The first-ever Kanban board was created by a Toyota engineer in the 1940s to reduce inefficiencies in supply chain management.
Since then, it has become a popular tool for visualizing complex business processes and workflows, with columns, rows, groups, and individual tasks represented by moveable cards.
This blog shares the best free Notion Kanban Board templates to boost productivity. Plus, some alternative options for those seeking advanced task management features. 🌈
Let’s discuss how Kanban templates can help keep your team on the same page—and track your projects and tasks better.
Free Notion Kanban Board Templates
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Makes a Good Notion Kanban Template?
While teams that use Notion for project management might be more comfortable with Notion Gantt Charts, finding the right Kanban board template in Notion is key.
Here are the essential components to look for when picking a Notion Kanban template:
- Adaptable columns: A good template should allow you to change the number and names of columns to reflect the various phases of your workflow
- Consolidated task management: Tools for assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and assessing progress are essential for tracking project milestones
- Visual enhancements: Look for layouts with color coding and other visually appealing features, making the board easier to read and comprehend
- Automation tools: Templates with built-in automation for repeating actions and notifications can save time and reduce the chance of human error
With that in mind, let’s look at some examples of Notion Kanban Board templates.
Summarize this article for me pleaseFree Notion Kanban Board Templates
1. MYP Design Cycle Project Tracking Template (Kanban style)
The MYP Design Cycle Project Tracking Template is ideal for educators who teach the MYP Design curriculum and need to track their progress through the 16 phases of the MYP design cycle.
It simplifies management for design educators by offering a clear, structured way to guide students through the design process. The template also tracks phases and allows for adjustments as projects evolve.
You get customizable Kanban cards for each broad phase of the MYP Design Cycle —Investigate, Plan, Create, Evaluate, and Share—and the flexibility to edit cards as project stages change.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
The Kanban template helps the educator grade designs. The board allows students to manage their workflow while giving educators a bird’s-eye view of the entire class’ progress.
2. CRM Professional System Template
The CRM Professional System Template is designed to help you manage clients, leads, and deals in a well-organized workspace. It is great for sales and customer success executives who need to manage customer data, track sales pipelines, follow up on tasks, and view customer interactions.
It comes with built-in automation to help streamline client follow-ups and progress tracking. You can use it to visualize sales pipelines with built-in views and customize properties to fit specific CRM needs.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
Think of a consultant who’s juggling multiple clients at different stages in their project lifecycle. The template helps them manage all their project/sales activities in one place, allowing for more efficiency, better client retention, and smoother project management.
3. Anthropic’s Project Planner Template
Anthropic’s Project Planner provides a dual-database setup for tracking high-level project overviews and detailed task lists. It helps teams manage large projects with actionable tasks while monitoring progress.
Using the project planner template, you and your team can see the project from the start of planning to execution. Its two-tiered structure (overview + tasks) ensures every detail gets noticed while keeping long-term objectives in sight.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
This template is ideal for a small product development team that manages several projects simultaneously. They can use the Anthropic Project Planner template to track long-term project goals while breaking down the day-to-day tasks needed to meet deadlines. As team members complete their tasks, the timeline and overall project progress are easily tracked and adjusted as necessary.
4. Task Manager Dashboard
The Task Manager Dashboard Template enables users to organize tasks, set priorities, and monitor workflow effortlessly. It provides a centralized hub where all project—and task-related information is available at a glance, helping users stay on top of deadlines and daily to-dos.
With this template, you can create a dashboard in Notion to get a clear visual representation of your task progress.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
A project manager handling multiple deadlines and deliverables can use the task manager dashboard template to keep all tasks organized in one place. With the ability to set priorities, they can focus on high-importance items while ensuring that minor tasks do not slip through the cracks.
5. Issue Tracker Template
The Issue Tracker Template is designed for teams, especially those using Agile methodologies, to keep track of project bugs, tasks, and issues.
Its customizable sprints, prioritization system, and integration capabilities help you deal with issues systematically. The templates come with sprint management with backlog prioritization to identify bugs, prioritize solutions, and assign tasks to your team members.
You also get filtering options by status, priority, team member, and integrations with Github, Slack, and other essential tools used by your development teams.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
A team working on a product release can use the Issue Tracker template to keep track of QA-reported bugs, streamlining the release process. Each issue is assigned to the appropriate developer, prioritized by severity, and tracked through the sprint cycle to ensure it’s resolved before the next release.
Read More: 20+ Kanban Board Examples for Teams
Summarize this article for me pleaseLimitations of Using Notion for Kanban Boards
When selecting a Kanban template in Notion, it’s important to be aware of certain features that might complicate or hinder your workflow rather than streamline it.
The primary challenge of using Notion Kanban boards is that they only provide an overview of your tasks and projects and need more planning, scheduling, and tracking features, which are necessary for project management.
