Project management · cost comparison
Trello vs self-hosted Vikunja: what each actually costs
Trello on the Standard tier against Vikunja running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
There is no bill to beat here. Trello costs nothing at 10 people, so running Vikunja yourself costs you $42.30 a month more, not less. The reason to do it is who holds the data, not what it costs.
- Trello
- $0.00per month, Standard
- Self-hosted
- $42.30server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $4.80Basic, 1 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $1,673 extra to self-host
- Break-even
- neverafter $150 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Trello | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $0.00 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | -$1,673 |
| 5 people | $0.00 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | -$1,673 |
| 10 people | $0.00 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | -$1,673 |
| 25 people | $150 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$3,727 |
| 50 people | $300 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$9,127 |
| 100 people | $600 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$19,927 |
| 250 people | $1,500 | $45.54 | $8.04 | CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB) | +$52,211 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around 25 people.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $4.00 | Basic at Kamatera: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB disk |
| Backups | $0.80 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $37.50 | 0.5 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $42.30 | Plus $150 once, for roughly 2 hours of first-time setup |
Trello at this size costs $0.00 a month. Trello's own free plan covers teams of up to 10 users, so a team of 10 pays nothing for the licence.
Read this before you price anything
Trello's Free plan covers up to 10 collaborators per Workspace, with a limit of 10 boards. A team inside that limit pays nothing, so self-hosting a replacement saves nothing either.
What Vikunja needs to run at 10 people
A single Go binary with SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL. Kanban, list and Gantt views without the operational weight of Plane.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 0.7 GB | 0.5 GB for the stack at rest, plus 3 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 6 GB | 5 GB base, plus 0.1 GB per user |
| vCPU | 1 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Trello has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $0.80 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- Vikunja is a light lift: one container and no scheduled work beyond image updates. That is why the maintenance line is 0.5 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. Vikunja covers the core of what teams use Trello for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put Vikunja
0.7 GB of memory and 6 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Basic at Kamatera for $4.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and may well undercut it. Price them yourself before you commit.
The Kamatera link above is an affiliate link: if you open a paying account through it, Kamatera pays us a one-time commission of $75 (in most countries). That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
Vikunja at a glance
| Licence | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | Go |
| GitHub stars | 5,364, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | v2.6.0 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | vikunja.io · go-vikunja/vikunja |
Get the migration checklist for this tool
A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.
Questions people actually ask
How much does Trello cost?
Trello Standard costs $0.00 a month at 10 people: USD 6.00 per seat per month; free for up to 10 users. That figure was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-14.
What does it cost to self-host Vikunja?
$42.30 a month at 10 people: $4.00 for the Basic at Kamatera, $0.80 of backups, and $37.50 for the 0.5 hours a month it takes to look after.
Is Vikunja cheaper than Trello?
Not at 10 people, where self-hosting costs $1,673 more over three years, but it becomes cheaper from 25 people upwards.
What server does Vikunja need?
At 10 people, 0.7 GB of memory and 6 GB of disk. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read, is the Basic at Kamatera for $4.00 a month.
How much work is Vikunja to run?
It is rated easy: about 2 hours to set up and 0.5 hours a month afterwards, priced at $75.00 an hour in the figures above.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trello Standard | USD 6.00 per seat per month; free for up to 10 users | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-14 |
| Kamatera Basic | $4.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-14 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| Vikunja sizing | 0.5 GB base, 3 MB per user | project documentation | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-14, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.