What makes Elemo unique compared to other project management tools?

[fajremvp]

Hi! 👋

I'm very interested in Elemo and I'm exploring different project management tools.
What do you see as Elemo's main unique points compared to other solutions (like Trello, Taiga, Plane, OpenProject, etc.)?

Thanks for the amazing work! 🚀

[gabor-boros]

Hey @fajremvp,

First off, really glad to hear you're interested!

It's a bit tricky to give concrete examples at this point, since Elemo doesn't yet support basic project management features. Most of what I can share is still conceptual or in early stage. That said, here are a few thoughts and personal opinions, which, of course, might not be for everyone:

Personally, while I respect the effort behind all project management platforms, I think many of them are fundamentally flawed. They often try to impose rigid data structures on users, which doesn't align well with how complex and interconnected real-world projects can be. Elemo aims to approach this differently. In addition to upcoming user experience improvements, we're implementing a hybrid use of graph and relational databases to provide a more flexible and intuitive project overview.

Also, unlike some of the tools you mentioned, Elemo is planned to be more than just a PM tool or issue tracker, it's designed to support collaboration, including working together on documents. Think of it as a blend of Confluence and Jira, but without the overly complex workflows.

Another common issue with current tools, in my opinion, is how they handle collaboration across teams or with clients. You're often forced to duplicate boards or create awkward workarounds using team-specific projects. Elemo will address this by introducing namespaces, allowing you to organize projects, assign namespace-specific roles, and eliminate the need for those workarounds. A thoughtful, mostly one-time setup of namespaces can fix a lot of the pain points that other tools still struggle with.

While some tools already offer this, Elemo also includes personal todo lists, currently pretty straightforward, but the goal is to evolve them into something more powerful and versatile down the line.

There's much more I could share, but I'd rather wait until more of it is actually in development.

That being said, join our Discord or Slack. I would be happy to see your contributions around! 😊

[fajremvp]

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply! 🙌 I really appreciate you taking the time to explain the vision behind Elemo – it makes total sense now.

I’m studying Software Engineering in Brazil, and so far the only project management tool I’ve really used is Trello, so it’s exciting to see a fresh approach like Elemo.

I’m still building my experience, but I’d love to contribute to the project as I keep learning and improving my skills. Is there anything specific I could help with right now?

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and for the warm welcome!

[gabor-boros]

You are most welcomed @fajremvp! I'll open several GitHub issues with the good first issue label, so you may select what would fit the best for you. If you help me out with what you are interested in (front-end, backend, devops, etc), I can help you recommend GitHub issues 😇

[fajremvp]

Thanks a lot! 🙌 I have some experience with Java, Bash Script, Linux and a bit of frontend (HTML/CSS/JS). I’d love to help with documentation improvements or smaller tasks.
I’m especially interested in helping with frontend contributions — like the project’s website, UI polishing, or even some design-related tasks. I should mention I don’t have experience with Go or TypeScript (yet), but I’m eager to learn as I go.
I could also contribute by creating specification documents, diagrams, or other planning materials if that would be useful. I’m still learning, but I’d be happy to begin with smaller issues to understand the workflow and gradually contribute more.

[gabor-boros]

You are most welcomed, @fajremvp! It is quite rare that someone would like to contribute documentation, which is glad to hear you would happily do that. We will need a ton of documentation for sure, like "user guides", process docs, and similar. Also, developer documentation and architecture docs would be good but would be hard to do without backend knowledge, so I wouldn't recommend that. That being said, help with user guides would be awesome, but we don't have much to showcase.

However, in the meantime, if you would like to do some smaller front-end tasks, #262 is quite small. It is about adding a single component which works well with TanStack Start/TanStack Router and setting its color to the primary color we have (oklch(0.5194 0.2033 262.12) or #1e5ddb in other words).