Parabol

Parabol is an open-source collaborative workspace for running structured, effective, and inclusive team meetings. It supports retrospectives, sprint planning, standup meetings, check-ins, agile estimation, and collaborative documentation — all in real time with a GraphQL API.

Parabol is easily self-hosted on your own infrastructure and works in air-gapped environments with no external dependencies required. It runs on Node.js + PostgreSQL + Valkey and can be deployed on-premise, in a private cloud, or in a fully isolated network — making it a strong choice for enterprises, government agencies, and security-conscious teams that cannot use SaaS tools.

Try a no-login demo: https://parabol.co/retro-demo

What Parabol Does

Parabol helps software teams and agile practitioners facilitate:

Pages — real-time collaborative documents powered by Yjs, scoped to teams or personal workspaces. Pages integrate directly with meetings, so notes, decisions, and action items live alongside the work that created them. Many teams upgrade from Confluence to Parabol Pages as their self-hosted knowledge management system — getting a Confluence alternative that is open-source, easier to operate, and purpose-built to connect documentation with the meetings where decisions are actually made.
Retrospectives — structured reflect/group/vote/discuss/action workflow; compatible with formats like Start/Stop/Continue, 4Ls, Mad/Sad/Glad, and custom templates
Sprint Poker (Story Point Estimation) — async-safe planning poker with Fibonacci, T-shirt sizing, or custom scales; integrates with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Linear, and Azure DevOps
Check-In Meetings (Action) — agenda-driven team sync with icebreakers, task review, and action items
Standup / Team Prompt — async standup via written responses, optionally recurring on a schedule
Tasks — Kanban-style task board (active, stuck, done, future) shared across meetings and linked to external issues

Meeting outcomes (summaries, action items, tasks) are automatically captured and can be pushed to integrations.

GraphQL API

Parabol exposes a public GraphQL API.

Endpoint: https://action.parabol.co/graphql
Schema SDL: https://action.parabol.co/graphql/schema.graphql
GraphiQL Explorer: https://action.parabol.co/graphql (in browser)

LLM & Developer References

llms.txt — concise API overview for LLMs and developers (auth, scopes, key operations)
llms-full.txt — full reference with example GraphQL queries and mutations

Integrations

Parabol integrates with:

Jira Cloud & Jira Data Center (Jira Server) — import backlog, push estimates, create issues
GitHub — import issues, push estimates as labels
GitLab — import issues, push estimates
Linear — import issues, push estimates
Azure DevOps — import work items, push estimates
Slack — meeting notifications, topic sharing
Mattermost — meeting notifications
Google Calendar — create calendar events when starting meetings
Microsoft / Azure AD — SSO login

Stack

| Concern | Solution | |---|---| | Server | Node.js | | Server Framework | μWebSockets.js | | Database | PostgreSQL | | PubSub & Cache | Valkey | | API | GraphQL | | Real-time | graphql-ws (WebSockets) | | Client Cache | Relay | | UI Framework | React | | Styling | Tailwind CSS |

Setup

Prerequisites

Node.js
pnpm

Production: PostgreSQL, Valkey Development: Docker Compose, Watchman

Note: text-embedding-inference is resource intensive. You may need to increase Docker's memory limit to 16 GB+ (Docker Desktop → Settings → Resources).

Installation

git clone https://github.com/ParabolInc/parabol.git
cd parabol
cp .env.example .env   # add your own vars
pnpm i
pnpm db:start
pnpm dev

App runs at: https://localhost:3000/

Deploy

# Workaround for a pnpm SSH key bug: https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/issues/7243
git config --global url."https://github.com/enahum/redux-offline.git".insteadOf git@github.com:enahum/redux-offline.git
pnpm i && pnpm build && pnpm predeploy && pnpm start

Developer Docs

Core Team & Maintainers

License

Dual-licensed under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3.0 while holding, at Parabol's sole discretion, the right to create new licenses. See LICENSE.

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