Self-hosted · Open source · Private
Sempa is a calm task manager you run yourself. Plan each day with intention, hold your focus, and close the evening cleanly — with your email and calendar quietly pulled in. No lock-in, no ads, no one watching.
Local-firstRuns fully offline · ~10 MB image · AGPL-3.0 licensed
The name
སེམས་དཔའ་ཆེན་པོ
Sempa Chenpo · Sanskrit: Mahāsattva
Mind, or consciousness — the awareness you meet the day with.
A hero, a warrior, a brave one. The courage to stay present.
Great, vast, big enough to hold what arrives without strain.
In Tibetan Buddhism, a sempa chenpo is a mind vast and courageous enough to hold the suffering of all beings — without being overwhelmed by it. Not a mind that does more, but one with room enough for everything that comes.
“A mind big enough to hold the day — without being overwhelmed by it.”
That is the whole idea behind the app. Sempa holds your tasks, your email, your calendar and your reminders, so your mind doesn't have to keep them all in the air. It's built for spaciousness, not pressure — plan with intention, focus without noise, and end each day knowing it's been set down.
Four quiet rituals carry your day — and the small pieces that make them up are designed to disappear into the work.
A guided morning ritual and a seven-day board you drag tasks across. Set the handful of outcomes that matter.
Time-box work into the schedule, then enter Focus mode with a built-in Pomodoro that logs real time against your estimate.
A shutdown ritual to tick off wins, reschedule what's left, and reflect — so the day is genuinely set down.
Star an email and it becomes a task. See calendar events beside your plan. Sync assigned Jira issues. All optional.
Sempa can turn a link or a recipe into a task, break a daunting task into clear steps, draft your weekly review, and tidy messy imports. It runs on a small model you host yourself — so the help is real, and nothing is ever sent to anyone.
Give a vague, heavy task the spark and Sempa suggests a few concrete, ordered subtasks. Keep them, edit them, or ignore them — it only ever suggests, and nothing happens until you say so.
Off by default. AI does nothing until you switch it on — and every feature has its own toggle, so you turn on only what you want.
No data ever leaves your infrastructure. No third parties, no API keys, no telemetry — your tasks stay yours.
Runs on a small model you host yourself — no usage costs, no rate limits, and it works fully offline.
Beyond breaking up tasks, the same local model can turn a URL or pasted text into a task with steps and a shopping list, power natural-language quick-add, tag suggestions, a drafted weekly review, day planning and end-of-day reflection prompts.
Each one is an independent switch in Settings → Integrations → AI. Flip any of them off and it vanishes from the app — or turn the whole thing off and Sempa works exactly as it always has.
All the AI features →Choose a palette that suits you — each one restyles the whole interface in light and dark, all carefully kept refined and quiet. Try them right here: the button below re-skins this entire site.
Each person runs their own copy — like Gitea or Vaultwarden. Your tasks, notes and reflections live in a single SQLite file on your own server, never on someone else's.
Pair Sempa with Tailscale and your devices form a private mesh. Your phone and laptop reach your server from anywhere — coffee shop, office, mobile data — with nothing exposed to the public internet.
Keep today in view without opening the app. A floating desktop widget sits quietly above your work, and Android home-screen widgets come in three sizes — so the next thing is always one glance away.
Docker for the server, native apps for Windows, Linux and Android, a PWA for everything else. Clone, run the installer, answer a few questions.
Free, and freeing
The app is free and open source, and self-hosting it will always be free. There are no ads and nothing to upsell. If it earns a place in your day, a small gift helps keep it maintained and the new clients coming.