Tarsen vs Kan

Choose Kan if

There are real reasons to pick Kan, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

• —You want the source code. Kan is open source; Tarsen is not. If that is the deciding factor, it decides it.
• —You need to self-host, on your own hardware or inside your own network.
• —You would rather have a small, simple tool than a larger one, and you do not want AI features anywhere near your work.

Tarsen is hosted software. You can take your data out at any time as JSON or CSV, and put it back in the same way, but you cannot run it yourself, and that is a genuine difference rather than a detail.

Choose Tarsen if

• —You want to run the board by talking to it, not by dragging cards and filling in forms.
• —You want the board to answer “what should I do today?”, not just store cards.
• —You want your AI assistant connected to the real board over MCP, rather than pasting cards into a chat window.
• —You want a calendar and a timeline now rather than later.
• —You want recurring cards that cannot pile up while you are away.

Where the products actually differ

Both present the familiar Kanban basics, and Kan's public pages highlight board visibility, members, Trello import, labels, filters, comments, activity logs and templates. Those are not the only things to compare. What follows is the split that matters to a team choosing between them.

Kan facts were checked against kan.bn, kan.bn/pricing, and docs.kan.bn/introduction on 3 August 2026. Product pages change, so check those sources before you decide.

The part that is hard to put in a table

A Kanban board tells you what exists. It does not tell you what to do next, and on a busy board those are very different questions. That gap is the thing Tarsen was built around.

• —Mission Mode picks a realistic set of cards for today, ordered by what it costs to leave each one undone, and sized by how many cards you actually finish in a day.
• —My Work and Inbox answer “what is mine” and “what changed” without you building a saved view for it.
• —Ask Tarsen answers questions about the workspace and proposes changes you confirm before anything is written.
• —The calendar shows the booked estimate on each day, so you can see a week is already full before you agree to more.

If none of that appeals, most of Tarsen's advantage disappears and the two tools are much closer than this page makes them sound.

Price

Tarsen is free for one person, with unlimited projects, the full board, the command palette, keyboard navigation, Trello import, JSON and CSV export, 15 AI requests a day and 15 one-off minutes of talking to your board. Pro is £12 per seat per month, or £120 per seat per year, and lifts the member and saved-view limits, raises AI to 100 requests a day, gives everyone 30 minutes a month of talking to Tarsen with the option to carry on using your own OpenAI key, and turns on email notifications and the finer permissions.

Kan currently lists Free, Teams, Pro∞, and Enterprise plans, alongside open-source and on-premise options. Check kan.bn/pricing for current prices and terms rather than trusting a comparison page.