The six best open source project management tools in 2026 are Plane, OpenProject, Orangescrum, Leantime, Taiga and Redmine. All six run on your own server under a recognized open source license, and all six install with Docker. They differ most in three things: whether they track time and budgets, whether the paid tier charges per user, and how actively the code is maintained.
We checked the license, the public repository and the pricing page of every tool on this list on 9 September 2026, and we name the source of every number at the foot of this article. Orangescrum is our own product. We say so wherever it appears and we score it on the same six criteria as the others.
In short
- Billing hours or tracking budgets? Orangescrum, on the Pro plan at 69 dollars a month for unlimited users. Timer, weekly timesheets, approvals and project budgets are included, and that price is the same at 10 people or at 200. The free Community Edition logs time against tasks with no user limit.
- Product team that does not track time? Plane. The best interface here, but time tracking starts at 6 dollars per user per month.
- Scrum and nothing else? Taiga. Flat pricing, unlimited users on every plan.
- Want a tool that will not change for a decade? Redmine. Free, no paid edition, the deepest plugin ecosystem, and 50 interface languages.
- Need single sign on for free? OpenProject, Leantime or Redmine. Plane and Orangescrum both charge for it, and Taiga has no two-factor authentication at any tier.
- Cost at 25 people, per year: Redmine 0, Taiga 600 euros, Orangescrum 828 dollars, OpenProject 1,785 euros, Plane 1,800 dollars, Leantime 2,400 dollars. Self-hosting any of them costs about 3,300 dollars once admin hours are counted.
- Disclosure. Orangescrum publishes this blog and is one of the six. We rank it third and score it on the same six criteria as the rest.
Open source project management software compared
| Tool | Best for | License | GitHub stars | Time tracking | Free edition limit | Paid tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plane | Product and engineering teams | AGPL v3 | 59,116 | Pro plan | None, self-hosted | $6 per user per month |
| OpenProject | Program and portfolio management | GPL v3 | 16,059 | Yes | None | €5.95 per user per month, 25-user minimum |
| Orangescrum | Tasks, time and budgets in one tool | AGPL v3 | 7, repo opened Aug 2026 | Yes | None | Flat, from $29 per month, unlimited users |
| Leantime | Small teams that plan by goals | AGPL v3 | 11,555 | Yes | None, self-hosted. No free cloud tier | $8 per user per month, billed yearly |
| Taiga | Scrum and Kanban teams | MPL 2.0 back end, AGPL v3 front end | 849 | No, plugin only | 1 public and 1 private project on cloud, none self-hosted | Flat, from €5 per month, unlimited users |
| Redmine | Issue tracking with plugins | GPL v2 | 6,031 | Yes | None | Free. Third-party hosting extra |
What counts as open source project management software
Open source project management software is a tool for planning and tracking work whose full source code is published under a license that lets anyone read, run and modify it. In practice, three tests matter:
- You can read the code. The whole application is in a public repository, not a cut-down demo.
- You can run it without a key. No license file, no activation call to the vendor.
- You can change it. The license permits modification, subject to its own conditions.
Five of the six tools here also sell a paid edition. That is normal in 2026 and it is called open core. The question is not “is it free” but what is missing from the free edition, and what does the paid one cost once the team grows.
Why teams move to open source project management
Four reasons come up again and again. They are not equal, and only you know which one is yours.
- The per-seat bill stopped making sense. A team of 40 on a mid-tier commercial plan pays between 4,000 and 7,000 dollars a year for task tracking. Every one of the six tools here removes that line completely if you self-host, and three of them remove it even on cloud, because they charge a flat price.
- The data has to stay in a known place. Legal, health, defense and public sector buyers often cannot put project data in a vendor cloud in another country. Self-hosting answers that in a way no contract clause can.
- Jira Data Center is ending. Atlassian closed new sales on 30 March 2026, ends renewals on 30 March 2028 and ends support on 28 March 2029. Every organization that needs an on-premise tracker is now shopping, whether it wanted to be or not.
- The tool has to bend. Custom fields and workflows are common. Reading the source, patching it and running your own build is not, but it is available, and for some teams that option alone is the reason.
If none of those four is true for you, a commercial cloud tool is very likely the cheaper answer once you count the hours in the next section. That is an honest thing for us to say, because we sell one of the six.
