Project and task management decision
Shortcut
A single developer can build a narrow Shortcut replacement (kanban, stories, roadmap, basic reports) in ~1 week, but reproducing Shortcut's full feature set (AI agents, integrations, enterprise security, compliance, and scale) is not practical without a larger team and multi‑month effort.
Visit website↗$8.5/mo
$102/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$0/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Shortcut alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code Shortcut publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
What a replacement has to do
- Create and update work items (Stories/Epics), move items on a Kanban board, view a roadmap and basic reports.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise features (SSO, SCIM, audit logs, volume discounts)
- Advanced integrations and VCS/MCP server sync
- Built-in AI agent (Korey) and agent coordination
- Advanced reporting, unlimited storage quotas, and paid support/SLAs
- Compliance attestations (SOC2/HIPAA) and mature security controls
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal project-management web app in Node.js + Express, PostgreSQL, and React. Implement: user signup/login, workspace and team model, Stories and Epics with CRUD, a Kanban board UI to move Stories between states, a Roadmap view listing Epics, an endpoint producing simple reports (velocity, cycle time), and a Dockerfile + deploy guide for a single VPS. Out of scope: SSO/SCIM, enterprise billing, AI agents, advanced integrations. Include error handling, basic tests for backend routes and core UI flows, and database migrations.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productShortcut — official product
- official pricingShortcut pricing
- official docsShortcut Docs — product docs
- open sourceopf/openproject
- open sourcemakeplane/plane
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
