Kanban Swimlanes: What They Are, How to Use Them & Best Tools

Kanban swimlanes are rows that organize tasks based on your team’s needs, so it is easier to manage workloads and prioritize tasks. Originally used to expedite work items, swimlanes now help teams to separate tasks by initiative, project, or product.

A wide variety of Kanban board applications are available, and their flexibility has made them popular across industries from accounting to engineering.

One of the features that makes these tools so powerful is the use of swimlanes. By adding a simple layer of structure, swimlanes transform boards into more readable, organized, and actionable workflows.

Key Takeaways: Kanban Swimlanes

• Swimlanes are horizontal rows in a Kanban board that categorize tasks.
• Kanban swimlanes help teams to prioritize and manage tasks by visually separating them, improving response time and flexibility.
• Common uses: task urgency, teams, projects, iterations.  
• Best tools: Teamhood, Jira, Businessmap.  

What Are Kanban Swimlanes

Swimlanes are horizontal rows that organize tasks on your Kanban board. Those rows allow us to define the classes of service by visual separation. This increases the board’s documentation power and tidily groups tasks according to specific classification criteria.

Why Use Kanban Board Swimlanes?

Initially, swimlanes were used to manage urgent tasks more easily, bypassing certain workflow restrictions (WIP). It allowed them to hurry an urgent task without completing the current work. To help identify such tasks, teams added an expedited swimlane to the top of their Kanban board.

Then, if an unplanned urgent task appeared, it would go to the expedited lane. The team could start working on it immediately, disregarding the WIP limit. This allowed Kanban teams to have a faster reaction time and manage tasks based on the potential cost of delay (CoD).

Today, Kanban swimlanes are used more broadly to help the team classify its tasks. Examples of such applications include identifying different departments, projects, types of tasks, or the urgency levels of the work (especially common for support teams).

Benefits of Kanban Swimlanes  

So, let’s break down the benefits of Kanban swimlanes:

• Prioritize urgent tasks (e.g., expedited lane).   
• Separate work by team, project, or client
• Improve workflow visibility with clear categorization
• Reduce bottlenecks by enforcing WIP limits per lane.

Here’s a short video explaining the key differences between a Kanban board and the full Kanban system.

Which Kanban Tools Support Swimlanes?

Here are our top kanban tools with swimlanes, featuring one-of-a-kind options that boost your workflow, whether you work for a big corporation or a small team. We have shortlisted the top 3 tools that support at least one level of swimlanes/row structuring in the Kanban board.

1. Teamhood – the most flexible structure and powerful Kanban system.
2. Leankit – most suitable for large enterprises as a Kanban system.
3. Jira – the most popular Agile solution which also can be a Kanban system.

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4 Types of Kanban Swimlanes (With Examples)

As more teams started using this Agile framework, the usage of swimlanes expanded. Kanban practitioners separated tasks by urgency, teams, time, and other criteria. Thus creating Kanban boards with swimlanes that were better suited to their processes.

Today, the most popular use of Kanban swimlanes are as follows:

1. Task type or urgency
2. Products, projects, or clients.
3. Teams or company levels.
4. Iterations and project phases.

Let’s see each one in action.

1. Kanban Board Swimlanes by Task Type/Urgency

Use Kanban swimlanes to separate tasks by urgency, ensuring your team tackles high-priority tasks first. Helpdesk teams can sort tasks into categories: critical, high-priority, or low-priority. This helps them better focus their support efforts.

Task Type

One of the most popular ways to use Kanban swimlanes is to help separate tasks by their type. In most teams, there are several types of tasks to be completed, and it helps to see the Kanban board divided by them.

In this example, you can see a Kanban board used by an accounting department. The task division is based on their type – suppliers, clients, and employees.

This makes the task board easier to navigate and allows the team to focus on its work. It also gives immediate insight into the type of work the team is concentrating on.

Depending on your processes, such division could mean anything from 2 to 20 swimlanes. To keep the task board readable, you should try to stick to around 10 swimlanes (at most).

