Best HacknPlan Alternatives in 2024: Review and Comparison
Looking for a HacknPlan alternative? You've come to the right place.
There are hundreds of various project management tools out there, with new ones launched nearly every month. Yet HacknPlan stands out among its competition. It's one of the few tools designed to fit the workflow of game development teams. It offers a number of unique and specialized features, such as its Game Design Model.
But while HacknPlan is a great tool, it's not without its shortcomings, and there are many reasons why you may be looking for an alternative to HacknPlan:
Some users find HacknPlan too slow and clunky (source)
HacknPlan is fairly bloated with features and can be challenging to set up (source)
Performing certain basic actions requires a large number of clicks (source)
HacknPlan integrates with very few tools (source)
The development of new features is fairly slow (source)
Whatever your reasons are, you are in luck, as there are many great HacknPlan alternatives to choose from.
Best HacknPlan alternatives
There are many project management apps and documentation tools that can replace HacknPland and help you keep your game development project on track. If your project is very simple and small in scope, even a combination of Google Docs and Sheets may potentially suffice. Most projects, however, require a more sophisticated set of tools.
To make your decision easier, we've evaluated dozens of options and put together a shortlist of the best HacknPlan competitors and alternatives:
Each one of these tools has its strengths and weaknesses. Depending on the reason you are looking for an alternative to HacknPlan, a different solution may be a better fit for your needs. Let's take a closer look at your options.
1. Nuclino
A great solution for managing your entire game development process in one place is Nuclino. Like HacknPlan, Nuclino brings together game design documentation and project management. It's a unified workspace for collaborating on GDDs, worldbuilding, and game project management.
Nuclino allows you to create long-form documents and organize them in a variety of visual ways. The nested list view is handy for organizing and collaborating on your design doc in real time. The Kanban board view is great for prioritizing features and planning sprints. The table view can be used to easily sort and filter long lists of game design assets. The graph allows you to visualize the links between different topics, levels, characters, and game assets like in a wiki or a mind map.
Nuclino items can contain a variety of content, including text, videos, images, files, todo-lists, tables, code blocks, interactive embeds, and more. This allows you to document, share, and collaborate on anything, from game proposals and storyboards to character profiles and concept art. Internal links can be used to easily link related documents, topics, and assets together.
All that content can be collaborated on in real time, with every change automatically saved in the version history. Comments and mentions can be used to communicate and exchange feedback asynchronously, preserving the context of every decision.
At the same time, Nuclino is lightweight and minimal by design and requires no technical skills to be mastered. It focuses on the essentials, doing away with clunky menus and rarely-used options, and minimizing the learning curve for new users. It works out of the box and doesn't require any complex configuration.
Visual collaboration is seamlessly built into Nuclino. You can add an infinite collaborative canvas anywhere and use it to create diagrams and whiteboards directly within your design document, without switching tools.
You can use it to visualize your game's core gameplay loop, capture different mechanics and interaction flows, brainstrom ideas using sticky notes, organize concept art, and more.
What users say about Nuclino:
"Designing a game requires a huge number of complex, inter-related documents. Game engines, code, tools, processes, character designs, market research, background research, customers, business models... Nuclino is saving us hours when it comes to ‘finding that one thing’ that you didn't need until now, be it a process, design sketch, or meeting notes."
— Matt Bond, Lead Game Designer at Psyon Games
2. Trello
No list of project management tools would be complete without Trello. It can be a great alternative for those who are primarily using HacknPlan as a Kanban tool but find it too complex and feature-heavy. It's a tried-and-true tool used by millions of teams and individuals. You will need a separate platform to organize your game design docs, but when it comes to Kanban-style project management, Trello is one of the best tools you can find.
A notable strength of Trello is its extensive selection of Power-Ups that make it easy to integrate it into your unique workflow.
Learn more about how Trello compares to HacknPlan: HacknPlan vs Trello.
Looking for more tools similar to Trello? Check out this list of Trello alternatives.
What users say about Trello:
"Trello is excellent for small game development teams. It has allowed me to organize and keep track of my team's game development project with ease using the Kanban project management methodology we wanted to use for agile development. If you're a small game development team it is by far the best tool you could use to track your game projects."
3. Jira
While Trello is aimed at small teams and indie game designers, Jira is a HacknPlan alternative designed with large game development projects in mind.
Like HacknPlan, Jira is a fairly complex and powerful tool that includes highly specialized features, such as issue tracking, burndown and velocity charts, Agile reports, and more. Every aspect of Jira can be configured and customized to fit your team's requirements. It's also tightly integrated with other products in the Atlassian suite, such as Confluence and BitBucket.
Looking for more tools similar to Jira? Check out this list of Jira alternatives.
What users say about Jira:
"Jira is a great project management tool for medium to large game development projects. I really like the flexibility that Jira provides. The one feature that I most appreciate when I use another PM tool is built-in support for Fix Versions. Being able to assign a fix version for a sprint and for each build, makes it easy to see all the tasks and bugs that are in a given full release or an individual build. However, a lot of folks, especially artists, have a general disdain for the Jira UX."
4. Taiga
If you are looking for an open-source alternative to HacknPlan for your game development project, Taiga is an option worth considering. It's a project management and issue tracking tool designed with Agile teams in mind. In many ways, Taiga is similar to Jira. The free version of the tool is available as a self-hosted solution. A cloud-based version of Taiga is available as well and starts at $5 per user, per month.
Taiga offers a wide variety of features that game developers may appreciate, including customizable Kanban boards, WIP limits, burn-down charts, performance dashboards, and more. All that comes with a relatively user-friendly and intuitive interface.
What users say about Taiga:
"Open source and works nicely! Perfect for personal or small projects, if you don't have a very big budget. Includes all of the expected features like team management, support for epics, issues, sprints, and backlog (just one AFAIK). You can define custom ticket/issue statuses. Also includes a built-in Kanban board."
5. Codecks
Like HacknPlan, Codecks is a dedicated tool for managing game development projects. However, while HacknPlan is built for complex, large-scale projects, Codecks is better suited for indie game developers. Inspired by trading card games, your workflow in Codecks is built around "cards". The interface is playful, colorful, and intuitive.
Codecks also stands out thanks to its integration with Discord, allowing you to interact with your community and collect their feedback.
What users say about Codecks:
"Codecks was made for Indie Game Devs and it shows. From the basic UX to the way you manage tasks, Codecks feels like a tool made with Indie Devs in mind, it is easy, intuitive, and fast."
Find the right HacknPlan alternative for you
HacknPlan is a unique tool — but it's not for everyone. Every game development team has its unique workflow when it comes to managing tasks and organizing docs and assets, and different HacknPlan alternatives may fit that workflow better.
At the end of the day, the only way to know if a tool will work for your team is to actually test it. We hope that this list made your evaluation process a little easier.
Ready to get started?
