Flanner and Taskmaster
Last updated: 23 September 2026
Both give a coding agent structure, at different points. Taskmaster breaks a requirements document into tasks and hands the agent the next one. Flanner keeps the plans agents write, tells you when one has gone stale, and shares them with your team.
A task list and a plan answer different questions. The list says what to do next; the plan says why, and how the pieces fit. Here is how the two tools differ, and how to use them together.
At a glance
| Taskmaster | Flanner | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | Turning a requirements document into a list of tasks, ordered by their dependencies, and picking the next one for the agent. | Keeping the plans agents write: every version, checked against the code, shared with your team. |
| How you use it | The task-master CLI and an MCP server. Its docs list 13 editors, including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and there is a VS Code extension. | The flanner CLI, its MCP server and a local web interface, set up for Claude Code, Codex and Claude Desktop. |
| Where the work lives | .taskmaster/tasks/tasks.json in the repository, committed to git by default. | .plans/ in the repository, kept out of git until you decide otherwise. |
| AI model calls | Needs an AI provider key, unless it works through Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Ollama or LM Studio. | Calls no model itself. Your agent does the writing. |
| History | No built-in history of tasks. Notes added to a subtask keep a timestamp. | Every revision of a plan is kept as a numbered version. |
| When the code moves on | You rewrite the later tasks by hand, with task-master update and a prompt. | flanner freshness checks the files and names a plan cites against your git history. |
| Teams | Hamster, a hosted workspace: team tasks live on Hamster's servers. Its Team plan is $40 per creator a month. | Flanner Mesh, device to device and signed; the servers never receive plans. Team Mesh is $19 a seat a month. |
| Licence | MIT with Commons Clause, per its LICENSE file. | MIT. |
Where they differ
What they hold
Taskmaster holds tasks: small units with a status, dependencies and a complexity score, worked through in order. Flanner holds plans: the documents an agent writes to describe an approach, kept version by version.
When the code changes
In Taskmaster, keeping tasks in line with the code is a step you take: its tutorial rewrites the tasks after a given one with an update command and a prompt. Flanner reads each plan against your git history on its own, and flags a plan that cites a file which no longer exists, or code that has changed heavily since, with the evidence.
Sharing
Taskmaster's team mode moves tasks to Hamster, a hosted service. Flanner Mesh keeps plans on your team's machines and moves them directly between them.
Using both
- Write the requirements or the plan with your agent, and save it through flanner, so it has a version history.
- Point Taskmaster's
parse-prdat the latest version, and work through the tasks it produces. - When
flanner freshnesssays the plan behind the tasks has gone stale, revise the plan, and regenerate or update the tasks from it.
Which to choose
- You want an agent to work through a long feature one task at a time: Taskmaster.
- You want every plan kept, checked against the code, and shared across your team's machines: flanner.
How to spot a stale plan shows the checks flanner runs, and the full comparison covers spec tools such as Spec Kit and BMAD.
Sources
Checked on 23 September 2026. If something here has changed, tell us and we will correct it.