FredrinVibe Kanban vs Fredrin
Vibe Kanban put coding agents on a kanban board with isolated worktrees — and proved the idea. Fredrin is a maintained, commercially supported take on that same board. Here's the honest comparison — and where a desktop board of parallel agents pulls ahead.
What each tool is for
Vibe Kanban put coding agents on a kanban board with isolated worktrees — and proved the idea.
Fredrin is a maintained, commercially supported take on that same board.
Fredrin vs Vibe Kanban, side by side
Vibe Kanban earns partial credit where it legitimately covers a row. Nothing here is stacked against it.
| Vibe Kanbanopen-source agent orchestrator | Fredrindesktop agent board | |
|---|---|---|
| Kanban board to run many agents | Yes — built in | Yes — built in |
| Each task its own branch + worktree | Yes — built in | Yes — built in |
| Runs locally on your machine | Yes — built in | Yes — built in |
| Bring your own agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Copilot…) | Yes — built in | Yes — built in |
| Free and open source | Yes — built in | Not supported |
| Built-in preview browser with devtools & inspect mode | Yes — built in | screenshot previews (partial) |
| Inline comments on the diff | Yes — built in | review on the PR (partial) |
| Actively developed by a funded team | community-maintained (partial) | Yes — built in |
| Synced issues & projects across devices | Not supported | Yes — built in |
| Plan + acceptance checks per task | issue description (partial) | Yes — built in |
| PR + CI status flowing back to the board | via git (partial) | Yes — built in |
Kanban board to run many agents
Each task its own branch + worktree
Runs locally on your machine
Bring your own agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Copilot…)
Free and open source
Built-in preview browser with devtools & inspect mode
Inline comments on the diff
Actively developed by a funded team
Synced issues & projects across devices
Plan + acceptance checks per task
PR + CI status flowing back to the board
✓ built inpartial = possible, but manual or limited not supported
Why teams move from Vibe Kanban to Fredrin
Someone is still shipping it
Bloop wound down in April 2026 and handed Vibe Kanban to the community under Apache-2.0. The code still works, but fixes and features now arrive on volunteer time. Fredrin is a funded product with the same core loop, shipping on a predictable cadence.
The parts that went away, still here
Vibe Kanban's remote services — synced issues, comments, projects and organisations — were retired 30 days after the announcement, leaving it fully local. Fredrin keeps a synced board across your machines while agents still run locally in your own worktrees.
Further down the shipping path
Vibe Kanban ends at a good diff. Fredrin carries the ticket the rest of the way: a plan with acceptance checks the Worker verifies, a real pull request, and CI status landing back on the board so a merge auto-completes the ticket.
An honest read
Choose Vibe Kanban
You want free, open-source software you can read, fork and self-host, and you're happy running on community maintenance. Vibe Kanban got a lot right first — the board, the worktree-per-task isolation, inline diff comments and the built-in preview browser — and it is still a genuinely good local tool.
Choose Fredrin
You depend on this in your daily work and want it maintained — with a synced board, acceptance checks, and pull requests plus CI status on the card.
Vibe Kanban vs Fredrin: FAQ
- Is Vibe Kanban shut down?
- The company behind it wound down. Bloop announced on April 10, 2026 that it was closing, with founder Louis Knight-Webb writing that "the vast majority are free users and we couldn't find a business model that we could get excited about." Vibe Kanban itself continues as a community-maintained open-source project under Apache-2.0 at github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban.
- Does Vibe Kanban still work?
- Yes. It runs locally via npx vibe-kanban and the open-source repo is still there. What ended were the remote services — synced kanban issues, comments, projects and organisations — which were removed 30 days after the announcement, leaving a fully local app. Ongoing fixes now depend on who shows up to maintain it.
- What is the best Vibe Kanban alternative?
- It depends on what you valued. If it was the open-source, self-hosted part, the community fork is still the closest thing to itself. If it was the board — many agents in parallel, each in its own worktree, reviewed in one place — Fredrin is the maintained alternative, and adds pull requests and CI status on the card.
- Can I use the same coding agents I used in Vibe Kanban?
- Mostly, yes. Fredrin dispatches Workers through swappable runtimes — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode and others — on the subscription you already pay for, the same bring-your-own-agent posture Vibe Kanban had.
- How do I migrate from Vibe Kanban to Fredrin?
- There's no import tool — the mapping is simple enough to do by hand. A Vibe Kanban task becomes a Fredrin ticket, an agent profile becomes a runtime, and the worktree-per-task model carries over unchanged. See our migration guide for the walkthrough.
Compare Fredrin with more tools
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