Plans drafted by AI
Paste a brief. Get a full draft — epics, tasks, owners, a timeline. Review, edit, then materialize. Nothing is committed to your plan until you say so.
AI-drafted · Chat-controlled · Local or cloud
Project plans,
drafted by AI.
Project plans,
drafted by AI.
Steered by chat.
Drop in a brief — shadow-planner builds the full project structure. Then steer it by conversation: re-schedule, re-baseline, query workload, rebalance, all in plain language. Run it on a local model, or bring your own Claude or OpenAI key.
- Brief → plan in one prompt
- Talk to your project
- Local or cloud — your choice
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shadow-planner
AI-assisted gantt project planning that runs on your machine
shadow-planner — Accelerated Plan
What makes shadow-planner different
Steered by chat
Ask, query, change. Push a launch by two weeks. Find who's overbooked. Re-baseline an epic. The agent reads your plan live and asks for approval before changing anything.
Your AI, your choice
Run the assistant on a local model via Ollama — fully offline — or connect Anthropic Claude or OpenAI in settings. Switch providers anytime; your plan and SQLite database stay on disk either way.
Drafted by AI
Drop in a brief. Get a project plan.
Tell shadow-planner what you want to build. It drafts the full structure — epics, tasks, owners, a timeline — in seconds. Review, edit, then materialize. Nothing touches your real plan until you say so.
brief.md
markdown
# Mobile App Launch — Q3 ## Goal Ship iOS & Android v1 by mid–August. Public TestFlight by July. ## Constraints - 3 backend devs, 2 mobile devs, 1 designer - Auth must reuse the existing platform service - No new vendor dependencies ## Streams - Mobile foundation - Auth integration - Offline sync - Store readiness
draft plan
awaiting approval
-
Mobile App Launch
- iOS App scaffold 20 PD
- iOS auth integration 16 PD
- Android scaffold 20 PD
- Offline sync engine 21 PD
- Store readiness 8 PD
Steered by chat
Talk to your project.
Once the plan exists, you don’t have to leave the chat to manage it. Ask questions. Make changes. Run analysis. Anything destructive needs your explicit approval — you stay in control.
Chat — Accelerated Plan
qwen2.5:7b · scoped to scenario
connected
Who is overbooked in May?
2 resources over 110% in May.
- 132% Lena Schultz — Mobile App, Customer Intelligence
- 118% Tom Becker — Platform Modernisation
Push the iOS launch by 2 weeks. What breaks?
Moving iOS Store readiness from Aug 15 to Aug 29.
3 dependent tasks shift forward. Customer Intelligence release unaffected.
change · needs approval
How are we doing on Mobile App Launch?
54.6% complete · 198 PD remaining of 419 planned.
Trending 8 days behind plan, pace dropped 38% since Feb.
Ask anything — “rebalance Q3 across the team”, “show critical path”...
- Query: status, workload, critical path, capacity
- Change: reschedule, re-baseline, rebalance, split tasks
- Approve: every destructive op shows a diff first
Local or cloud
One agent. Four engines.
The chat and planning agents are provider-agnostic. Default to a local model that never phones home, or connect a cloud key when you want more horsepower — chosen in settings, scoped per scenario.
Default · Local
Ollama
Runs a model on your own hardware — qwen2.5:7b
out of the box. No API key, no account, nothing leaves the machine.
- Free — uses your hardware
- Works fully airgapped
- Rescue parser keeps small models on-task
Cloud · your key
Anthropic Claude
Paste a Claude API key for stronger reasoning on large plans. Prompt caching keeps repeat calls fast and inexpensive.
- Best-in-class tool use
- Prompt caching built in
- Provider-aware history budget
Cloud · your key
OpenAI ChatGPT
Prefer GPT? Drop in an OpenAI key and the same agent, with the same tools, runs on the Chat Completions API.
- Same agent, same tool surface
- Automatic prompt caching
- Drop-in — no config sprawl
Cloud · your key
OpenRouter
One key, hundreds of hosted models from many vendors. Pick the model per provider and switch from the chat header any time.
- Llama, Mistral, Gemini, DeepSeek & more
- Quick-switch between providers
- Reasoning effort per provider
Local stays local. Choose a cloud provider and only the requests you send — scoped to the active scenario — are transmitted to it. Any model with tool calling works — see which models work best.
Parallel realities
Ask the AI to plan it three different ways.
Every plan lives in a scenario. Run a baseline, an accelerated, and a re-org plan side by side — ask the agent to draft each one, then compare. Snapshots and templates keep your favorites for next time.
MarAprMayJunJulAug
- Mobile App Launch
- Platform Modernisation
- Customer Intelligence
- Payments Refresh
The plan, materialized
Real Gantt. Real utilization. Real numbers.
The AI drafts and edits the plan, but the plan itself is a proper PM tool. Drag-to-reschedule timelines, capacity-aware utilization tables, budgets, notes and portfolio rollups — all editable by hand whenever you want, and all undoable.
Gantt
A timeline that thinks in dependencies.
Drag tasks to reschedule and preview what cascades before anything is written. Collapse epics. Toggle dependency arrows. Zoom from a week to a ten-year plan. Edit dates, estimates and status right in the work-breakdown pane, or steer the whole tree from the keyboard.
- Drag-to-reschedule with cascade preview
- Week / Month / Quarter / Year scale, 1M to 10Y ranges
- Inline editing: dates, estimates, status, priority
- Public-holiday overlay and centred today line
- Bulk status change or delete — one undo
Gantt — Accelerated Plan
Resource utilization
See who's overbooked, before they tell you.
