Paca

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What is Paca?

Paca is a self-hosted project management platform where AI agents and humans collaborate as equal teammates inside a Scrum team — not as chatbots bolted on the side.

Jira gives you a backlog. ClickUp gives you automations. Monday gives you dashboards. Paca gives your AI agents a seat at the table. They join sprint planning, pick up tasks from the board, write BDD specs, and adapt alongside humans in real time.

Everything about Paca — its workflow, its data model, its UI — is configurable and extendable via plugins.

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Why Paca?

	Jira / Trello / ClickUp / Monday	Paca
AI integration	Chatbot add-ons, peripheral automation	AI agents as first-class Scrum teammates
Collaboration model	Human-only by default	Human + AI, side by side on the same board
Hosting	Vendor cloud (your data, their servers)	Self-hosted, you own everything
Cost	$8–$20+ per seat/month	Free forever. Every feature, no paid tiers
Customization	Limited; locked behind enterprise tiers	Fully open: configuration + plugins
Weight	Bloated feature sprawl	Lightweight core; extend only what you need
Source	Closed / proprietary	100% open-source (Apache 2.0)

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Our Promise: Free Forever, Owned by the Community

Paca is, and will always be, free and non-profit.

• No paid tiers. There will never be a "Pro", "Team", or "Enterprise" edition.
• No paywalled features. Every feature — today and in the future — is available to everyone, at no cost.
• No open-core bait-and-switch. We will not move existing features behind a paywall or a license change.
• Belongs to the community. Paca is built by its contributors and for its users. It is not a vendor's product, and its direction is shaped in the open through issues, discussions, and pull requests.

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Core Idea: Humans and AI Agents, One Scrum Team

The central insight behind Paca is that AI agents should participate in the Scrum process, not just generate output in isolation.

In Paca, AI agents:

• Are assigned to sprints and appear on the Scrumban board alongside human teammates
• Pick up tasks from the backlog and update their status in real time
• Collaborate on BDD specs — helping Product Owners and BAs write Gherkin scenarios
• Contribute to System Design Documents — keeping the architecture visible to the whole team
• Probe, sense, and respond to emerging complexity, just like a human would

This is not automation. It is genuine collaboration — rooted in the Cynefin / Stacey framework's recognition that complex domains require teams, not pipelines.

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Fully Customizable — Configuration and Plugins

Paca ships as a small, focused core. Everything else is optional.

Configuration-driven: workflows, statuses, field definitions, board layouts, sprint rules, and agent behavior are all driven by project-level configuration files. No code needed to adapt Paca to your team's process.

Plugin system: extend or replace any part of Paca via plugins. Plugins are compiled to WebAssembly (WASM) for the backend (write in Go, Rust, AssemblyScript — anything with a WASM target) and standard module bundles for the frontend. Plugins run in a sandboxed environment with a capability-based permission model; they declare exactly what host functions they need, and nothing more.

plugins/
├── backend/        # WASM modules — add custom routes, logic, data models
└── frontend/       # UI modules — add custom pages, board views, widgets

Browse and install community plugins directly from the Plugin Marketplace inside the Paca UI — no command line required. Go to Settings → Plugins → Marketplace, find a plugin, and click Install.

For local development or custom plugins, you can also install from the filesystem:

./scripts/install-local-plugin.sh ./my-plugin --api-key <your-api-key>

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The P-A-C-A Cycle

Paca structures team collaboration around four phases that mirror both Scrum and the scientific method:

Plan  →  Act  →  Check  →  Adapt
  ↑                             |
  └─────────────────────────────┘

Phase	What happens
Plan	POs, BAs, and AI agents collaboratively refine the backlog. BDD scenarios and SDD designs are written together.
Act	Sprint is live. Humans and AI agents pull tasks from the board, execute, and post updates.
Check	QA agents run automated verification. Humans review AI output. The board reflects reality.
Adapt	Data from the sprint informs the next cycle. The team — human and AI — retrospects together.

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