Open source against commercial cloud
This is the comparison most buyers actually need, and it rarely appears in a list like this one because every publisher of such a list is selling something.
| Open source, self-hosted | Commercial cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| License cost | Zero for all six | Per user per month, usually |
| Cost as the team grows | Flat, you pay for the server | Grows with headcount |
| Where the data sits | Wherever you put it | The vendor’s region |
| Who patches it | You, every month | The vendor, invisibly |
| Who is on call at 2am | You | The vendor |
| Upgrades | Your change window, your risk | Done to you, sometimes unwanted |
| Time to first login | An afternoon to a week | Minutes |
| Can you change the product | Yes, it is your source tree | No, you file a request |
| What happens if the vendor fails | You still hold a working copy | You migrate under pressure |
| Support | Community, or a paid contract | Included, with a response target |
How we chose these six
We compared every tool against the same six criteria. The number in brackets is the weight we gave each one, out of 100.
- Open source in practice (20). A recognized license, the whole application public, and a way to run it with no key.
- Core project management (25). Tasks, subtasks, Kanban, lists, milestones, timeline, custom workflows, files, comments.
- Time and money (15). Time logging, timesheets, billable flags, estimates against actuals, budgets.
- Scale and administration (15). User limits, database, roles, single sign-on, backup, upgrade path.
- Support and community (15). Documentation, forum or chat, paid support, migration help, release cadence.
- What users say (10). G2 and Capterra ratings, weighted by review count.
We did not score visual design or the number of integrations. Both matter, and both change too fast to compare fairly.
What we considered and did not include
A list is only honest if it says what it left out. These were considered against the same six criteria and did not make the six, with the reason.
- Focalboard. Excluded for inactivity. It moved to the mattermost-community organization and has had no commit since 18 May 2026. It is not archived, but it is dormant. Several current articles still recommend it.
- GitLab and Tuleap. Excluded as category mismatches. Both are strong, but planning is one module inside a software lifecycle platform. If developers own your process, look at them anyway.
- ProjectLibre. Excluded as a desktop scheduler. It is a Microsoft Project replacement for one planner, not a tool a team works in.
- Wekan. Excluded on scope. Kanban only, with no list view, no timeline and no time tracking.
- Vikunja. Excluded on scope. Good for personal and small-team task management, but no timesheets and no budgets.
- Huly. Excluded on maturity, not quality. It is young and moving fast, and we will look at it again at the next update.
- Odoo. Excluded as a category mismatch. It is an ERP suite that contains a project module.
- Phabricator. Excluded because development stopped in 2021. It still appears on lists published this year.
What changed in open source project management in 2026
Atlassian closed new Jira Data Center sales on 30 March 2026. Renewals and expansions end on 30 March 2028, and support ends on 28 March 2029. Every organization that needs an on-premise tracker is now shopping, and that is the single biggest reason this category grew this year.
Open core became the default. Every tool on this list except Redmine now sells a paid edition.
Docker became the install. All six run from a compose file. Hand-built PHP or Ruby stacks are no longer the normal path.
One well-known option left the list. Focalboard, an open source Trello alternative with 26,456 stars, moved from Mattermost to the mattermost-community organization and has had no commit since 18 May 2026. It is not archived, but it is dormant. Do not start new work on it.
1. Plane, best for product and engineering teams
- License
- AGPL v3
- GitHub
- 59,116 stars
- Hosting
- self-hosted or cloud
- Rating
- 4.4 on G2 from 15 reviews
- Last release
- v1.4.2, August 2026
- Release pace
- About one a month
- Set up
- Moderate10 documented steps
- Repository
- makeplane/plane
Plane is the closest open source answer to Linear and Jira Software, and it has the most GitHub stars of the six, 59,116. Plane gives you issues, cycles, modules, views and pages in a fast interface, and it ships a release almost every week.
Plane key features
- Issues with sub-issues, relations and custom properties
- Cycles for sprints and modules for epics
- Saved views and filters
- Pages for documentation
- Importers for Jira and GitHub
- REST API and webhooks
Pricing. The self-hosted community edition is free with no user cap. Pro is $6 per user per month and adds time tracking, automation and full Jira import. Business is $13 per seat and adds worklog approval. A team of 25 on Pro pays $1,800 a year.
Strengths
- The best interface of the six.
- The largest and fastest-moving community.
- A strong Jira importer.
Trade offs
- Time tracking is a paid feature, so the free edition has none.
- There are no budgets at any tier.
- Pricing is per user on the paid tiers.
