kadence task tracker: what it does, and four times not to use it
Four different products called kadence track tasks. This is the git one — how it stores work, and the cases where one of the other three is the better answer.
Search this exact phrase and the first result is the git-native one. That is the only brand query where that happens, and it is not a coincidence: the name alone returns none of it, and the name plus the noun returns it first.
But the eight results underneath are four other products called kadence, three of which also track tasks, plus three unrelated projects called cadence that track tasks too. So before anything else: which one you are looking at.
The four kadences that track something
| Which | What it tracks | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|
kadence on npm | tasks, their history and time, in your git repo | your machine, a CLI |
kadence.pro | action items out of meetings, for marketing teams | hosted, sign-up |
kadence.life | personal task completion, streaks, a consistency score | hosted, consumer |
kadence.co | desks, rooms and who is in the office | hosted, enterprise |
Only the first one is a developer tool, and only the first one puts anything in your repository. If you were sent here looking for meeting action items or a habit streak, rows two and three are your answer and the rest of this page is not about them.
The three cadences on that page — AdrianPlesner/cadence, an Android
repeated-task tracker that syncs over your local network; Jmelin/cadence, a
simple last-completed tracker; and osborneferds/Cadence — are unrelated
projects that happen to share the sound. All three have no stars.
What the git one actually does
It keeps tasks as append-only events committed to your repository. Nothing is edited in place. Changing a status writes a new event; the current state is folded from the events when you read.
That single choice is where every property comes from:
- the history cannot be rewritten by ordinary use, because nothing overwrites anything — the record is what happened, not what is currently true
- concurrent edits do not collide the way file edits do. Across 8,396 merge commits in 130 public repositories using file-based trackers, task-file conflicts hit 15% of repositories and 89% of those were content conflicts. On a three-branch spike — three people editing one task on three branches, merged in every order — the result was 0 conflicts
- the cost of asking stays flat. An agent reading one task reads 982 bytes, whether the project holds ten tasks or a thousand, while the journal behind it grows 5 KB → 528 KB
It is a CLI at 0.8.1, 125 KB packed, MIT, no daemon and no network call. The terminal board pulls in 1.8 MB of UI library and only when you open it.
Four times you should not use it
This is the part a product page leaves out, and it is the part that decides whether you waste a week.
You want to edit tasks in an editor. The file on disk is a log, not a board.
vim stops being a supported way to move a task — you need the tool, and that is
a real dependency the alternatives do not impose. If reading and editing the
board with no tool at all matters to you, pi-task-tracker is the purest version
of the opposite design: one Markdown file per task, and the status is the
directory, so moving a task is git mv and nothing else.
You are one person, or one team on one branch. The conflict numbers above are
the whole argument, and they describe concurrent branches touching the same task.
If that does not happen to you, you are paying the adoption cost of a tool for a
problem you do not have. A TODO.md is genuinely fine, and switching later is
cheap.
You want something that runs your agents. This writes down what happened; it
does not start sessions, attach to terminals or gate delivery. favcrm/cadence
does that — it coordinates agents across terminals — at the cost of a daemon and
tmux. Different tool, and if that is what you were promised, go there.
Somebody non-technical needs to use the board. A git repository is a bad place to send a stakeholder. Backlog.md ships a web UI with drag-and-drop and a terminal kanban board, which is a real advantage and the reason it is the category leader. Nothing here replaces that.
There is a fifth, smaller one worth naming: a journal records work, not everything you know. It is a poor home for freeform knowledge, and an append-only log only grows — compaction exists for that reason, and it is complexity the file-per-task design never has to carry.
The short version
If two or more people or agents touch the same tasks on different branches, and you want the history to be the record rather than the latest edit, this is built for that and the numbers above are what it is built on.
If not, one of the other rows on this page is probably a better fit, and saying so is cheaper for everyone than a trial that ends in a week.
kadence is the first row. The documentation covers the commands; the measurements are where each number here comes from, and every one names the test that keeps it true.
Where the numbers come from
- Probe run 2026-09-24, nine results: `kadence task tracker` returned github.com/bogutskiandriy/kadence first, then two kadence.co workplace pages, kadence.pro, kadence.life, github.com/AdrianPlesner/cadence, github.com/osborneferds/Cadence, github.com/Jmelin/cadence and a Techstars jobs listing
- kadence.pro headlines itself Action Tracker and describes a professional action item tracking system designed for marketing teams with intelligent meeting integration and performance analytics; it is hosted, with a sign-up, and has no connection to version control — read 2026-09-24
- kadence.life headlines CONSISTENCY IS A WEAPON. KADENCE KEEPS IT SHARP. and scores personal task completion across volume, consistency, difficulty, focus and momentum on a 90-day rolling window; it is hosted and consumer-facing, with no git integration — read 2026-09-24
- kadence.co is a workplace operations platform covering space management, team scheduling and occupancy, with a public API at api.kadence.co — read 2026-09-24
- Repository figures read from the GitHub API on 2026-09-24 — github:AdrianPlesner/cadence stargazers_count=0, github:Jmelin/cadence stargazers_count=0, github:osborneferds/Cadence stargazers_count=0; AdrianPlesner/cadence is a repeated-task tracker for Android syncing over the local network with no server, created 2026-09-17, and Jmelin/cadence is a simple last-completed task tracking app, created 2026-02-15
- Backlog.md stores every task as Markdown in a project-local backlog folder and ships a web UI with drag-and-drop and a terminal kanban board — README.md at MrLesk/Backlog.md, read 2026-09-24
- favcrm/cadence coordinates coding agents across terminals and needs a local daemon started with `cadence daemon start` plus tmux — README read 2026-09-24
- dekstop/pi-task-tracker keeps one Markdown file per task and encodes lifecycle state in the directory — backlog, active, archive — moving the file when the state changes — README.md, read 2026-09-24
- 8,396 merge commits across 130 public repositories using file-based trackers — kadence docs/research/probe-a-results.md