Native vs Connected vs both

Laya works whether your team lives entirely in Laya, keeps its work in another tool, or sits somewhere in between. This page helps you pick a starting point — and you can change your mind later, because the three approaches coexist in one workspace.

The three approaches

• Pure native — create Kanban or Scrum boards in Laya and run everything here.
• Mirror first — keep your existing tool as the source of truth and mirror its boards into Laya with two-way sync.
• Mixed, with master boards — run some work natively, mirror the rest, and build a master board that unifies both into one view.

At a glance

When pure native fits

If your team has no existing tracker to preserve, native boards give you the full Laya feature set with nothing to configure: sprints, epics, a backlog, Board Studio customisation, automations and saved views. The create wizard describes the two templates as Kanban — "Continuous flow, no fixed iterations." — and Scrum — "Time-boxed sprints with backlog grooming."

When mirroring fits

If another tool is your system of record and must stay that way, connect it instead of migrating. Laya keeps a synced mirror of the work items on the boards you choose — their core fields, such as title, status, priority, dates and description — and changes flow both ways. Comments stay in the source tool and are read live. Your team keeps working wherever they prefer.

Honest trade-offs to know about:

• Disconnecting a board deletes Laya's mirror of it — your data in the source tool is untouched, but the Laya copy goes. See Disconnecting safely.
• If an admin disconnects a shared team connection, connected boards keep their items but new changes stop syncing until it is reconnected.
• Starring a connected board is stored only in your browser, so those stars do not follow you across devices (native board stars do).

When you want both: master boards

A master board combines sources — connected boards from any provider and native Laya boards — into one Laya-native view. It opens grouped by "Source board" so you can see where each card comes from (you can change or remove the grouping), and a "Sync all boards" menu action pulls every provider on the board in parallel.