Built for my own work. Now ready for yours.

Kanroo did not start as a product. It started as a tool for my own work. I needed a board for my tasks and one place for the notes that belong to them. Nothing fancy. Just something calm that I could trust every day.

I started in spring 2025. That is about one and a half years of building now.

Before I built more, I looked at the market. There are many good products, and I tried a lot of them. None really fit.

Most come from big US tech companies. Your data then sits on their servers, under their laws. For a tool that holds a team’s plans, ideas and client work, that did not feel right to me.

The self-hosted alternatives were closer. But each one missed something I needed every day, such as a wiki next to the boards, fine-grained access or a clean API.

So I kept extending my own tool. Step by step, it became Kanroo.

Fair question. The world has plenty of them.

But I did not find the one I wanted: boards and a wiki in one place, an open-source core, workspace data in the EU, and every feature on every Kanroo Cloud plan.

I also wanted my client work in the same place. I share wiki pages with clients, and each client gets their own link, with its own password and expiry date. Their requests come in through public forms or by email, and each one becomes a task. Many other tools cannot do that. Email to task comes with Kanroo Cloud and the Enterprise Edition.

Kanroo is my answer. It is not for everyone. It is for businesses and teams who want exactly that.

Many tools add a new button for every idea. After a few years, the screen is full and the work is hard to find.

Kanroo focuses on the main thing: tasks and wikis. Nothing more, nothing less. I want an interface that is clean and beautiful, and that never feels overloaded.

And you can use it with the keyboard alone. Press ShiftK, and you search across tasks, boards and pages.

Many tools put their best parts behind a minimum number of seats or a higher plan. Single sign-on only in the top tier. More history after an upgrade. EU hosting as an add-on.

I find that unfair, especially to small teams. They often need good tools the most.

So on Kanroo Cloud, every plan gets every feature. The plans differ only in fair usage limits, such as members, wiki pages and file size, and in support. And you can start for free, with every feature, no time limit and no card required.

The world has become less predictable. Laws, trade rules and political priorities can change fast, and your data is part of that.

I want your work under European law. Your workspace data is hosted and processed in the EU: servers in Germany, files in the Netherlands, email from France. Every sub-processor is European.

One honest note: payments for paid plans run through Polar, a US company. Polar handles checkout and invoices. It does not see your boards or pages.

And if you want full control, run it yourself. The core is open source under AGPL-3.0. Your server, your rules.

Building a European SaaS means more than writing code. Every service I wanted to use raised the same questions: Where is the data processed? Who owns the company? Which sub-processors sit behind it? Is there a data processing agreement?

Many convenient tools failed those questions, for analytics, error reports or email. So we run these things ourselves. It takes time, but every transfer of data is a deliberate decision.

Then come the privacy policy, a data processing agreement with every safeguard, the imprint and the terms. For every feature I ask: What data does it create, how long does it stay, who sees it, and how do we protect it? Other markets let you launch faster. Here this part of the work is sometimes as big as the code itself.

For you, that means your data protection officer finds the answers on one page before having to ask.

I wanted tools that I can read, run and keep for years. Open source wherever possible, and everything in my own hands.

Launching on Supabase, Vercel or Lovable would have been comfortable. But I want to control and understand my stack, without vendor lock-in. So Kanroo has a modular stack: each part can be replaced when something fits better.

That search took endless hours... days... weeks. For every part, I weighed the pros and cons. Many self-hosted products keep some features behind a license. So I set up each candidate locally, saw how it works, learned it, and often found bugs. Then I started again with the next one.

Most new tools pick React. I chose Angular. I have been a software developer for more than 15 years, and I have built many apps with Angular. I tried to make friends with React and Next.js several times. But from an Angular point of view, a lot is missing there. Angular brings routing, forms, signals and dependency injection in one framework. And it has improved massively in its recent versions.

Around it are the open-source projects I build on: Express, PostgreSQL with Drizzle, Better Auth for sign-in, and Spartan and Tailwind for the interface. PostgreSQL also carries search and live updates, so Kanroo needs no Redis and no extra search service.

The servers run at netcup in Nuremberg, the files sit at Scaleway in Amsterdam. The database, the mail server, monitoring and analytics are services we run ourselves. Traces, metrics and logs stay in our own monitoring. If something breaks, I want to know before you do.

The name took longer than I like to admit. I had a long list of candidates, and each one failed somewhere. Kangoo was out early: a car already has that name.

Then came Kanroo. Kan for Kanban. Roo for the kangaroo, an animal that moves forward with every jump.

Today it is hard to find a fitting domain for a brand. Most good names are long gone. The domain kanroo.app was one of the rare good ones still available.

The kangaroo became our mascot. It is a small pixel-art figure, and you can see it at the end of this story.

A calm place for work. Tasks and knowledge side by side, so nothing gets lost between tools.

Fair to small teams. Honest about what it does, and about what it does not do yet.

Built for the people who do the work. Kanroo has no built-in AI. If you use an agent, connect it through MCP, on your terms.

And always with an open exit. Export everything at any time, or run the core yourself.