What replaces Vibe Kanban now that it is sunsetting?

No single product replaces it. bloop, the company behind Vibe Kanban, shut down on April 10, 2026. The project continues as open source and community maintained, and its local workspaces keep working. If you want an actively developed tool instead, the right pick depends on what you used Vibe Kanban for: Emdash for issue intake and worktrees, Conductor for a Mac app with cloud workspaces, Claude Squad for a terminal UI, or plain git worktrees with GitHub Issues.

All facts below were checked on each project's own site or repository on October 23, 2026.

What happened to Vibe Kanban

The README on GitHub opens with "Vibe Kanban is sunsetting" and links to the announcement. In that post, dated April 10, 2026, Louis Knight-Webb writes that bloop is shutting down because most users were on the free tier and the team "couldn't find a business model that we could get excited about."

What the announcement says about the product:

• The project lives on as open source, community maintained.
• The latest version includes a data export feature.
• Remote services stay up for 30 days, then Vibe Kanban moves to a fully local architecture. The removed remote services are kanban issues, comments, projects and organisations.
• Local workspaces continue to function.
• The team said it would publish a roadmap for the community-maintained edition in the following weeks.

As of October 23, 2026:

• The repository is not archived, is licensed Apache-2.0 and has about 28.4k stars.
• The latest tagged release is v0.1.44, published April 24, 2026. The last push to the repository was on September 19, 2026.
• The Vibe Kanban blog shows no post after the April 10 announcement.

So you can still run it locally with npx vibe-kanban. Whether to rely on it depends on how much you need new releases.

What Vibe Kanban did, so you know what to replace

From its README: kanban issues to plan work; a workspace per task with a branch, a terminal and a dev server; diff review with inline comments sent back to the agent; a built-in browser preview; support for more than ten agents (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Amp, Cursor, OpenCode, Droid, CCR, Qwen Code); and pull request creation and merging.

Few tools cover all of that. Decide which part you actually used.

The alternatives, as of October 2026

These tools change quickly. Check the current docs before you migrate.

The do-it-yourself version

If what you liked was "a card becomes an isolated agent workspace", you can rebuild the core with standard tools:

# Pick a task
gh issue list --label ready

# Create a linked branch in its own worktree
gh issue develop 42 --checkout --worktree ../app-42
cd ../app-42

# Start the agent with the issue as its prompt
claude "$(gh issue view 42 --json title,body -q '.title + "\n\n" + .body')"

Claude Code can also create the worktree itself with claude -w issue-42, which puts it under <repo>/.claude/worktrees/. For the full routine, see how to organize tasks for AI coding agents.

Limits of each path

• Staying on Vibe Kanban: the code still runs locally, but you depend on community maintenance, and the remote features were scheduled for removal.
• Switching tools: each one covers a different slice. None of them is a drop-in replacement, and your boards won't import automatically.
• DIY: no overview of which agent is on which task, and no signal when one is waiting for you. Managing several Claude Code sessions covers the options for that part, and connecting Claude Code to GitHub Issues covers the board side.

With Kanbell

Kanbell is a macOS app (Apple Silicon) with one window per project and real terminals in panes and tabs. Here is how it compares on the parts people used Vibe Kanban for, without overselling it:

• Board: local, or GitHub Issues (columns open/closed or by labels). No Linear, Jira or Trello.
• Launch from a card: the brief is pasted into a real terminal, not sent. You press Enter. Issues from authors outside the repository require confirmation.
• Agents read the board through the kanbell CLI (kanbell list, kanbell show), read-only on GitHub.
• Agents: full tracking for Claude Code (working, waiting or done, pending questions and permissions, a map of agents and subagents, subscription usage). Codex CLI shows state, pending permissions and usage. Gemini CLI shows state and pending permissions. Other CLI agents run in the terminals without tracking.
• Waiting is visible: orange dot, menu bar, macOS notification, ⌘⇧J to jump to the next waiting agent.
• Git: changes, diffs, history and worktrees next to the terminals.
• No account and no Kanbell server.

Kanbell's feature set stops at that list: no built-in browser preview and no inline diff comments sent back to the agent. If those were your main reasons for using Vibe Kanban, look at the tools above first.