Where agent work gets planned and tracked: markdown-native trackers, graph-backed issue databases, event-sourced Git trackers, local-first daemon ledgers, self-hosted team platforms, agent-first cloud boards, knowledge-vault systems, and the pipelines that turn PRDs into typed tasks.
- Agent Kanban - the source-available Cloudflare task board whose assignee cannot accept its own review, with claims bound to verified agent sessions.
- AgentRQ - the AGPL self-hosted realtime human-in-the-loop task board agents work over MCP, supervised from phone, web, desktop, and a Chrome extension, about 1.2k stars.
- AI Dev Tasks - the two-file PRD-to-checklist prompt pack that ran the pipeline before any of these tools existed, dormant since November 2025 at 7.8k stars.
- Backlog.md - the markdown-native task manager whose three review gates, spec, plan, code, make it the first line of code review.
- beads - Steve Yegge’s Dolt-backed graph issue tracker, dependency-aware with atomic claims, the agent-memory thesis in running code.
- Epiq - the Git-native event-sourced issue tracker whose replayable log turns unattended agent sprints into auditable history, with MCP, a skill file, and per-agent identities.
- It’s a Plan - the self-hosted AGPL tracker where agents hold assignee slots on the team board, with MCP, schedules, and an external runner for coding CLIs.
- kanban-md - the single-binary markdown kanban whose expiring claim leases make a file board safe to share between parallel agents.
- Kata - the local-first Go daemon ledger that answers agent queries in milliseconds, with atomic claims, evidence-based closes, and hooks for 18 harnesses.
- Operon - the Obsidian plugin that makes the vault the task store, with agent writes landing only through receipted sealed plans.
- Ordewell - the CLI that turns one goal into typed plan artifacts with per-task runners and models, verified by an explicit tool call rather than the model’s word.
- Pad - the Apache-2.0 single-binary tracker where conventions and playbooks are items the agents load, driven by CLI, web UI, and a versioned MCP server.
- PlanDB - the stalled Apache-2.0 SQLite task graph whose compound graph crosses subtree boundaries, with atomic claims, pre and post conditions, and no daemon.
- Task Master - the most-installed PRD-to-tasks pipeline, quiet since April 2026 as it became Hamster’s Commons-Clause commercial engine.
- Veritas Kanban - the MIT local-first board whose agent layer mounts in verified layers and whose v6 runtime gates what an agent may do per execution phase with digest-pinned, approval-bound tool catalogs.
Its members are compared on shared rows in the Task Management Feature Matrix.
Changes #
- 2026-08-27 - Added Backlog.md.
- 2026-08-27 - Added beads.
- 2026-08-27 - Added Task Master.
- 2026-09-16 - Added Ordewell.
- 2026-10-07 - Added It’s a Plan.
- 2026-10-08 - Added AI Dev Tasks.
- 2026-10-08 - Added Operon.
- 2026-10-10 - Added Epiq.
- 2026-10-11 - Added Agent Kanban.
- 2026-10-11 - Added kanban-md.
- 2026-10-11 - Added Kata.
- 2026-10-11 - Added Pad.
- 2026-10-11 - Added Veritas Kanban.
- 2026-10-13 - Added PlanDB.
- 2026-10-13 - Added AgentRQ.