- There are only 15 G2 reviews so far, so the rating is thin.
Who should not pick Plane: anyone who bills hours or runs client projects on the free edition. Time tracking starts at Pro, $6 per user per month, and there are no budgets at any tier.
2. OpenProject, best for program and portfolio management
- License
- GPL v3
- GitHub
- 16,059 stars
- Hosting
- self-hosted or cloud, EU data center
- Rating
- 4.6 on Capterra from 188 reviews
- Last release
- v17.8.0, September 2026
- Release pace
- A minor release most months
- Set up
- Moderateeasy to trial, harder in production
- Repository
- opf/openproject
OpenProject is the most complete classic project management tool in open source, and it holds the highest user rating on this list, 4.6 on Capterra from 188 reviews. OpenProject gives you Gantt charts, work breakdown, budgets, cost reports, agile boards, meetings and a wiki, and it supports hybrid methods. It runs an EU data center, which is why it appears often on European public sector shortlists.
OpenProject key features
- Work packages with hierarchy and relations
- Gantt charts and roadmaps
- Agile boards and backlogs
- Time tracking and cost reports
- Budgets
- Meetings, wiki and documents
- A dedicated edition for construction
Pricing. The community edition is free, and it includes time tracking and budgets. Enterprise cloud starts at €5.95 per user per month on Basic, billed yearly, with a 25-user minimum. Professional is €10.95 and Premium is €15.95 with a 100-user minimum. A team of 25 on Basic pays €1,785 a year, and so does a team of 10, because 25 seats is the smallest purchase.
Strengths
- The widest feature set here.
- The highest rating from the largest review base.
- A clear enterprise support path with service level agreements.
Trade offs
- Heavier to run and to learn.
- Several administration features sit behind the Enterprise add-on.
- The interface is functional rather than modern.
Who should not pick OpenProject: a team of five who want a board and a list. It will feel like far too much tool.
3. Orangescrum, best for tasks, time and budgets in one tool
- License
- AGPL v3
- GitHub
- 7 stars, repository published August 2026
- Hosting
- self-hosted or cloud
- Rating
- 4.5 on G2 from 25 reviews, 4.3 on Capterra from 105 reviews
- Last release
- v0.1.14, September 2026
- Release pace
- Very frequent, and very young
- Set up
- Easyone clone, one command
- Repository
- Orangescrum/opensource-community-edition
Disclosure: Orangescrum publishes this blog. The scoring criteria above were fixed before the review began and applied to all six tools.
Orangescrum ships time logging, timesheets, billable flags and budgets in its free edition, and charges a flat price rather than a per-user price on its paid plans. OpenProject is the only other tool here with time tracking and budgets built in and free. Redmine can also do budgets, through a plugin. Taiga is the only other one with flat pricing. For an agency or any services team that bills hours, that combination is the difference between one tool and three.
The Orangescrum Community Edition needs no license key and has no limit on users, projects or storage. It runs inside a private network with no outbound connection and joins Active Directory through LDAP or SAML. The licensed self-hosted editions activate offline, which is what an air-gapped site needs.
Orangescrum key features
- Projects with members, roles and per-project workflows
- Tasks with priorities, due dates, labels, subtasks and task groups
- List, Kanban, calendar and overview views
- Custom statuses and workflows per project
- Time logging and timesheets, billable and non-billable
- Reports and dashboards
- Comments, mentions, attachments, email notifications
- Five roles: Owner, Admin, User, Client, Guest
- An MCP server with more than 70 tools, so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can create and update work
How to install Orangescrum Community Edition
Three commands, with Docker as the only requirement:
git clone https://github.com/Orangescrum/opensource-community-edition.git
cd opensource-community-edition
docker compose up -d --buildThen open http://localhost:8080 and follow the setup wizard. You can also get the build from the Orangescrum Community Edition download page.
Pricing. Community Edition free with unlimited users. Cloud is flat at $29, $69 or $349 a month, every plan with unlimited users. Basic at $29 is limited to 10 projects. Self-hosted licensed editions start at $1,500 a year.
Strengths
- Time and budget tracking in the free edition, flat pricing so cost does not grow with headcount, air-gapped operation with offline activation.
- AI assistant access over MCP.
Trade offs
- The public repository opened in August 2026 and has 7 stars, so there is no independent contributor base.
