weekly, not when someone volunteers When Anthropic changes Claude Code on a Tuesday, the fix is our job — not an open issue waiting for a PR.
The thing a board can't do
Talk to all ten at once.
On a kanban board you prompt one card at a time. In Claudete, you drop the plan into a shared room once — then broadcast it to the whole fleet or @mention the one agent that should pick it up.
One prompt, whole fleet
Broadcast a single instruction to every agent in the room —
no pasting it ten times into ten cards.
@mention one agent
Aim a follow-up at a single instance while the rest of the
room keeps grinding.
One shared log
The plan, the replies and the coordination live in the same
thread you're reading.
No migration required
Run both this afternoon
There's nothing to export, convert or uninstall. Both tools drive the same local CLIs, so trying Claudete costs you about three minutes and zero commitment.
Keep Vibe Kanban
Seriously — leave it installed. It's free, it works, and your board isn't going anywhere. Nothing on this page requires you to delete anything.
Download Claudete, point it at the same repos
It picks up the Claude Code, Codex, Grok and OpenCode CLIs you're already signed into. No API keys, no account, no config files to copy over.
Compare after one real day
Run your normal workload in both. If watching live terminals, broadcasting prompts and seeing your usage windows doesn't win you over, keep the board. No hard feelings.
Pricing
Both are free. Here's the fine print.
Vibe Kanban is free because it's open source. Claudete is free because the full app costs nothing for up to 3 instances — one $39 payment removes the only cap, forever.
Vibe Kanban
$0 open source
- Free forever, Apache-2.0
- Unlimited tasks and agents
- Updates and fixes depend on community volunteers
- Roadmap is whatever gets merged
A fair choice if you're happy to self-support — or to send the occasional PR yourself.
Claudete
Claudete
$0 then $39 once — only if you outgrow 3
instances
- Every feature free for up to 3 instances — no trial timer
- Pro: unlimited instances, $39 once, licensed for 3 Macs
- Weekly releases, full-time maintenance
- No subscription, no API keys, no account
Lifetime
deal: 50% off Pro with code
QZMTYZMW
Still shopping?
The rest of the field
Vibe Kanban isn't your only alternative — the agent-manager space is crowded now, and every one of these exists for the same reason: a single built-in terminal isn't enough for fleet work.
Conductor
Agent
View
claude-squad
Parallel Code
Emdash
Sculptor
OpenHands
Claude
Code Desktop
Even Anthropic's own Claude Code Desktop is single-vendor by design — it will never run your Codex or Grok sessions next to Claude. Head-to-head pages for Conductor, Agent View and claude-squad are next; if you want one of them sooner, tell us at [email protected].
FAQ
Questions, answered
Is Vibe Kanban dead?
No. Bloop, the company behind it, wound down on 10 April 2026, but the project continues as community-maintained open source under Apache-2.0. It still works and it's still free. What changed is who fixes it when something breaks: volunteers, on their own time, instead of a funded team.
Do I have to migrate anything to try Claudete?
No. There's no import step because there's nothing to import — both tools drive the same local CLIs against the same repos. Install Claudete alongside Vibe Kanban, run both for a day, and keep whichever fits. Or keep both.
Does Claudete have a kanban board?
Honestly: no. Claudete's model is live tiled terminals, named tabs, shared chat rooms and broadcast — you watch agents work rather than track cards. If a worktree-per-task board is the part of Vibe Kanban you love most, that's a real difference and you should weigh it.
Do I need API keys or a new AI subscription?
No. Like Vibe Kanban, Claudete runs on the CLIs already installed on your Mac — Claude Code, Codex, Grok and OpenCode — using whatever subscriptions you're signed in with. No tokens are billed through us.
Is Claudete open source?
No — and that's a fair point in Vibe Kanban's favor if source access matters to you. Our trade-off is different: a native, closed-source Mac app with a free-forever tier, funded by a single $39 lifetime license so full-time development doesn't depend on donations or volunteers.
Your move
30,000 people are choosing again.
If you're one of them, the test is simple: run Claudete next to your board for one real workday. Every feature is free for 3 instances — no account, no trial timer, no migration.
macOS 13+ · no account needed · works with your existing AI subscriptions · Pro is $39 once, not a subscription