Orbit documentation
Orbit is a free, realtime, keyboard-first task manager. Issues, boards, sprints, projects and docs, all of which update the moment anyone changes anything.
There is no pricing, no billing and no paid tier, so nothing in these docs is gated behind a plan.
Start here
| If you want to | Read |
|---|---|
| Run Orbit on your machine in five minutes | Getting started |
| Understand what Orbit calls things | Concepts |
| Put Orbit on the internet for your team | Self-hosting |
| Look up an environment variable | Configuration |
| Stop reaching for the mouse | Keyboard shortcuts |
| Let an AI agent read and update your board | MCP server |
| Connect GitHub | Integrations |
| Know how the realtime sync actually works | Architecture |
| Write or run the tests | Testing |
| Fix something that broke | Troubleshooting |
| See what is coming | Roadmap |
| Contribute | CONTRIBUTING.md |
The five minute version
The canonical quick start is in Getting started. Follow that page for the full commands and troubleshooting notes.
What Orbit is
- Issues with priorities, labels, states, estimates, assignees, multiple reviewers and relations, as a fast list or a drag-and-drop board.
- Sprints and cycles for timeboxed planning, with scope, points and burndown.
- Projects and milestones that group work across teams.
- Docs with a rich editor, living next to the issues they describe.
- Standup as a Kanban of the whole workspace, filtered to work a person owns or reviews with a click.
- Analytics: scope, throughput, churn and distribution by assignee, project, label and estimate.
- Search, filters and saved views, shared with the team or kept private.
- Realtime everywhere. A change writes to Postgres, publishes to Redis, and fans out over a websocket to everyone allowed to see it.
- An MCP server, so an agent can read the board and file work with the same permissions the person who authorised it has.
- Notifications, an inbox and GitHub integration.
What Orbit is not
It has no pricing, no seats and no usage limits, and it never will. It does not phone home. It does not try to be a CRM, a helpdesk or a spreadsheet. When there are two reasonable ways to do something, Orbit picks one and fixes that one.
Getting help
- Discussions for questions.
- Issues for bugs and concrete work.
- SECURITY.md for anything that should not be public.
If a page here is wrong or missing something, that is a bug. Please tell us.