Short answer: the company shut down; the project didn't. On April 10, 2026, Louis Knight-Webb announced that Bloop — the company operating Vibe Kanban — is closing. The Vibe Kanban project itself lives on, open source and community-maintained. But the announcement carried real consequences for users: remote services stayed up for only 30 days, subscriptions were terminated, and the funded roadmap is gone. Here's what the announcement actually said, what it changes for your workflow, and the realistic options if you decide to move.
What the announcement actually said
The shutdown post (vibekanban.com/blog/shutdown) is unusually candid about the reason. Vibe Kanban had thousands of daily users, but as the team put it, “the vast majority are free users and we couldn't find a business model that we could get excited about.” Bloop refunded recent invoices, terminated subscriptions, and committed to releasing “a roadmap for the community maintained edition” — the project is Apache-2.0, so the code was never at risk of disappearing.
What stopped working — and what didn't
The operative line for existing users: “Remote services will remain available for 30 days, after which Vibe Kanban will transition to a fully local architecture.” That window closed in mid-May 2026. Remote kanban issues, comments, projects and organizations are gone; local workspaces continue to function. The final company-shipped release added a data export feature, so if you had boards living in the remote service, the export was the way out — anything you didn't export is now behind a switched-off service.
Can you just keep using it?
Honestly — yes, with eyes open. Vibe Kanban still does what made it popular: cards dispatch 10+ agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Amp, Aider and more) across parallel git worktrees, cross-platform, via npx vibe-kanban. None of that required Bloop's servers. What changed is the trajectory: development now depends on volunteers rather than a funded team, and nobody can promise how quickly the community edition picks up security patches, agent-CLI breakage or OS updates. For a personal workflow that's often an acceptable bet. For a team process, it's worth at least knowing the field — our full PortBay vs Vibe Kanban comparison spells out where it still wins.
The landscape, honestly
If the shutdown is your prompt to re-evaluate, the agent-orchestration field in mid-2026 splits by interface and by one structural question — does the agent get anything beyond a bare git worktree to work in? Kanbots is the closest like-for-like replacement: a cross-platform, MIT-licensed Kanban board over worktrees, launched May 2026 and moving fast, with the maturity caveats that implies. Claude Squad keeps the parallelism in the terminal — tmux session plus worktree per agent, no board. Superset models every task as a workspace headed for a PR, a clean fit for teams that already review everything that way. And Conductoris the Mac-native, diff-first review UI, closed source with a narrower agent roster. All four share Vibe Kanban's core assumption: the agent works in a checkout, and the runtime, database and server are your problem.
PortBay is the exception to that assumption, and it's the tool we build, so weigh the framing accordingly. The board works the way Vibe Kanban taught everyone — write a card, assign an agent, watch it move to Done — but each card lives inside a running local environment: managed PHP or Node runtime, a per-project MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL database, trusted HTTPS on a real .test domain, mail capture, an optional public tunnel. The agent doesn't just edit files; it verifies its work against the running app before the card moves. The trade runs the other way: macOS-only (Apple Silicon), four agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity) rather than ten, and one agent per card rather than maximum parallelism. The full orchestrator roundup puts all of these side by side in one table.
If you move to PortBay
There's no board import — PortBay reads project folders, not Vibe Kanban's data export. In practice that matters less than it sounds: your projects are plain folders on disk and your agents are CLIs already installed and authenticated, so the move is pointing PortBay at the same folders, pressing Play, and recreating your open tasks as cards. Same subscriptions, same CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files, same MCP setup. The switch guide has the four-step version, including the honest case for keeping Vibe Kanban around — it remains the better pick for many-agent worktree runs and for anyone on Windows or Linux. PortBay is a free download, open source under AGPL-3.0, so trying it next to your current setup costs nothing — switching isn't destructive, and nothing about your existing tools changes until you retire them.