- No third-party plugin ecosystem and no fork history yet. The open source edition depends on one vendor. Some screens still run an older front end while the rewrite finishes. Reviewers on Capterra who used it before the 2026 rewrite describe the old interface as dated.
Who should not pick Orangescrum: a team that wants a Linear-style tracker with cycles and modules. Plane does that better.
4. Leantime, best for small teams that plan by goals
- License
- AGPL v3
- GitHub
- 11,555 stars
- Hosting
- self-hosted or cloud
- Rating
- 4.3 on Capterra from 10 reviews
- Last release
- v3.9.8, July 2026
- Release pace
- Small releases, often
- Set up
- EasyDocker Compose with a wizard
- Repository
- Leantime/leantime
Leantime connects strategy to daily work: goals, milestones and to-dos in one line of sight, designed for people who are not project managers. It also includes time tracking, which most tools in this size class leave out.
Leantime key features
- Goals, milestones and to-dos in one hierarchy
- Kanban, table, calendar and timeline views
- Time tracking and timesheets
- Retrospectives and idea boards
- A plugin marketplace
Pricing. There is no free cloud tier. Leantime removed it in 2026. Pro is $8 per user per month billed yearly, or $10 billed monthly. The self-hosted AGPL v3 build is free and has no user limit. A team of 25 on Pro pays $2,400 a year.
Strengths
- Goal-to-task linking that nothing else here does as well, time tracking included.
- A self-hosted build with no user cap.
Trade offs
- The free cloud tier is gone.
- At $8 per user per month Leantime is now the most expensive per user of the six. Smaller community.
- Fewer integrations.
- Only 10 Capterra reviews, so treat the rating as early.
Who should not pick Leantime: teams above about 50 people, or anyone who needs portfolio-level reporting.
5. Taiga, best for Scrum and Kanban teams
- License
- MPL 2.0 on the back end, AGPL v3 on the front end
- GitHub
- 849 stars on the back end repository
- Hosting
- self-hosted or cloud
- Rating
- 4.3 on Capterra from 87 reviews
- Last release
- 6.10.2, July 2026
- Release pace
- Two to four a year
- Set up
- ModerateDocker Compose, vendor claims 30 minutes
- Repository
- taigaio/taiga-back
Before you choose Taiga, know that it changed hands. Taiga is now maintained by Taiga Cloud Services, S.L., a company registered in Vigo, Spain, rather than by Kaleidos alone. Kaleidos has not fully left: the current privacy policy still names two joint controllers. Development is real but narrow, with 76 commits from three main contributors in the twelve months to 10 September 2026, and two to four releases a year. A successor project called Tenzu exists, run by a French worker cooperative, and its issue tracking module is still listed as in specification. None of this makes Taiga a bad choice today, and no end of life date has been announced. It does mean you should read the release history yourself before you commit a large team to it.
Taiga is the closest fit for Scrum of the six. Taiga gives you a backlog, sprints, a taskboard, a burndown chart, epics and a Kanban mode. It has been in production since 2014. Its star count understates its use, because every Taiga repository was created in April 2021 during an organization move, which reset the star history.
Taiga key features
- Backlog and sprint planning
- Scrum taskboard with burndown chart
- Kanban with work-in-progress limits
- Epics and user stories with points
- Wiki and issue tracking
- Importers from Jira, Trello, Asana and GitHub
Pricing. Self-hosted is free with every feature and no user limit. Cloud is flat and billed in euros, with unlimited users on every plan: Gratis free with one public and one private project, Enthusiast €5 a month, Basic €20 a month and Premium €60 a month, or €50, €200 and €600 a year. The plans differ on project count and storage, not on seats, so a team of 25 on Premium pays €600 a year and so does a team of 100.
Strengths
- The best Scrum fit here.
- The complete feature set at no cost when self-hosted, flat cloud pricing with unlimited users on every plan.
- The widest set of importers.
Trade offs
- Taiga releases less often than Plane and OpenProject.
- There is no time tracking without a plugin.
- The interface has changed little since 2020.
Who should not pick Taiga: teams that do not run agile, or anyone who needs Gantt charts and budgets.