Task Urgency

Teams working with clients often like to take a different approach. They divide Kanban board swimlanes by service plan or urgency. This is similar to the expedited swimlane concept but with more options. Instead of a single expedited Kanban swimlane, rows show several urgency levels or service plans.

In this example, a helpdesk team finds it most helpful to divide the task board into critical, high-priority, moderate-priority, and low-priority tasks. This allows them to identify and solve the most critical issues before moving on to other requests.

To minimize distraction and focus on the most critical work, you can always minimize empty swimlanes. This allows us to hone in on the important items at all times.

Another option would be to classify tasks based on the service plans. In this case, the Kanban swimlanes show the expected response time for that group of tasks, such as responding in 24 hours, replying in 48 hours, and responding in 5 business days. You can also combine both approaches, as in the example above.

Ready to try this yourself? Start organizing your tasks with swimlanes on Teamhood today – it’s free to get started!

2. Kanban Board Swimlanes by Products, Projects, or Clients

Products

Another common path many teams take is using Kanban swimlanes to separate products, projects, or clients. When working towards various goals, it becomes pretty important to see work items separated from one another in this way.

For example, a furniture manufacturer could set up their task board with separate Kanban swimlanes for every product line. They allow us to understand the entire operation’s waiting periods and each specific product line. As you can see in the board below, such separation is also great for storing information on each product line.

You will be able to find all the current and past designs of a specific line in one place.

Projects or Clients

Similarly, you can use Kanban swimlanes to separate different projects. For the more client-oriented services, each swimlane can represent a particular client.

Such division becomes very useful when the team wants to track and understand the effort required by each client and allocate resources accordingly.

In this Kanban board, you can see the team has used Kanban swimlanes to represent clients and added product tags to tasks to track what type of product they are making for each client. Thus, creating a double tracking system in this online Kanban board with swimlanes.

Use Case:

• A marketing agency managing multiple clients.
• A software development team with different specialists (developers, testers, designers).
• An IT support team handling tickets for different departments.

Example:

A digital agency uses Kanban swimlanes to manage work for multiple clients:

Each client has its own swimlane, ensuring clear visibility and preventing confusion between projects.

Moreover, the swimlane with the company’s most important client is highlighted in green, ensuring the team put more focus on that part of the board.

3. Kanban Board Swimlanes by Teams or Departments

Things might get quite confusing if you have several teams or departments working from a single task board. To eliminate the mess, you can use Kanban swimlanes to separate their tasks and create more clarity in each team’s operations.

By dividing the board by teams, you can include teams from several locations and ease their collaboration while keeping tasks separate and manageable for each team. As a manager, you can also more efficiently track and compare each team’s progress.

In the example above, Kanban swimlanes are used to separate two sales teams. You can collapse and expand each team as needed while also keeping track of the overall situation.

Departments

Conversely, if your company is more department-based, you may prefer to have different departments represented by Kanban Swimlanes.

For example, an engineering company could have design, engineering, and manufacturing tasks represented by different Kanban swimlanes on one board. This would make it easier to collaborate and track progress. By seeing the design progress, engineering could plan out their tasks, and by seeing what is ready, the manufacturing team could be ready to produce as fast as possible.

4. Kanban Board Swimlanes by Iterations or Project Phases

Lastly, tracking iterations or phases on their task board is essential for some teams. In Teamhood, similarly to Jira swimlanes, you can set start and end dates for each swimlane to ensure the team keeps to the set deadlines and plans for only a specific period. Learn about other Kanban planning techniques.

You can also rename the Kanban swimlanes any way you like, creating a clear plan for your team to follow.

Setting up Kanban swimlanes with start and due dates will also activate an additional feature in the Teamhood Timeline. In this view, you can only add tasks between the set dates. Thus, allowing you to plan with more certainty.

What Is the Relationship between the Kanban Board and Swimlanes?

Simply put, Kanban boards visualize workflows, while swimlanes offer an additional layer of organization. Swimlanes help categorize tasks by teams, priorities, or urgency, enhancing the board’s clarity and focus.

A Kanban board is a visual representation of work using cards or sticky notes on a board, typically divided into columns representing different stages of the workflow. Each card represents a task or work item, and its movement across the columns indicates its progress.

