The pain this grew out of
I help one client with blog support, and their team was working across four different messengers at once. Some people in one, some in another, part of them on a phone only. There was no single place to track anything. Every subproject landed in one shared chat, and it turned into a mess: tasks got lost, agreements were forgotten, and results were written down nowhere.
The big systems are supposed to fix this. But Odoo, monday, ClickUp and the heavy ERPs are too much for a small team, packed with features nobody there will ever touch. By the time you finish setting one up, any wish to actually use it is gone.
I wanted something light that fit this exact problem. That is how Krokq started.
What Krokq is
Krokq (krok means step) is a light and completely free task tracker and chat under one shell, with a built-in AI assistant.
The chat is built to feel like the messengers people already use, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber. That matters more than it sounds: nobody has to learn a new tool, it is familiar from the first minute, and the barrier to entry is almost zero. It takes the parts that actually get used: messaging, drafts, comments, voice notes, drag and drop files, reactions. But the main thing is moving freely between the two modes, Chat and Tasks.
- Turn a chat message into a Task in one click.
- Jump from a Task straight into a private chat with that person.
- Or keep the discussion right inside the Task, whichever fits.
The Tasks side
- Create a task by voice with the built-in AI assistant (more on that below).
- A real workflow: New, In progress, Rework, In review, Done, plus Trash and Archive.
- Custom task types to match how a team works.
- A board with columns, with urgent items standing out.
- Threaded comments under a task, with reactions, editing and deleting.
- Attachments on a task, uploaded or pulled from a connected source.
- Search across tasks.
- Status based permissions: an assignee goes read only once a task is accepted or archived, for example.
- Assigning an owner, accepting work, or sending it back for rework.
The Chat side
- Private conversations with colleagues.
- Drafts, editing, deleting and forwarding messages.
- Reactions on messages.
- Voice messages with a waveform.
- Attachments: drag files into a thread and back out, paste an image from the clipboard.
- Presence indicators and read receipts.
- Quoting and replying to a message.
The AI assistant
There is a built-in AI assistant for creating tasks by voice. You tap the button, say what you need in plain words, something like "new task for Sveta to check the banners, urgent, by Friday", and it opens a ready to save task form with the title, the assignee, urgency and the due date already filled in. You look it over, fix anything, and save.
It works in any of the 10 languages the app speaks, and you can pin the language you dictate in from your profile when it differs from the interface language. Under the hood the clip is transcribed and turned into a structured intent by Gemini, then mapped onto real people and task types from your company. For now it does one thing, creating a task, and it does it well. More intents are next.
Adaptable through connections
This is the part I am most happy with, and the reason Krokq stays light without being limited. Krokq connects to the services a team already uses, and their content shows up right inside the app as a built in source.
Two connections are ready so far, both to WordPress:
- Gallery: browse and search a connected site's media library, read only, through the app backend.
- Posts: the list of the site's posts.
Everything goes through the backend over the WP REST API and Application Passwords, you can connect several sites at once, and access is set per company. The useful bit: right from there you can build a Task or drop a message into Chat, without exporting or copying anything by hand.
Under the hood each connection is a small descriptor class. Here is the WordPress Gallery one, trimmed to the essentials:
// A Krokq connection is just a small descriptor. This one pulls a
// WordPress media library into the app, read-only, through the backend.
final class WpGalleryPlugin extends AbstractPlugin
{
public function id(): string { return 'wp-gallery'; }
public function name(): string { return 'WordPress Gallery'; }
public function multiInstance(): bool { return true; } // connect several sites
}
Adding a new one for another service is the same kind of descriptor, so the list keeps growing around real requests. That is what adaptable means here: the tool shapes itself to the work, not the other way around.
An app, not just a website
- Installs as an app through Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS, and on desktop too. If the system allows standalone, Krokq offers to install itself.
- Web Push notifications, with an unread counter right on the icon.
- Share files into the app: the system lists Krokq among the share targets for most file types.
- 10 languages, more as they are needed.
- No mobile app yet, but the whole base for it is in place: an API plus Sanctum. So it is a matter of time.
Sign in and demo
- Sign in with a login and password or through Google OAuth. Signing in on another device by QR code is next on my list.
- Right after signing in you can fill the app with demo data in one click (the vertical is retail, in any of the 10 languages). The demo lives for 24 hours and then deletes itself, so the sandbox is always clean.
What this runs on
Krokq runs on my own engine package, LaraFoundry, a core for spinning up SaaS projects fast: companies, users, roles, authentication. Krokq is the third application on that engine, and the Krokq side itself took me about three days. The engine already runs in production on other apps, and I keep polishing it in parallel.
The domain is covered by tests (Pest and PHPUnit), with the usual CI on top.
What is next
Bigger things in progress: bulk actions on messages and attachments, data export, an admin layer for oversight, and more service connections. I will show them as they land.
Follow along
If a light tracker plus chat is something your small team keeps improvising in group messengers, give Krokq a try and tell me what is missing.
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