Compare · last checked October 2026
Portia vs Vibe Kanban
Vibe Kanban is an open-source board where each card runs an agent in its own worktree and merges back with one click. The company behind it closed in April 2026; the project continues in the community.
Vibe Kanban starts with npx vibe-kanban and gives you a board. Each card is a task; an agent runs it in its own worktree, and when it is done you merge it back (rebase onto main, merge, clean up) or open a PR. It supports Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Amp, Cursor's agent, OpenCode and others, and has an MCP server so other tools can create cards.
The pitch is that planning and review by people is now the bottleneck, and a board with many cards in flight removes the dead time of waiting on one agent.
That is a good fit for a backlog of unrelated tasks. Portia is for the other case, one feature whose tickets depend on each other: it keeps them on an integration branch, orders them by dependency, writes the acceptance specs first, and leaves the merge to main to a person.
| Portia | Vibe Kanban | |
|---|---|---|
| Who proves the work is right, and when | The tests, written first and signed off by a person before any wave; then the gate on each child's rebased head; then you, at the one PR. | You, per card, before its one-click merge. |
| Where rework shows up | At the gate, per child, before it lands: a failed exit gate retries with the failure in its brief. Siblings never touch the same file, so there is nothing to reconcile at the end. | At each card's merge: it rebases onto main, so conflicts and breakage surface then, after the work. |
| Unit of work | An epic, or a story big enough to split into children. | A card. One task per card, one worktree per task. |
| What you get back | One reviewed pull request for the whole feature, with a ledger of every child and the evidence for each scenario in its description. | A one-click merge (rebase onto main, merge, clean up) or a PR per card. |
| Where the agents run | Your machine, or a build box you open over SSH. One git worktree per child. | Your machine, from npx vibe-kanban. |
| Which agents | Claude Code, on your own subscription. Workers follow the target repo's CLAUDE.md, skills and settings. | Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Amp, Cursor Agent, OpenCode and more. |
| Planning | A wave table drawn from the tickets and shown to you first. Written back into the tickets, with each dependency as a blocker link. | A board you fill. |
| Tests before features | The spine writes every acceptance scenario as a failing spec. You sign off before any wave starts. | If you ask for them. |
| Isolation between tasks | A worktree, branch, port and database per child. No two children in a wave touch the same file. | A worktree per card. |
| Gates before landing | Task gate; exit gate, run again on the rebased head; CI; an optional review of each child; the epic gate. | None built in. |
| Who merges | You. Children squash-merge into an integration branch, pinned to the commit their gate passed. Portia never merges to main. | You, per card; its merge rebases onto main. |
| Tracker | Jira or GitHub Issues. | Its own board, plus an MCP server for other clients. |
| Model choice | Per child, from its tier: a cheaper model for routine children, a stronger one for the hard ones. | Per agent. |
| Spend and capacity | Caps per worker, per wave and per epic. Waves are sized from free memory and the other runs on the machine. | Your subscriptions. |
| Unattended, and resuming | Parks with one question instead of guessing. Detached workers outlive the session, with a stall detector; portia resume picks a run back up. | Remote access, per its blog. |
| Licence and price | Free. Source on GitHub. | Open source, Apache-2.0. The company closed in April 2026; community-maintained since. |
What Vibe Kanban does that Portia doesn't
- A board is a familiar way to see many small tasks at once.
- Many agent families.
- Nothing to install: npx.
Choose Vibe Kanban when
You have a backlog of unrelated small tasks and want to hand them out and merge them one by one.
Choose Portia when
The tasks make one feature. Portia keeps them on one integration branch, orders them by dependency, and never merges to main itself.
Questions
- Is Vibe Kanban still maintained?
- Its blog says the company shut down and the project continues as open source, community-maintained. Check the repository for current activity before relying on it.
Sources
Vibe Kanban's column comes from the pages below, read in October 2026. Portia's comes from its README and reference. If a cell is wrong, open an issue.