Best alternatives to Cainban in 2026

Most kanban boards (Trello, Asana, Jira) assume you're working in a browser, which means alt-tabbing out of your terminal every time you want to check or update a task — a small friction that adds up for developers who live in the command line all day. Cainban skips the browser entirely: it's a command-line tool with an interactive terminal interface (TUI) for managing boards, so task tracking stays in the same window as your code. Beyond the CLI and TUI, it includes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which means AI coding assistants can read and update your task board directly through natural language rather than you manually syncing what the AI just did with your tracker. It supports task prioritization (none through critical), fuzzy search, task linking and dependencies, and multiple boards, all backed by a local SQLite database. It's free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tiers at all.