Cairn Projects
Project management is where work gets planned and tracked — tasks, boards, sprints, timelines. Cairn Projects gives your team that workspace as code you own, so planning the work isn't a growing per-seat bill.
Want this Trail sooner? Add your vote and help set the route.
A complete app, yours to keep.
Every Cairn Trail ships as a complete, AI-native application — full source in your own repository, a native MCP server, and a first-class CLI. Here’s what Cairn Projects includes out of the box.
- Tasks with assignees, due dates, and dependencies
- Boards, lists, and timeline (Gantt) views
- Sprints, cycles, and milestones
- Custom fields, labels, and saved filters
- Comments, mentions, and activity history
- Native MCP server and CLI so agents can plan and update work
Every way to get project management.
We’d rather you saw the whole map than a sales pitch. Here are the tools teams actually evaluate — what each is good at, said plainly. Cairn is one option among them.
Commercial
Hosted, polished, rented — your data lives on their cloud.Open source
Self-hostable and yours to run — read each license closely.So why Cairn?
Asana, Jira, and Linear are excellent — and every one of them meters you per seat, forever, with your plans on their servers. The open-source field is strong here (OpenProject, Plane, Taiga), but you adopt their stack and pace. Cairn Projects gives you the core planning workspace as documented code in your repo: own it once, shape the workflow your team actually runs, and let your agents keep it current.
However you get there, Cairn Projects is software you own — full source in your GitHub repository, running in your own cloud. No phone-home, no license server, no kill switch. Export your data any time; Cairn could disappear tomorrow and your software would keep working.