Following are some of the predominant limitations of using Notion Kanban boards:
- There are no time tracking or cost estimate features in Notion Kanban boards. While you can delegate tasks to your team members, you can’t monitor their work hours or labor costs
- No conditional automation to keep tasks moving between stages
- The lack of dashboards, as well as dedicated goals and OKRs trackers, make it limited to specific use cases
- Templates with too many categories and lack of customization can make your boards look cluttered and difficult to navigate, reducing overall efficiency
- While intuitive, Notion has a high learning curve, especially for new users. Many need to rely on external resources like YouTube tutorials for smooth usage
As we see above, although Notion has some great templates, it has significant limitations in terms of scalability and integrations.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAlternatives to Notion Kanban Templates
While looking for better Notion alternatives, ClickUp stands out with its easy user interface and collaborative tools.
ClickUp is a free project management solution that allows teams to manage numerous workflows, interact more effectively, and consolidate all work into one application with its multiple collaborative features, including Kanban boards.
The best part? You can customize ClickUp’s Kanban Board to fit any team size.
Let’s check out some of the best Kanban Board templates from ClickUp.
1. ClickUp Kanban Board Template
The ClickUp Kanban Board Template is designed to categorize tasks into columns such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done.” It allows you to track workflows, manage large projects, and gain insights into bottlenecks.
The template also integrates helpful features like custom statuses (e.g., Closed, In Progress, Blocked) and custom fields for categorizing tasks, offering high flexibility for different workflows.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
The Kanban Board Template is perfect for project managers who oversee multiple teams and complex projects. They can set customizable statuses and monitor the steps of each task, making it ideal for managing both high-level project goals and day-to-day tasks.
2. ClickUp Kanban View Roadmap Template
The ClickUp Kanban View Roadmap Template is a flexible and customizable tool that helps teams visualize how individual contributions shape the final project outcomes.
For example, if you’re working on a task like creating a landing page, the roadmap shows how it directly supports the broader goal, such as a product launch. It lets you see how your work fits into the larger project timeline.
The visual board layout system allows teams to assign tasks to team members and track progress efficiently with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
This template is particularly useful for product development or marketing teams that need to manage long-term projects with clear milestones. It provides a structured view of ongoing tasks and their deadlines so you and your team can align daily activities with broader strategic objectives.
3. ClickUp Kanban Software Development Template
The ClickUp Kanban Software Development Template is a specialized tool for software development teams using Agile methodologies. It provides a visual workflow management method in which work is represented by cards that move through different stages of the software development process.
Its sprint planning, backlog prioritization, and issue-tracking features help developers better manage tasks in a sprint-based workflow.
Further, this template allows the Agile teams to track progress across stages like development, review, and deployment.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
Dev teams can use this software development template to manage bugs, tackle feature requests, and deploy code at every stage of the software development lifecycle. This ensures that software releases are on time and within scope.
4. ClickUp Kanban Agile Project Management Template
The ClickUp Kanban Agile Project Management Template is built for non-software development teams looking to implement Agile methodology. Customizable views, such as task boards and timelines, help manage complex projects easily.
With sprint planning and workload-tracking features, you can evaluate each task’s progress from backlog to completion.
You also get custom automation and sprint point tracking, which streamline your project management and ensure you nail those hectic sprint cycles.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
The Kanban Agile Project Management template can prove useful for project managers overseeing iterative development cycles. It helps teams maintain an Agile workflow, promoting flexibility and responsiveness to changes in project requirements.
💡Pro Tip: Agile teams working in sprints can use 13 different ClickApps in ClickUp to customize workload management, team collaboration, organization, and work progress reports.
5. ClickUp Simple Sprints Kanban Template
The ClickUp Simple Sprints Kanban Template is ideal for Agile teams looking for a straightforward way to manage sprints with features and components such as task assignments, progress tracking, and backlog organization.
With a clean structure and pre-configured statuses like “Open,” “In Progress,” and “Closed,” ClickUp’s Simple Sprints Kanban Template lets you quickly set up and manage your sprint cycles.
📑Who can use this Kanban Template?
The Simple Sprints Kanban Template template is great for smaller teams or those new to Agile project management. It simplifies the sprint process while providing essential tools for tracking progress and ensuring that tasks move smoothly through the workflow.
Summarize this article for me pleaseUse Kanban Boards to Visualize Projects Better in ClickUp
While Notion offers a range of useful Kanban templates for organizing workflows, it has limited integrations and scalability.
That’s where ClickUp’s Kanban board templates provide you with a more efficient solution.
ClickUp’s Kanban boards allow you to fully customize your workflow with color-coded statuses, custom fields, and task automation. You can also use collaborative features, like ClickUp Chat and mentions, to communicate with your team while managing tasks on a Kanban board.
Whether you’re managing simple tasks or complex projects, ClickUp’s Kanban boards offer flexibility, clarity, and control, making it easier to keep teams aligned and projects on track.
Sign up to ClickUp and try these templates to streamline your workflow, boost collaboration, and improve overall productivity.
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