6. Redmine, best for issue tracking with plugins
- License
- GPL v2
- GitHub
- 6,031 stars on the mirror
- Hosting
- self-hosted only
- Rating
- 4.0 on G2 from 257 reviews, the largest review base here
- Last release
- 7.0.1, August 2026
- Release pace
- Maintenance across three branches
- Set up
- Moderateeasy by Docker, hard by hand
- Repository
- redmine/redminemirror, Subversion is canonical
Redmine is what you choose when you want a tool that will work the same way in ten years. It has been in continuous development since 2006. Issues, trackers, custom fields, roles, Gantt, calendar, wiki, repository integration, and a plugin ecosystem that covers agile boards, time reports and even CRM.
Redmine key features
- Flexible issue tracking with custom trackers and fields
- Multiple projects and subprojects
- Gantt chart and calendar
- Time tracking
- Wiki, forums and news
- Git and Subversion integration
- Hundreds of community plugins
Pricing. Free, with no paid edition and no official cloud. Several third-party vendors sell managed Redmine hosting. Prices vary widely by vendor, instance size and support level, so compare two or three before you commit.
Strengths
- The most stable and predictable option, time tracking built in.
- The deepest customisation through plugins.
- The largest body of user reviews.
Trade offs
- A dated interface out of the box.
- No official cloud.
- Plugin quality varies enough that a bad plugin can block a version upgrade.
Who should not pick Redmine: anyone who expects a modern interface without installing a theme and several plugins.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Plane | OpenProject | Orangescrum | Leantime | Taiga | Redmine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kanban board | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Plugin |
| List and table | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Gantt or timeline | Partial | Yes | Yes | Timeline | No | Yes |
| Sprints | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Plugin |
| Milestones or epics | Modules | Yes | Task groups | Milestones | Epics | Versions |
| Custom workflows | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Time tracking | Pro plan | Yes | Pro plan | Yes | Plugin | Yes |
| Timesheets and approval | Business plan | Partial | Pro plan | Partial | No | Plugin |
| Budgets | No | Yes | Pro plan | No | No | Plugin |
| Reports and dashboards | Partial | Yes | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial |
| Wiki or pages | Yes | Yes | Add-on | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| API | REST | REST | REST and MCP | REST | REST | REST |
Hosting and scale
| Plane | OpenProject | Orangescrum | Leantime | Taiga | Redmine | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Install | Docker, Kubernetes | Docker, packages | Docker | Docker | Docker | Manual, Docker |
| Database | PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL 16 | MySQL or MariaDB | PostgreSQL | MySQL or PostgreSQL |
| Cloud edition | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Third party only |
| Air-gapped | Yes | Yes | Yes, offline activation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free user cap | None | None | None | None, self-hosted only | None | None |
| Minimum server | 2 cores, 4 GB | 4 cores, 4 GB | 2 cores, 4 GB | 1 core, 2 GB | 2 cores, 4 GB | 1 core, 2 GB |
What a team actually pays per year
| Team size | Orangescrum, $69 plan | Leantime Pro | Taiga Premium | Plane Pro | OpenProject Basic | Redmine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 people | $828 | $960 | €600 | $720 | €1,785 | $0 |
| 25 people | $828 | $2,400 | €600 | $1,800 | €1,785 | $0 |
| 100 people | $828 | $9,600 | €600 | $7,200 | €7,140 | $0 |
Single sign-on, two-factor authentication, role based access and audit logs are compared in Security and access control, which is checked against each vendor’s documentation and source tree rather than its feature list.
Flat pricing wins as the team grows, but not against everything. The $69 Orangescrum plan costs less than Plane above about 12 people, less than Leantime above about 9, and less than OpenProject at any size, because OpenProject sells a minimum of 25 seats. It never costs less than Taiga, which is also flat priced, and Redmine costs nothing at all if you run it yourself.
Project health, side by side
Stars measure attention. These columns measure whether anyone is still working on the code. All read from the GitHub API on 10 September 2026.
| Latest release | Release pace | Contributors | Open items | Languages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plane | v1.4.2, Aug 2026 | About monthly | 164 | 804 issues, 298 PRs | 20 |
| OpenProject | v17.8.0, Sep 2026 | Most months | 281 | 247 items | Over 30 |
| Orangescrum | v0.1.14, Sep 2026 | Very frequent, very young | 4, all our staff | 0 open, 38 closed by us | 10 |
| Leantime | v3.9.8, Jul 2026 | Small and often | 171 | 322 issues, 6 PRs | 34 |
| Taiga | 6.10.2, Jul 2026 | Two to four a year | 84 | 58 issues, 34 PRs | 29 |
| Redmine | 7.0.1, Aug 2026 | Three live branches | 8 on the mirror | 4,809 on its tracker | 50 |
Security and access control: free or paid
Single sign on and two-factor authentication are the two features most often fenced behind a paid tier. If you are replacing Jira Data Center inside a company that requires single sign on, this table decides your shortlist on its own.
