Getting started with shadow-planner

shadow-planner is a desktop project planner: your data lives in a local database on your machine, and an AI assistant helps you draft and steer plans. This page takes you from install to your first plan.

Install

Windows — install from the Microsoft Store. Updates arrive automatically.
Linux — install from the Snap Store (also on Flathub). Updates arrive automatically.
macOS — download the signed .dmg for Apple Silicon or Intel and drag the app into Applications.

Everything works immediately: no account, no sign-in, no trial clock. The free tier includes every feature within its limits — see License & upgrades.

The setup wizard

On first start, shadow-planner opens a short setup wizard:

Choose an AI provider. Pick a card — Ollama (local, free), Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter — choose a model, and use Test connection to verify it. You can also press Skip for now and set this up later; the planner works fully without AI, you just won't have the assistant. Details in Connect an AI provider.
Create your first project. Give it a name (start and end dates are optional) — or continue straight into the AI planning flow, which drafts a whole project from a written brief (Plan a project with AI).

You can reopen the wizard any time from the settings gear menu — LLM Setup Wizard.

What is a scenario?

Everything you plan lives inside a scenario — a self-contained planning world holding projects, epics, tasks, people and assignments. You start with one scenario, and that is all most people need day to day. Extra scenarios become useful when you want to try "what if we delay project X?" without touching your real plan — see Scenarios, snapshots & templates.

Finding your way around

Gantt — the timeline view: drag bars to reschedule, see dependencies, and use Undo / Redo in the toolbar.
Projects and Resources — searchable lists of your projects and people.
Utilisation — weekly capacity versus planned allocation per person, with overloaded weeks highlighted.
Chat drawer — the AI assistant, bottom-right. Ask questions or make changes in plain language (The chat assistant).

Make it feel right

In Settings → General you can set:

Date Format — YYYY-MM-DD (default), DD.MM.YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY, applied everywhere dates are shown.
Number format — 1,234.56 (default), 1.234,56 or 1234.56, applied to every number display.

Dark and light mode follow a toggle in the app header. One note: the small calendar that pops up inside a date input follows your operating system's locale — the browser controls that, not the app — so it can differ from the column format next to it.

Where your data is

Your whole plan is a single SQLite database file in your user profile. Nothing syncs to a cloud, and there is no telemetry. To move to a new machine, use Import & export; to re-activate a purchased license there, see License & upgrades.