Ship a project without losing the thread
Side apps, client work, weekend builds — columns for what’s next, what’s stuck, and what’s done.
Dodalu
See the work. Keep it yours.
A personal kanban board on your desktop — for projects, plans, and everything you’re juggling. No account. No cloud workspace.
Local files. Quick board or project folder — you own the data.
One person. A lot of moving pieces.
Dodalu is built for solo work — the stuff that falls apart in a shared team board, or never belonged there in the first place.
Keep life goals off the guilt spreadsheet
Fitness, finances, learning — a board you actually look at, not a list that grows forever in a notes app.
Plan the messy middle
Trips, moves, renovations, launch weeks — stages you invent for the real sequence, not a generic “todo / doing / done.”
Run a personal pipeline
Writing, courses, content, job applications — each piece is a card you can move as it progresses.
Start a board your way.
The welcome screen keeps your boards in one place. New Board walks you through location, name, structure, look, and settings — a quick board on this computer, a new or existing project folder, or bring an existing board along from a JSON export.
Shape the board
Stages, colors, themes, wallpaper, tags, and buckets — tuned to this work, not a hosted workspace template.
Write real notes
Every card can open a Markdown document beside the board — checklists, research, specs, packing lists.
Stay in control
Search, tag filters, archive, undo, copy and paste across boards. Your files stay on this machine.
Cards that hold more than a title.
Select a card and its Markdown opens in the same window — preview by default, edit when you need it, or jump to your usual editor.
Building with agents? Give them a board too.
If you already work in Cursor, Claude Desktop, Codex, or Copilot, optional MCP lets those tools create and move cards on your board — while Dodalu stays a calm place to see the whole picture. Conversations stay in your editor; the board stays yours.
Register agent clients from the app when you want them. Skip it entirely if you just want a quiet personal board.
Get Dodalu
Free forever — every feature, no account. Windows Setup and Linux
AppImage / .deb; installed builds can check for updates
here. If Dodalu earns its keep on your machine,
support the project and we’ll
send a code that tells the little robot to stop calling you a
freeloader.
Beta channel packages are on the feed now · macOS not available yet · Snap remains local/manual for now · GitHub
Features
Dodalu is a local-first desktop kanban app for a single user. Here is what it does today:
- Personal kanban boards that run on Windows and Linux (desktop app)
- No account and no required cloud sync — board data stays on your computer
- Boards catalog on the welcome screen with recent projects and sorting
- New Board wizard: location, name, structure, look, and settings
- Quick boards stored on this computer, or boards inside a new or existing project folder
- Import a board from a Trello JSON export (lists, cards, labels, checklists)
- Custom stages (columns) with colors, widths, collapse, and reorder in edit mode
- Built-in themes, board wallpaper, and card/selection/bucket colors
- Cards with titles, summaries, colored tags, and optional Markdown backing documents
- In-app Markdown preview and source editor, with open-in-external-editor
- Buckets to group related cards one level deep inside a stage
- Search across titles and summaries, with optional search in Spec documents
- Tag filters on the board; manage a project tag catalog
- Archive and restore cards (optional permanent delete)
- Undo and redo for board content changes
- Cut, copy, paste, and copy-to between boards; drag cards across Dodalu windows
- Optional effort tracking with estimates and work entries
- Optional MCP server so external agents (Cursor, Claude Desktop, Codex, Copilot) can create, update, and move cards
- Board state as local JSON plus Markdown files you can keep with a project
- In-app updates from the Dodalu release feed
- Free forever with all features enabled; optional financial support via Lemon Squeezy returns a supporter code
- A reminder robot that nudges you when you’re using Dodalu without having supported the developer — enter a supporter code to quiet it