| SSO, SAML or LDAP | Two-factor | Role based access | Audit log | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plane | Paid only | Email code sign in | Basic free, granular paid | Paid only |
| OpenProject | Free, LDAP and Active Directory | Free | Free, with groups | Enterprise |
| Orangescrum | Paid only | Free | Free, five roles | Paid |
| Leantime | Free, LDAP and OpenID Connect | Free | Free | Limited |
| Taiga | Partial, GitHub and GitLab plugins | None at any tier | Free, per project | None |
| Redmine | Free, LDAP with multiple servers | Free, TOTP | Free, in core | Partial |
Who actually runs these tools
Every vendor here shows a logo wall, ours included. A logo wall is not evidence. We tried to open every claimed deployment and kept only what an outside reader can verify today.
- Taiga has the strongest evidence, and it is not a vendor page. The French state software register, SILL, lists Taiga with three declared public bodies: the Ministry of Ecological Transition as expert referent, the Rectorat de Strasbourg, and a university. A government register is a higher standard of proof than any customer page in this article.
- Redmine has public trackers you can open right now. The Ruby programming language runs its issue tracker on Redmine. We probed the eight installs listed on the Redmine community wiki and six no longer respond, so treat that page as stale.
- Plane, OpenProject, Leantime and Orangescrum: not verifiable. All four publish logo walls, and Plane also publishes eight named customer stories. None is confirmable by an outside reader, so we exclude all of them.
- Orangescrum, specifically. We could not find a single organization publicly documented as running the Community Edition. Our named customers are paid cloud and paid self-hosted accounts on our own marketing pages. By the standard above they do not count, so we do not count them.
What self-hosting really costs
The license is zero for all six. The bill is not. This is the part most comparison articles leave out, and it is the part that decides whether open source is actually cheaper for you.
| Team size | Server | Server per year | Admin time | Admin cost per year | Total per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 people | 2 vCPU, 4 GB | About 290 dollars | 2 hours a month | About 1,800 dollars | About 2,100 dollars |
| 25 people | 4 vCPU, 8 GB | About 580 dollars | 3 hours a month | About 2,700 dollars | About 3,300 dollars |
| 100 people | 8 vCPU, 16 GB, plus a database | About 1,700 dollars | 5 hours a month | About 4,500 dollars | About 6,200 dollars |
Where self-hosting overtakes a per-seat plan
Self-hosting is not automatically cheaper. Against Plane Pro at 6 dollars per user per month, it is the more expensive option until the team passes about 90 people.
Plane Pro cloud
The rule behind the picture: a server bill barely moves as the team grows, while a per-seat bill climbs in a straight line. Self-hosting therefore wins late, not early. It wins immediately only when the admin hours land on someone who already patches servers, because then those hours are absorbed rather than added.
How to choose an open source project management tool
- Count your users in eighteen months, not today. Per-user pricing looks cheap at eight people and expensive at forty.
- Decide whether hours and money matter. If anyone bills time, Plane charges for it and Taiga needs a plugin. If anyone tracks a budget, cross out Plane, Taiga and Leantime, because only OpenProject and Orangescrum have budgets built in, and Redmine needs a plugin.
- Install the free edition before you read another review. All six have a Docker path. Look for what is grayed out.
- Read the license. For a tool that you run for your own staff only, AGPL, GPL and MPL usually create no duty to publish anything. The AGPL adds one more condition. If you change the code, and then let people outside your organization use it over a network, you must offer those people the source of your changes. It makes no difference whether you charge them. This is a summary, not legal advice. Take advice before you change the code, or before you open it to people outside your organization.
- Look at the last ninety days of commits, not the star count. A quiet repository is a risk whatever its stars say.
- Test the import. Export a hundred tasks from your current tool and load them. Importer quality tells you what the migration will really cost.
What to check before you shortlist
Run this list against any tool in this article, or any tool outside it. It takes about twenty minutes per tool and it removes most of the bad choices.
- Is the whole application public? Not a cut-down community demo with the useful parts held back.
- Does it run with no license key? No activation call to the vendor, no phone home.
- Has it shipped a release in the last ninety days? Open the repository and look at the commit dates, not the star count.
