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Kanban vs Gantt Chart: Which Is Right for Your Team

Kanban and Gantt charts manage work differently. Learn when each is the better choice—and when the best answer is using both at different levels of planning.

Kanban vs Gantt Chart: Which Is Right for Your Team

The Real Difference

Kanban and Gantt charts aren't competing tools in the same category—they answer different questions about your work.

Kanban answers: What's the current state of each piece of work? Is it waiting, in progress, or done?

Gantt chart answers: When will work happen? Which tasks depend on others? When will the project be complete?

A Kanban board is a flow management system. A Gantt chart is a schedule management system. The choice between them isn't about which is "better"—it's about which question matters most for your team right now.

What Kanban Does Well

Kanban originated in Toyota's manufacturing system and was adapted for knowledge work by David Anderson in the 2000s. Its core mechanics:

  • Tasks move across columns representing workflow states (typically: Backlog → In Progress → Done)
  • Work-in-progress limits prevent overloading any stage
  • Flow is optimized by reducing cycle time (how long a task takes from start to finish)
  • New work is pulled from the backlog when capacity opens up

Kanban excels for:

Continuous service teams: Support tickets, bug fixes, maintenance requests, and content production don't have fixed deadlines and arrive in a continuous stream. Kanban manages this flow naturally.

Teams with variable demand: When you can't predict what work will arrive next week, Kanban's pull-based system adapts better than a pre-committed Gantt timeline.

Workflow visibility: A Kanban board makes bottlenecks obvious—if the "Code Review" column has 12 items while "In Progress" has 2, the review process is the constraint.

Short-cycle work: Tasks measured in hours or 1-2 days fit Kanban well. The board shows current state without needing a formal timeline.

What Gantt Charts Do Well

Gantt charts, developed in the early 20th century and still standard across industries, organize work around time. Their core mechanics:

  • Tasks have explicit start and end dates
  • Dependencies show which tasks must precede others
  • The critical path reveals which tasks determine the end date
  • Resources are assigned to specific tasks in specific windows

Gantt charts excel for:

Project work with deadlines: When you're building something that needs to ship by a specific date, the Gantt chart tells you whether your plan fits the timeline.

Dependency-heavy work: Software integrations, construction, event planning, and product launches all have complex dependencies. Gantt charts model these explicitly.

Stakeholder communication: Executives, clients, and investors understand timelines. A Gantt chart answers "when will this be ready?" directly. A Kanban board doesn't.

Resource planning: When you need to balance team capacity across tasks and phases, the Gantt chart makes overallocation visible.

Decision Framework: Which to Use

Use Kanban if:

  • Your work arrives continuously without a predictable schedule
  • Tasks are short (days, not weeks)
  • You have no fixed project end date
  • Your primary concern is managing flow, not hitting a deadline
  • Your team does support, maintenance, or content production

Use a Gantt chart if:

  • You're delivering a project with a fixed deadline
  • Tasks have clear durations and dependencies
  • Stakeholders need timeline visibility
  • You need to manage resource allocation across time
  • Your primary concern is "will we deliver on time?"

Use both if:

  • You're running a product team with ongoing development AND a release roadmap
  • You want Kanban for sprint-level execution and a Gantt chart for quarterly/milestone planning
  • Your team delivers projects (Gantt) while also handling support requests (Kanban)

Combining Kanban and Gantt in Practice

Many mature product and engineering teams use both tools at different levels:

Gantt chart (strategic level): Quarterly roadmap, release planning, cross-team dependencies, executive communication. Built in gantt-chart.io, shared with leadership and stakeholders.

Kanban board (execution level): Sprint board, current work items, daily standup reference, team task management. Lives in Linear, Jira, or Trello.

The Gantt chart shows what needs to happen and when. The Kanban board manages how the work flows day to day.

This combination avoids the worst failure modes of each tool in isolation:

  • A team with only a Kanban board can't answer "when will this ship?"
  • A team with only a Gantt chart has a beautiful plan that doesn't survive contact with actual work

Common Misconceptions

"Agile teams shouldn't use Gantt charts." Agile methodology doesn't prohibit timeline planning. It distinguishes between rigid waterfall plans and adaptive planning. A Gantt chart used as a forecast (updated as you learn more) is compatible with agile principles.

"Kanban means no planning." Kanban has explicit planning mechanisms: backlog refinement, priority ordering, WIP limits. It's not "no process"—it's a different kind of process focused on flow.

"Gantt charts are too rigid for creative work." Gantt charts are as rigid as you make them. A chart with milestone-level planning and rough durations accommodates significant uncertainty. The chart serves you; you don't serve the chart.

Making the Call for Your Team

Ask two questions:

  1. Do you have a fixed deadline that stakeholders care about? → Gantt chart
  2. Do you have continuous, unpredictable incoming work? → Kanban

If both: use both. Most product teams fall in this category.

Start your Gantt chart for project planning at gantt-chart.io—it takes 20 minutes to build a meaningful quarterly timeline. Run your execution in whatever Kanban tool your team already uses.

The goal is visibility at both levels. The specific tools matter less than consistently using them.