We built Orbit on Laravel 12, using Laravel Reverb — Laravel's own WebSocket broadcasting server — as the backbone for real-time sync, rather than a polling-based "refresh every few seconds" approach. That decision is why a card move, a comment, or an edit shows up on a teammate's screen in under a second: the change is pushed the moment it happens, not fetched on the next poll cycle.
On top of that real-time core, we built the features a team actually needs day to day: drag-and-drop boards and cards, an Inbox for capturing tasks the instant they come up, checklists with progress bars, comments with emoji reactions, and file attachments with cover images. Premium workspaces add Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard, and Map views of the same underlying data — so a manager can see a timeline while an individual contributor works the board view, both looking at the same live data.
To solve the "automation shouldn't need a separate tool" problem, we built Pilot — Orbit's own trigger-condition-action automation engine, directly inside the product. And to solve the "sharing progress with outsiders" problem, we built read-only public board links that need no login at all — useful for exactly the kind of client-visibility use case Kawach's own client work runs into constantly.
Billing runs on Stripe across four tiers (Free, Standard, Premium, Enterprise), with role-based access via Spatie's laravel-permission package splitting workspace members into Admins (who manage billing, invites, and see every board) and Participants (who only see boards they're added to). The Free plan is deliberately generous — unlimited cards, up to 10 boards, no credit card required — because we wanted small teams and freelancers to be able to actually run their real work on it, not just trial it.
One of Orbit's actual users summed up the result better than our own marketing copy could: "We closed four other tabs the week we switched. Everything that used to live in a spreadsheet now just lives on a board people actually open." — Maya Kessler, Head of Ops at Northwind Labs, an Orbit customer.
