- Most Kanban tools treat your tasks and your codebase as two separate worlds. They are not, and pretending they are creates real overhead. - A task that doesn't move when you push a branch or open a PR forces you to maintain two systems simultaneously. - GitHub Projects is genuinely good for solo developers, but it has no deployment visibility and limited separation between features and bugs. - The useful distinction isn't between "simple" and "powerful" tools. It's between tools that know about your code and tools that don't. - If you're on a modern stack (Next.js, Vercel, GitHub), your board should reflect what's actually deployed, not just what's theoretically done. - AdeptDev connects your Kanban board directly to GitHub webhooks and Vercel deployments so tasks move when your code moves.

## The Board That Doesn't Know You Shipped You close a PR. The feature is merged, the Vercel build passes, and the thing is live. Then you open your project management tool and manually drag the card from "In Review" to "Completed" like it's 2009. Nobody talks about this tax. It's small enough per instance to feel trivial and large enough in aggregate to be genuinely annoying. This is the core problem with most Kanban tools for developers: they were built to track work, not to understand code. They're excellent at showing you what's supposed to be happening. They have no idea what's actually happening in your repository. The result is two parallel systems that you have to keep in sync by hand. That's not a workflow. That's busywork dressed up as a workflow.

## What "GitHub Integration" Actually Means (And Usually Doesn't) Every project management tool claims GitHub integration. Most of them mean you can paste a GitHub link into a card, or maybe display a PR status badge if you configure a webhook correctly on a Sunday afternoon. That's not integration. That's a hyperlink. Real GitHub integration means the board reacts to what happens in the repository. You push a branch with the issue number in the name and the card moves to "In Progress" automatically. You open a PR and it moves to "In Review." You merge and close the issue and it moves to "Completed." The board becomes a live reflection of the repository state, not a separate document you have to remember to update. Linear gets closer to this than most tools. But even Linear's GitHub sync is primarily about issue linking, not about making the board state a direct function of repository events.

## The Feature vs. Bug Problem Nobody Solves Well Here's the thing nobody mentions in Kanban tool reviews: features and bugs are not the same kind of work, and mixing them on one board creates a prioritisation mess. A bug that came in from a GitHub issue has a different urgency profile, a different origin, and a different resolution path than a roadmap feature you planned last quarter. Most tools give you one board and let you use labels to distinguish them. Labels are fine until you have forty cards and you're trying to figure out what's actually on fire right now versus what's on the roadmap for next month. The cognitive load of filtering and re-filtering is real. The cleaner model is two boards with a shared context: one for your roadmap (planned features, product work) and one for your bug tracker (GitHub issues, production problems). Same workspace, same team, different views.

## GitHub Projects Is Good. Here's Where It Stops Being Good. You could argue that GitHub Projects covers all of this for free. And you'd be partly right. For a solo developer on a tight budget who lives entirely inside GitHub, it's a genuinely solid option. The automation rules are real, the issue linking is native, and you don't have to pay for another tool. But GitHub Projects has no deployment visibility. It doesn't know whether your Vercel build succeeded. It doesn't show you environment variables, build logs, or whether the thing you just marked "Done" is actually live in production. You finish a card in GitHub Projects and then you open a new tab to check Vercel to confirm the deployment went through. That tab-switching is the gap. For a team shipping to Vercel multiple times a day, that gap compounds. It's not catastrophic. It's just friction that accumulates.

## What Deployment Visibility Changes Most developers underestimate how often they check deployment status during a normal workday. A build kicks off when you push. You want to know if it passed. You check Vercel. Then you go back to your task. Then the build finishes and you check again. It's a five-second action repeated fifteen times a day, and each repetition is a context switch. The useful thing about having deployment status inside your board isn't that it saves you those five seconds. It's that it closes the loop between "task done" and "thing shipped." When you can see that the card you just moved to "Completed" corresponds to a successful production deployment, you're not maintaining a mental model across two tools. You have one source of truth. This matters more than it sounds. The mental overhead of tracking state across multiple dashboards is where small teams lose hours they don't notice losing.

