Why I Created Kaneo
I always loved simplicity, especially when it comes to tools for everyday use. I wanted a project management tool for me which was open source, self-hosted and beautiful.
The Journey
In late 2024, I was on the hunt for a project management tool that I could use. I had a few requirements:
- Open source
- Simple to use
- Self-hosted
- Beautiful
I’ll be honest, there are some amazing project management tools out there. A few of them are:
And I want to give praise to all of them. I’ve tried them all and they are all great tools. Shoutout to the creators of these tools!
However I wanted something that was simple, had beautiful design and had integrations and obviously open source.
The Name
Then a trip to Ohrid, Macedonia happened. And I was thinking if I should create my own project management tool. I was visiting Kaneo which is a beautiful church in Macedonia and then it hit me. That is the name of my project.
The Tech Stack
So I started working on it. I wanted to use bleeding edge technologies and I went for a monorepo with:
- Hono for the API
- React for the frontend
- Tanstack for the router and queries
- Drizzle for the database
- Vite for the frontend
- TailwindCSS for the design
- dnd-kit for the drag and drop
I wanted to implement everything from scratch. For the first two weeks I was learning how to build a proper authentication system. Shout out to Lucia for the learning resources.
The Architecture
I’m using a microservice architecture. I felt this was the best way since:
- It’s very simple to setup
- I wanted things to be decoupled and easy to maintain
- I wanted to learn how to build a microservice architecture
The Development
My goal was not just to build a simple project management tool, but software which is easy to maintain for everyone. After the authentication, I built a board view, then someone suggested a list view. So one drunk night I stayed up and built a list view. Then why not a backlog view? Sure!
This project is something that I’m very passionate about and I want to involve you in the process. You as the developer, if you are interested to contribute, I will be more than happy to accept your PRs. It’s not just about building a project management tool, open source is something that I believe in and me myself have contributed to some projects.
But of course, I want to build something that truly matters to people and thank you to everyone who tried it out.
Currently Kaneo is still in beta and I’m working day and night to make it even better. Something that you can expect in the near future is:
- A Github integration
- Gantt charts
And many more features…
And to end this blog post, Kaneo will never have a pricing page. It will always be self-hosted and free. Thanks to everyone who supported me and helped me out.