- Does the free edition do the thing you actually need? Time tracking and budgets are the two features most often fenced off.
- Is there a user cap? Some free editions cap seats. None of the six here does when self-hosted.
- Can you get your data back out? Test the export before you load a real project, not after.
- Does the import work? Export a hundred tasks from your current tool and load them. Importer quality is the true cost of the migration.
- Who patches it, and when? Name the person and the monthly window before you commit, not after the first security advisory.
Self-hosted or the vendor’s cloud
Five of the six sell a cloud edition, so this choice is separate from the choice of tool.
| If this is true | Choose | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Data must stay in your country or your building | Self-hosted | It is the only option that answers the question completely |
| You have no one who patches servers | Cloud | An unpatched tracker on the public internet is a liability |
| The team will pass about 25 people | Self-hosted, or a flat-priced cloud | Per-seat pricing is where the cost runs away |
| You need it working this week | Cloud | Self-hosting is an afternoon at best, a week at worst |
| You need to modify the product | Self-hosted | Cloud editions cannot be patched by you |
| The network is air-gapped | Self-hosted | Four of the six run with no outbound connection |
Migrating from Jira, Trello, Asana or monday.com
From Jira Data Center. Plane and OpenProject import from Jira directly. Orangescrum runs a guided migration at no charge for self-hosted licenses, inside your own network, and leaves the old instance readable for as long as you need it. Atlassian ends renewals on 30 March 2028, so plan the move for 2027 at the latest.
From Trello or Asana. Taiga imports both natively. Every tool here accepts CSV.
From monday.com or Basecamp. Export to CSV, map the columns to task, assignee, status, due date and estimate, then import.
If your main requirement is running the tool on your own servers rather than the license itself, read our guide to self-hosted project management software, which covers ten tools including several that are not open source.
Also worth knowing
- Huly, EPL 2.0, 27,614 stars. An all-in-one platform with chat and HR built in. Young and moving fast.
- Wekan, MIT, 21,074 stars. Kanban only, and very light.
- Vikunja, AGPL v3, 5,333 stars. Personal and small-team task management with a Todoist importer.
- GitLab and Tuleap. Lifecycle tools where planning sits beside code and pipelines. The right answer when developers own the process.
- ProjectLibre. Desktop scheduling and a Microsoft Project replacement, not a team tool.
- Focalboard. Moved to the mattermost-community organization and dormant since May 2026, as noted above. Do not start new work on it.
The short answer
If you bill hours or track budgets, pick Orangescrum or OpenProject, because they are the only two here with time and money built in and no user cap. If you run a product team and do not track time, pick Plane. If you run Scrum and nothing else, pick Taiga. If you want something that will not change for a decade, pick Redmine.
All six install from a compose file. Install two, load a real project into both, and decide in a week. Download the Orangescrum Community Edition, free, with unlimited users.
How this article is maintained
Comparison articles rot. This one carries the dates so you can judge how much of it to trust.
- First published: 9 September 2026.
- Last updated: 10 September 2026.
- Next scheduled review: March 2027, or sooner if a tool on this list changes its license or its pricing.
- What we recheck each time: every price against the vendor’s own pricing page, every star count and commit date against the GitHub API, and whether any tool has gone dormant.
Change log
- 10 September 2026. Rechecked all five vendor pricing pages, every figure matched. Corrected the AGPL guidance, which had named selling as the trigger rather than network use of modified code. Removed a claim that we had checked the G2 and Capterra ratings, which we could not. Added source links, a last release date per tool, and the sections on cost of ownership, security, support and selection.
- 9 September 2026. First published.
Sources and dates
GitHub star counts, licenses and commit dates from the GitHub API on 9 September 2026. Prices from each vendor’s own pricing page, read on the same date and rechecked on 10 September 2026: plane.so, openproject.org, orangescrum.com, leantime.io and taiga.io. Every price in this article matched the vendor page on both dates. Redmine has no paid edition, and we quote no third-party hosting price. Ratings and review counts are the figures shown on each product’s G2 or Capterra page. We could not open those pages on 9 September 2026, so the ratings carry no check date. Treat them as unconfirmed, and read the product’s page before you rely on one. Jira Data Center dates from Atlassian’s published end-of-sale and end-of-life schedule. If this page has not been updated for six months, treat the star counts, the ratings and the prices as indicative and check the vendor’s page.
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