Best Project Management for Indie Hackers

The Indie Hacker PM Problem

Ask an indie hacker what project management tool they use, and you'll get one of two answers. Either "Notion" followed by a 20-minute explanation of their custom workspace, or "nothing" followed by a shrug. Both answers lead to the same place: a project graveyard.

The Indie Hackers community has debated project management tools for years. Every few months, someone posts "What PM tool do you use?" and the same answers appear: Notion, Trello, Linear, spreadsheets, sticky notes, nothing.

What nobody asks is: "Are the people recommending these tools actually shipping?"

The standard listicle approach would rank tools by features, pricing, and UI polish. That's useless for indie hackers. You're not managing a team. You don't need resource allocation, Gantt charts, or permission systems. You need something that forces you to ship. So every tool on this list is scored against criteria that actually matter when you're building alone and trying to make money from it.

What Indie Hackers Actually Need

Before reviewing any tools, here are the criteria specific to indie hacker project management, where the whole point is getting to revenue.

1. Idea Validation That Saves You Months

The most expensive mistake an indie hacker makes isn't a bad deployment or a buggy feature. It's spending four months building something nobody wants. Your PM tool should have a way to pressure-test an idea before it becomes a project — just a structured process that makes you answer hard questions early. "Who is this for? Would they pay? Does it already exist? Can I build it in reasonable time?"

If your tool treats every idea like it deserves four months of work, it's failing you.

2. Speed to MVP Through Scope Control

You know the drill. You start with a landing page, a Stripe integration, and one core feature. Three weeks later you're building an admin dashboard, a notification system, and "maybe a mobile app later." Scope creep is the default outcome for indie hackers because there's nobody to push back when you add things.

Tools for indie hackers should make scope expansion hard. Not impossible, but hard enough that you have to consciously decide to increase scope rather than sleepwalking into it.

3. Revenue and Launch Orientation

Most PM tools are built around "getting work done." For indie hackers, the work isn't the point. Revenue is the point. Shipping is the point. A tool that helps you track 400 tasks but never asks "have you launched yet?" is solving the wrong problem.

4. Low Overhead

Every hour you spend configuring your PM tool is an hour you're not building your product. Setup should take minutes. Learning curve should be minimal. The tool should serve you, not the other way around.

5. Accountability When You're Your Own Boss

When you work at a company, someone will eventually ask why the project is behind schedule. When you're an indie hacker, nobody asks. You can silently abandon a project and the only consequence is a private repo collecting dust.

Good indie hacker tools fill this gap — streaks, progress tracking, abandonment records, public building logs. Something that makes the cost of quitting visible to you.

The Best Project Management for Indie Hackers, Reviewed Honestly

1. FoundStep

FoundStep was designed for indie hackers and solo developers who start projects but don't finish them. That's the entire premise. It's not a general purpose PM tool with an indie hacker mode bolted on. Every feature assumes one person trying to ship something and make money from it.

The standout feature for indie hackers is the 7-Step Validation Framework. Before you can start building, you score your idea against real criteria: market demand, competition, your ability to build it, monetization potential. It forces the conversation that most indie hackers skip entirely — "Should I actually build this?" instead of just diving in because the idea is exciting.

Scope Locking is the other big one. Once you commit to a feature set, FoundStep makes it hard to add more without acknowledging that you're expanding scope. You can still do it, but the decision is visible and recorded, which changes your behavior over time. And then there's Shame History, which keeps a permanent log of every project you abandoned. It sounds harsh because it is. But if you've got twelve dead repos on GitHub, maybe harsh is what you need.

The honest downside: FoundStep is opinionated about how you should work. If you already have strong shipping discipline and just want clean task tracking, this tool will feel restrictive. It prescribes a workflow. That's a feature if you lack discipline, and a bug if you don't.

Best for: Indie hackers who struggle with finishing. If your Product Hunt launches keep getting pushed to "next month" and next month never comes, FoundStep addresses the root cause. Check out how to validate ideas as a solo developer for more on why validation matters.

2. Notion

Notion is everywhere in the indie hacker community. Open Twitter, find any "building in public" thread, and someone will share their Notion dashboard. Templates for product roadmaps, customer trackers, content calendars, revenue dashboards. It looks fantastic in screenshots.

Here's the problem. Notion is so flexible that using it for project management becomes a project itself. You'll spend a Saturday building the perfect indie hacker workspace — custom databases for ideas, linked to projects, linked to tasks, with rollup fields showing completion percentages. It feels productive. It is not productive. You just built a tool instead of building your product.

Notion is genuinely good at some things: research organization, document storage, knowledge bases. If you need a place to dump your competitor analysis or store customer interview notes, Notion is hard to beat. It's just not good at making you ship. It won't stop you from adding features. It won't question whether your idea is worth building. It won't care if you haven't touched your project in a month.

Read more about why Notion is too complicated for side projects.

Best for: Knowledge management and documentation. Solid as a second tool, risky as your only tool.

3. Linear

Linear is the best-designed issue tracker available. Full stop. It's fast, keyboard-driven, and the UI is clean enough that using it feels genuinely good. A lot of indie hackers on Twitter use Linear and swear by it.

The thing is, Linear was built for engineering teams. Every concept — from cycles to projects to team views — assumes multiple people coordinating. You can use it solo, but Linear won't help with the hard parts of indie hacker project management. There's no idea validation. No scope locking. No accountability mechanism beyond self-imposed cycle deadlines that you can quietly extend whenever you want.

Linear tracks what you put into it and gives you a nice interface to look at. It won't push back when you dump forty issues into a cycle. Linear also has a generous free tier for solo use, which matters when you're bootstrapping.

Best for: Indie hackers who have shipping discipline and just need fast, beautiful issue tracking. If your problem is organization rather than completion, Linear is excellent. If your problem is finishing, Linear won't solve it.