## Choosing a Kanban Tool: The Actual Decision Here's the honest breakdown of how to think about this choice based on where you are. | Situation | Tool That Makes Sense | Why | |---|---|---| | Solo dev, tight budget, lives in GitHub | GitHub Projects | Free, native issue linking, good enough automation | | Solo dev or small team, wants clean UI, no deployment needs | Linear | Best pure issue tracker available. Fast, opinionated, excellent. | | Team using Notion for everything | Notion databases | Convenient if you're already there, but automation is weak | | Small team on Vercel + GitHub wanting one workspace | AdeptDev | Two boards, GitHub webhooks, Vercel deployment tracking in one place | | Team that needs heavy reporting, sprints, stakeholder views | Jira or Shortcut | Worth the overhead if you actually need those features | The mistake most developers make is choosing based on feature lists rather than on where the actual friction in their workflow is. Audit your tab-switching before you pick a tool.

## The Four-Column Flow and Why It Works Most Kanban boards for developers converge on the same four columns: **Todo**, **In Progress**, **In Review**, **Completed**. There's a reason for that. It maps directly to the code lifecycle: something is planned, someone is working on it, it's in a PR waiting for review, and it's merged. Where teams go wrong is adding columns that don't map to real state changes. "Backlog," "On Hold," "Blocked," "Needs Design" all sound useful and all create a board where cards go to die. If a column doesn't have a clear entry condition and a clear exit condition, it becomes a graveyard. Keep the four columns. Use labels for nuance. Move cards when the code moves, not when you remember to.

## Wrap Up The problem with developer Kanban isn't that good tools don't exist. It's that most tools were built for tracking work in the abstract, not for tracking work that lives in a repository and ships through a deployment pipeline. The gap between "task marked done" and "thing actually deployed" is where the real friction hides. If you're on a modern stack and your board doesn't react to your repository, you're maintaining two systems by hand. That's the thing worth fixing. Audit your current workflow, figure out where you're doing manual sync work, and choose a tool that closes that loop. If you're building on GitHub and Vercel and you want your Kanban board to actually know what's happening in your codebase, try AdeptDev free for 7 days at adeptdev.io.

## What is the best Kanban board for solo developers? GitHub Projects is the best free option if you're already inside GitHub and don't need deployment visibility. Linear is the best pure issue tracker if you want a fast, opinionated UI. If you're on Vercel and GitHub and want your board to reflect deployment state automatically, AdeptDev is built specifically for that workflow. The right answer depends on where your actual friction is, not on feature counts. ## Does GitHub have a built-in Kanban board? Yes. GitHub Projects includes a Kanban-style board view with automation rules. You can configure it to move cards when issues are opened, closed, or when PRs are merged. It's genuinely useful and free. The main limitation is that it has no visibility into your deployment pipeline, so you won't see Vercel build status or logs without switching tabs. ## How do I connect my Kanban board to GitHub? The mechanism is webhooks. Your project management tool registers a webhook URL with GitHub, and GitHub sends events (push, PR opened, issue closed) to that URL. The tool then uses those events to update card state. Linear, GitHub Projects, and AdeptDev all support this. The quality of the integration varies: some tools only link issues, others actually move cards based on repository events. ## Should I use one Kanban board or separate boards for features and bugs? Separate boards are almost always cleaner for developers. Features on a roadmap board have a different lifecycle and urgency than bugs coming in from production. Mixing them forces you to filter constantly. The practical model is two boards in one workspace: one for planned product work, one for GitHub issues and production bugs. This keeps prioritisation decisions clean without fragmenting your context. ## Why does my Kanban board feel like extra work instead of less? Because you're maintaining it manually. If you're dragging cards after you push code, after you open PRs, and after you close issues, the board is a second job. The fix is automation: your board should react to repository events, not wait for you to remember to update it. Any tool that doesn't move cards automatically when code moves is adding overhead, not reducing it. ## Can I track Vercel deployments inside a project management tool? Most project management tools don't support this natively. You'd need a custom Vercel webhook pointing to a Zapier or Make automation, which adds complexity and maintenance overhead. AdeptDev integrates Vercel deployment tracking directly into the workspace, so build status, logs, and environment info are visible next to your tasks without a separate integration layer. ## Is Linear better than Jira for small development teams? For most small teams (one to five people), yes. Linear is faster to set up, has a cleaner interface, and doesn't require a dedicated admin to maintain. Jira's power comes from its configurability and reporting depth, which are genuinely valuable for larger teams with complex sprint requirements. If you don't have a Scrum Master and you're not generating stakeholder reports, Jira's overhead is cost without benefit.