On the other hand, Swimlanes are horizontal divisions within the Kanban board.

They provide additional categorization or segmentation of tasks based on specific criteria, such as departments, priorities, features, or workflows.

Swimlanes run across the columns of the Kanban board, dividing it into distinct sections.

The relationship between the Kanban board and swimlanes is that swimlanes are used to further organize and structure the tasks within the board. They provide a visual separation and grouping of tasks based on specific dimensions, allowing teams to understand the work distribution and progress better.

Swimlanes enhance the Kanban board by offering a way to segment and prioritize tasks, identify bottlenecks or areas of focus, and provide context to the work being done.

How to Add Swimlanes in Kanban (Step-by-Step Guide)

Adding swimlanes to your Kanban board is simple. Categorize tasks based on priority, department, or type and visually separate them for better tracking. Here’s how to quickly set it up.

1. Define the Swimlane Categories: Identify the categories or divisions you want to create with your swimlanes. These categories could be based on departments, teams, projects, stages of a workflow, or any other relevant factors that help organize your tasks effectively.
2. Visualize the Swimlanes: Create horizontal sections on your Kanban board representing the swimlanes. These sections should run across the columns of your board. You can use lines, borders, or different-colored backgrounds to visually separate the swimlanes.
3. Assign Tasks to Swimlanes: Assign or place the individual tasks or work items within the appropriate swimlanes based on their corresponding category or criteria. This ensures that tasks are grouped together in a logical and organized manner.
4. Customize Swimlane Headers: Optionally, you can add headers or labels to each swimlane to clearly indicate the category it represents. These headers provide context and help team members understand which tasks belong to which swimlane.
5. Track and Manage Tasks: As work progresses, team members move tasks within their respective swimlanes across the columns of the Kanban board to reflect their current status. This visual tracking helps monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and maintain a smooth workflow.

6. Adapt as Needed: Over time, you may need to adjust or modify your swimlanes based on changing requirements or evolving project needs. Stay flexible and adapt the swimlane structure to accommodate new categories or reorganize existing ones.

Advanced Kanban Swimlane Strategies

Teams that deal with multiple types of work – like client requests and operational tasks – need a way to keep things straight. That’s where a Kanban board comes in.

How it works

Your board is organized with Swimlanes, which act like horizontal categories for different types of work. For example, you might have one lane for Client Tickets and another for Internal Tasks.

This setup is great for multiple workflows. It lets different teams or projects use their own processes on the same board. For instance, a Customer support team can have its own workflow.

Example: Customer support team handling client tickets + internal work

This support team’s got two main jobs: Handling client support tickets (external work) and Working on internal process improvements (internal work).

Workstreams (Work Type):

• Client Support Requests (super urgent client tickets)
• Internal Process Work (stuff the team wants to improve)

Custom Workflows (Columns per Workstream)

Each workstream has its own process, so tasks follow the right steps.

Applying WIP Limits per Swimlane

Work-in-progress limits ensure that client tickets are wrapped up on a timely basis, so the team isn’t overwhelmed. This keeps internal upgrades moving forward, and burnout is avoided, all while keeping things efficient.

To apply WIP limits by swimlane, set limits based on what your team can handle. For example, you might cap client tickets at 5 for fast turnarounds. It’s also a good idea to customize limits for different workflows – like setting a higher limit for internal tasks. Remember to use visual flags to alert the team when a swimlane reaches its limit, so everyone’s on the same page.

Customer Support Team with WIP Limits Example

Regularly check and adjust your work in progress (WIP) limits based on what your team can handle and how busy you are. You might need to adjust your team’s capacity if bottlenecks keep happening.

Best Kanban Swimlane Tools for 2025

Many popular task management solutions offer Kanban boards as part of their package. However, those looking to use Kanban swimlanes can be disappointed as only a few solutions also include this feature. To make your search a little easier, here is a shortlist of Kanban swimlane tools on the market.

1. Teamhood

Teamhood’s swimlane functionality lets you easily map out, optimize your processes, and categorize your Kanban items on the board. With its intuitive interface and collaborative features, Teamhood provides a robust platform for managing projects and visualizing work across swimlanes.  Prices start at $9.50 per user/month.