4. Trello

Trello is how a lot of indie hackers start. Three columns: To Do, Doing, Done. Simple, works for small projects.

The problem shows up after a few weeks. Your To Do column has 47 cards. Your Doing column has 8 cards because you keep context-switching. Your Done column has 3 cards, and two of those are "Set up project" and "Create Trello board."

Trello has no opinion about how you should work. Cards just sit there, aging quietly, and the board becomes a monument to good intentions. For simple, short-term projects where scope is already defined and small, Trello is fine. For ongoing indie hacker work where discipline is the bottleneck, it's not enough.

Best for: Quick, visual task tracking on small, well-scoped projects.

5. Basecamp Personal

Basecamp has a strong philosophical stance about project management. Small batches. Shaped work. Fixed timelines. The "Shape Up" methodology is genuinely good, and a lot of it applies to indie hacker work.

The tool itself, though, is built for teams. To-dos, message boards, schedules — these make sense when a team of four is shipping a feature cycle. For one person, a message board is just a place to talk to yourself. What Basecamp gets right is the philosophy. Fixed time, variable scope. But the tool doesn't enforce it for solo use.

Best for: Indie hackers who love the Shape Up methodology. The philosophy is better than the solo experience.

6. Taskade

Taskade markets itself as the AI-powered workspace. You can describe a project and it generates a task breakdown. For brainstorming and early-stage thinking, the AI features are genuinely useful.

Where Taskade falls short for indie hackers is on the discipline side. All that AI generation makes it very easy to create a massive project plan in five minutes — now you have 200 AI-generated tasks and no system for completing them. The tool doesn't know which tasks matter, which ones are scope creep, or whether the project is worth building. It's a powerful creation tool with no built-in restraint.

Best for: Brainstorming and project kickoff. Good for generating initial structure. Weak on the follow-through that determines whether you actually launch.

7. Height

Height is the newer entrant competing with Linear. Clean interface, AI-powered task creation, good keyboard shortcuts. For indie hackers, Height has the same problem as Linear but with a smaller community and fewer integrations. It manages work but doesn't manage you.

Best for: Indie hackers who want Linear-like issue tracking with AI features.

Comparison Table

Tool	Idea Validation	Speed to MVP (Scope Control)	Launch Orientation	Low Overhead	Accountability
FoundStep	Yes (7-Step Validation)	Strong (Scope Locking)	Yes (phase-gated shipping)	Fast setup	Strong (Shame History)
Notion	No	No	No	Slow (heavy setup)	None
Linear	No	No	No	Fast setup	Weak (self-directed)
Trello	No	No	No	Fast setup	None
Basecamp	No	No	Partial (Shape Up philosophy)	Moderate setup	Weak
Taskade	No	No	No	Moderate (AI helps)	None
Height	No	No	No	Fast setup	None

The pattern is hard to ignore. Most indie hacker tools are actually team tools with a free tier. They solve the wrong problem — organizing work across people — when your actual challenge is getting yourself to ship something.

The Indie Hacker Shipping Workflow

For indie hackers who want a concrete process, not just a tool:

Phase 1: Validate (15 minutes). Before you create a repo, answer: Who has this problem? How painful is it? What exists already? Can you ship an MVP alone in four weeks? If the answers aren't strong, add the idea to your backlog and move on.

Phase 2: Plan (30 minutes). Define five to seven features. That's your MVP. Lock your scope.

Phase 3: Build (2-4 weeks). Build fast. Use AI coding tools. Ship the MVP, not the dream version. When you want to add something, write it down for v1.1. Don't expand scope. Don't unlock. Ship what you scoped.

Phase 4: Ship and share. Deploy. Get a Ship Card. Share it publicly. Add it to your Harbor. Move on to the next idea or iterate with v1.1.

For more on making your launches visible, see the build in public developer guide.

Our Pick

FoundStep is our top recommendation for the best project management for indie hackers. We built it, so yes, we're biased. But we built it because we were indie hackers using these other tools and none of them addressed why we weren't shipping.

The core argument is simple: indie hackers don't fail because they can't track tasks. They fail because they build the wrong things, they expand scope until the project is overwhelming, and nobody calls them out when they quietly abandon it. A scope-locked, validation-first system is the only approach on this list that directly targets all three of those failure modes.

But a discipline-enforced workflow is not for everyone. If you've already shipped multiple products and your discipline isn't the issue, Linear gives you cleaner issue tracking without the opinionated workflow. If you need a knowledge base, Notion is better for that. If your projects are small enough that a flat task list covers them, even a paper notebook works.

The honest recommendation: pick the tool that fixes your weakest point. If you're the indie hacker with twelve started projects and zero launches — who keeps saying "I'll launch next month" while adding one more feature — a purpose-built indie hacker productivity tool was made for you.

Check our pricing page if you want to see where FoundStep fits your budget.

Also see: best tools for indie hackers in 2026 for a broader look at the full stack.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tools do most indie hackers use?

Most bounce between Notion, Trello, and Linear. The common complaint is none of these are built for solo work. They're team tools repurposed for one person.

Do indie hackers need project management software?

You need a system, not necessarily software. But if your bottleneck is finishing projects (and for most indie hackers, it is), a tool that enforces discipline pays for itself.

What's the difference between indie hacker and solo developer tools?

Indie hackers care about revenue and speed to market. Solo developers may be building for fun or portfolio. The criteria overlap but indie hackers need stronger idea validation and launch orientation.

Is Notion good enough for indie hackers?

Notion is good for organizing research and notes. It's not good for shipping discipline. Most indie hackers who use Notion for PM end up building their system instead of their product.

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Tired of starting projects and not launching them? Try FoundStep and see if structured shipping discipline is what's been missing.