Acorn

What is Acorn and what is it for?

Acorn is an open-source project management application for distributed software development teams, built on Holochain so that a group works together peer-to-peer rather than through a central service. It is designed as an alternative to scrum, tracking work as Intended Outcomes arranged in a dependency tree rather than as sprints and backlogs.

Acorn was first envisioned and prototyped in 2018 by the Holochain core development team, using a third-party platform, to organise their own planning and execution process. In August 2019 Sprillow began a design process and started building Acorn on Holochain, and the first major alpha release followed in June 2022. Lightningrod Labs now houses its continued development.

Acorn is project management software for distributed software teams, built so that a group working on the same project talks to each other directly instead of through a central service. It is a Holochain application, and the people taking part in one Acorn project are the hosting power behind it. Rather than sprints and backlogs, work is organised as Intended Outcomes held in a dependency tree, so the shape of the plan shows which pieces depend on which.

A remote team might break a project into outcomes and then read progress through different views: Map View for the big picture, Table View for individual tasks, and Priority View for what needs attention first. Acorn is distributed as a native desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, currently offered as an alpha release. The Acorn Knowledge Base and the project repository are the places to learn more.

From 5 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.