A weekly allocation table that shows planned vs. actual person-days per project, per resource. Flip the axis to see it by person, drill down to single issues, and let real capacity thresholds colour the overloads. No more pivot-table archaeology before each steerco.
- Plan / actual PD by project × resource, or by person
- Issue-level breakdown with inline estimates
- Overload colouring from actual weekly capacity
- Saved filters shared with the Gantt
- Assign or replace a resource across a whole epic
Utilization
Export
Take the timeline anywhere.
Drop your Gantt into a slide deck, an email, a Markdown doc, or hand it to a stakeholder who lives in Microsoft Project. The schedule exports to whatever shape you need.
- PNG & JPEG — share in any deck or email
- TIFF — lossless, print-ready
- Mermaid — text-based, embeds in Markdown or docs
- MS Project (.xml) — round-trip with Microsoft Project
Gantt — Accelerated Plan
Everything around the plan
Portfolio rollups
RAG status, cost, and person-day totals across every project — at a glance.
Jira-style hierarchy
Project → Epic → Task → Sub-task, with task, story, bug and milestone types. Promote a task to an epic or an epic to a project without re-typing.
Audit log
A readable trail of every change — whether you, the chat agent, or the planner made it.
Snapshots & templates
Freeze any plan as a point-in-time record, save reusable templates, and move or copy whole projects between scenarios.
Labels & capacity
Group projects and resources with free-form labels; track daily rate and a manager hierarchy.
Import data
Bring resources in from Excel, projects and allocations from CSV, and export any scenario as JSON, Excel or CSV.
Project notes
Meeting minutes, risks and decisions in Markdown, with @-mentions, attachments and a scenario-wide Notes view. Export a note to Markdown or PDF.
Undo & redo
Ctrl+Z reverses any change — yours or the assistant’s — up to 50 steps per scenario. A bulk edit or a resource swap comes back in one step.
Budgets & cost
Give a project a budget and watch the unburnt remainder. Costs roll up from each resource’s own daily rate, in the Gantt, dashboards and portfolio.
Saved filters
Filter as you type by project, label, resource or status, then save the view as a named preset for the Gantt and Utilization.
Status & priority
Every task and epic carries a status and a priority, visible in the work breakdown. Ask /status @Project in chat for a health briefing.
Made for your desk
Dark and light themes, your date and number format, forms that dock beside the Gantt, an optional browser mode, and an update check on start.
Want the details? Every feature is documented step by step in the Help center.
Yours to keep
Your roadmap is your roadmap.
shadow-planner runs on your laptop, your workstation, or a private server you
control. The database is a single SQLite file you back up with cp. Run
the assistant on a local model via Ollama
and nothing leaves the machine at all — or opt into a cloud provider, where only
your scoped requests go out. No telemetry, no analytics, no account needed to use the app.
-
Local-first. Default to Ollama and the app runs fully offline — your network can be airgapped.
-
One file to back up. SQLite means a single file. Snapshot it, version it, encrypt it.
-
Accountable & audited. Every change — yours or the AI's — lands in a readable audit trail you can inspect any time.
The details, in plain legal terms: read the full privacy policy.
Switching?
Coming from another tool?
Most planning tools are cloud task trackers billed per seat, per month. shadow-planner is a desktop planner you buy once. Each comparison has the same side-by-side table and says plainly when you should stay where you are.
vs.
Microsoft Project
Desktop planning you buy once, with an AI assistant instead of a Copilot license.
Read the comparison
vs.
Asana
Timelines and workload without per-seat pricing.
Read the comparison
vs.
monday.com
For one planner who doesn’t need a minimum seat count.
Read the comparison
vs.
Trello
When Kanban stopped being enough and you need a real Gantt.
Read the comparison
vs.
ClickUp
A focused planner instead of an everything-app.
Read the comparison
vs.
Notion
When your project plan outgrew a database with a timeline view.
Read the comparison
vs.
Smartsheet
Capacity and scenarios without an enterprise contract.
Read the comparison
vs.
TeamGantt
An offline Gantt with utilisation, not a per-manager subscription.
Read the comparison
vs.
GanttProject
A modern desktop Gantt with scenarios, AI and your data in one local file.
Read the comparison
Not sure which applies? Start from what you actually do on the use-case pages, or browse all comparisons.
Pricing
Free to start. €4,99 once to go unlimited.
Install free from the Microsoft Store or Snap Store and use the full tool right away. Pay once only when you outgrow the starter limits.
Free
€0
Microsoft Store & Snap Store download
- 1 scenario
- 3 projects
- 3 resources
- Gantt, utilization & portfolio — unrestricted
- Chat & planning agents — unrestricted
- Audit log, snapshots & export
Pro
€4,99 one-time purchase
Pay once via Stripe — no subscription
- Unlimited scenarios
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited resources
- Every feature in Free, no caps
- Upgrade in-app via Stripe Checkout
- Yours forever — no recurring fees
Get started
Install free in seconds.
Pick your platform — install from a store or download directly. The app opens right away, no purchase required.
macOS
Version 3.3.3 · signed & notarized
Linux
Currently version 3.3.3 · updates automatically
Free download · €4,99 once unlocks unlimited use
SHA-256 checksums for the macOS downloads · see what changed in each release in the changelog