Here’s how you can use Teamhood for creating swimlanes:

• Clarify your goal: Determine the objective of using swimlane diagrams in your project management process. Identify the specific processes you want to explore and the level of detail required for effective visualization.
• Break the work into manageable pieces: Divide your project or process into manageable tasks or steps. Clearly define the boundaries of the process you want to study and optimize.
• Utilize Kanban project swimlanes: In Teamhood, create swimlanes based on your project’s needs. Swimlanes can represent employees, work groups, departments, or other relevant divisions that help organize and structure your tasks effectively.
• Research the process steps: For existing processes, document the process steps within each swimlane, including interconnections, communications, and handoffs between lanes. Identify gaps, redundancies, bottlenecks, and other inefficiencies to improve the process.
• Optimize new processes: If you’re modeling a new process in Teamhood, outline the steps required to increase efficiency, reduce delays, and minimize costs. By visualizing the process in swimlanes, you can easily identify areas for improvement and streamline workflows.

2. Businessmap

Businessmap is a Kanban swimlane tool calibrated for larger teams and enterprises. Like Teamhood, it offers all the traditional Kanban functionality and features you would expect for such a solution. However, even though it is focused on enterprise users, Businessmap is strictly Kanban-based. This means there are no traditional project management features included in the suite.

Thus, it would not be a good fit if your company is not strictly on Kanban. You would find a lack of traditional planning and reporting tools, which are common in other project management systems. Prices start at $10 per user/month.

3. Planview AgilePlace

Planview AgilePlace is a tool optimized for the Kanban approach and geared towards engineering teams. While other teams can use it, this Kanban swimlane tool is quite technical and might initially be a bit intimidating.

The Kanban board layout in AgilePlace is a bit different from other tools, and I suggest you handle all planning and execution phases in one board. As such, swimlanes are not defined for the whole board but instead defined per column. This means you must spend more time setting up the tool before you begin. Prices start at $20 per user/month for the subscription.

4. YouTrack

YouTrack is a Kanban swimlane software that is geared toward project management. Here, you can visualize items on a Kanban board, categorize them further with swimlanes, and limit the work in progress. While YouTrack does provide some lean reports, there is a lack of traditional lead and cycle time metrics. If you use this often, having to work around for a solution may be a deal breaker.

On the other hand, this solution’s flexible functionality makes it suitable for Scrum and other Agile approach applications. Prices start at $4.40 per user/month.

5. Kanban Tool

Kanban Tool is swimlane software for those who want a simple tool. It will be a great fit for smaller projects run purely on Kanban. This solution offers all the traditional Kanban features, as well as time tracking and some integrations. However, you will not find any common project management tools here.

Select this Kanban swimlane option to visualize your efforts easily. Prices start at $5 per user/month.

6. Zenkit

Zenkit is a Kanban swimlane tool focused on collaboration. While the Kanban view here is just one of the options to work in, it does carry the main functionality you would need for an effective setup. The Kanban board can be divided into swimlanes and categories, and you can track the WIP. However, there is no out-of-the-box tracking for the Kanban metrics. You would have to set up custom reports in the tool to achieve those.

If you are looking for other project management features, use the Gantt chart, track workload, and create mindmaps. These options nicely complement the tool’s collaboration aspect. Pricing starts at $9 per user/month.

Summary

When visualizing your process on a Kanban board, it is essential to use all the available tools to get the best results. Kanban board swimlanes are a great way to add a new layer of structure and clarity to your operations, making the process much more enjoyable.

As the examples above show, Kanban board swimlanes can be used for various purposes, and you can surely think of a couple more to add to the list.

Get more inspiration for your team’s process with these Kanban board examples, start working immediately with Teamhood Kanban board templates, or learn more about Kanban project management.

Swimlanes are important, but only one element of Kanban Methodology. Teamhood has published an Ultimate Kanban Guide, a compact but complete e-book for Kanban principles, terminology, and practices. Download our Ultimate Kanban Guide and become a Kanban Expert!