I want to formally request that Plane prioritize real-time updates (websockets or whatever the right approach is) over adding new features. Right now if a coworker updates a work item, you don’t see it until you manually refresh, and honestly this is becoming a dealbreaker for teams actually using Plane to collaborate day to day.
This isn’t just me either, it keeps coming up. One user said the kanban board just doesn’t feel good anymore, states randomly disappear, and they were seriously thinking about cancelling their subscription because of it. Someone else put it plainly: it’s frustrating when a coworker updates something and you have to refresh to see it, real-time updates should just be a thing at this point. Another person in the same thread agreed and said Plane should fix this before adding anything else, since building more features on a shaky foundation doesn’t help anyone.
There’s also a Reddit thread from a team of about 10 people who switched from ClickUp and actually like Plane, but ran into the exact same issue, updates aren’t pushed live because everything is API-call driven instead of websocket-based, so they’re stuck refreshing constantly too. And just this week someone said it again: they can’t believe real-time collaboration isn’t the number one priority right now, since they’re constantly refreshing their app just to stay in sync with their team.
For anyone using Plane as an actual shared workspace instead of a solo tracker, this really matters. Not seeing your teammate’s changes without refreshing kind of defeats the purpose of using PM software together, and it’s a big part of why some people compare Plane unfavorably to Asana or Linear even when they prefer Plane otherwise.
If you’ve run into this too, drop a reply so the team can see how many of us are affected.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this out, and for being honest about it, including those of you who are weighing whether Plane still works for how your team collaborates. Feedback like this is a big part of how we decide what to work on, so let me be straight with you: we hear you, we agree, and real-time collaboration is something we’re actively building right now.
I also want to be upfront about why it isn’t already live, because you deserve a real answer instead of “it’s on the roadmap.”
Real-time updates sound simple. “Just use WebSockets,” right? But making them actually reliable for teams turns out to be one of the harder problems in a tool like Plane. If we get it wrong, the failure isn’t a missing feature. It’s Plane confidently showing you the wrong thing, which is worse than having to refresh. A few of the things we’re working through:
- Ordering and consistency: When two people change the same work item at almost the same moment (say, both moving it between states), every screen has to land on the same correct result instead of flickering between values or quietly dropping someone’s change.
- Reconnection and stale tabs: A tab that’s been sitting in the background or briefly lost its connection has to catch up on everything it missed and line it up with what it already had, without duplicates, gaps, or items that shouldn’t be there. This is usually what’s behind the disappearing states some of you mentioned.
- Conflicts and instant updates: We want your own edits to feel instant, but we also have to handle it gracefully (including undoing cleanly) when the server or a teammate’s change disagrees with yours.
- Sending the right updates to the right people: Every live update has to respect permissions, so the people who should see a change get it, without blasting every client with every event in the workspace and slowing everything down.
- Infrastructure and scale: Persistent connections behave nothing like normal API calls. Pushing updates reliably across a lot of people and multiple servers at once takes real plumbing underneath, and it has to hold up when things get busy.
Right now we’re testing a few different approaches internally so we can be confident the foundation we pick is the right one. We’re being careful on purpose, because this is the kind of thing that’s really painful to rebuild later. Rushing it would just mean stacking more on a shaky base, which is exactly what some of you asked us not to do.
So, the short version: it’s a priority, it’s in active development, and we’re working to get real-time updates onto Plane Cloud soon. I’ll keep this thread posted as we have something concrete to share.
Keep the feedback coming. The specific situations you’re describing really do help us prioritize and test against how people actually use Plane. Thanks for caring enough to push on this, and for sticking with us while we get it right.
Really appreciate the honest and detailed response.
It is great to hear that real-time collaboration is actively being worked on. As a developer, I completely understand why this is a difficult problem to get right, and I appreciate that the team is being careful with the foundation instead of rushing something fragile.
I love Plane and the direction it is going, so this is genuinely reassuring to hear. Please keep us updated when possible, especially since this has come up a few times over the past year.
Thanks again for taking the time to explain it clearly.
Thank you so much for understanding. We are very excited to get this out to our customers, stay tuned.