Orangescrum Community Edition is now open source. It is free project management software that you host on your own servers, published under the GNU AGPL v3 with no seat limit and no paid tier. The first public release, v0.1.0, went out on 11 August 2026, and the source is on GitHub.

Read it, change it, and run it for as many people as you like.

Source code: github.com/Orangescrum/opensource-community-edition

The release at a glance

Version v0.1.0, first public release
Released 11 August 2026
Licence GNU AGPL v3
Cost Free. No seat limit, no expiry
Hosting Self-hosted only, on your infrastructure
Stack CakePHP 4, PHP 8.2+, PostgreSQL 16, Apache (Nginx supported)
Deployment Docker, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RHEL, Rocky, Windows, macOS, AWS AMI, from source
Support Community: GitHub issues and a Google Group. No SLA

Why are we open sourcing it?

Orangescrum is built on open source. CakePHP runs the application. PostgreSQL stores every row. PHP executes all of it. None of those sent us an invoice.

Publishing our own source under a copyleft licence is how we pay part of that back.

There is a second reason, and it is about our customers rather than us. Over fifteen years we have kept meeting teams who cannot use a hosted tool. A hospital. A bank. A defence supplier. A government department. Their rules do not permit project data to sit on infrastructure they cannot inspect. Those teams do not want a longer security questionnaire. They want to read the code and run it themselves.

Now they can, at no cost.

What is included in Orangescrum Community Edition?

The Community Edition is the core of the product, not a demonstration of it:

  • Projects, tasks, and subtasks
  • List, Kanban, calendar, and overview views
  • Custom task statuses that you define and reorder
  • Checklists on work items
  • Milestones
  • Time logging against tasks
  • Comments and mentions
  • Labels and saved search filters
  • Task reminders
  • Roles and permissions
  • Personal dashboards
  • File attachments, with cloud storage links
  • Two-factor authentication
  • Editable email templates
  • A REST API

No seat cap. No expiry. Add your whole team, your contractors, and the people who only look at a board once a week.

What is not included?

This part matters more than the list above, so we will be direct about it.

The Community Edition does not include Scrum and sprints, Gantt charts, resource and workload management, timesheets, budget and cost, invoicing, defect tracking, test case management, document management, the wiki, risk management, AI chat, the MCP server, or single sign-on.

Those are in the paid Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

We could have written a longer feature list and let you discover the gaps after installing. Anyone evaluating an open-source tool finds out within ten minutes anyway, and a list that oversells costs more trust than the missing rows ever could. If your plan depends on sprints or Gantt from day one, the Community Edition is not the right starting point, and we would rather tell you now.

Who should use the Community Edition?

Engineering teams who self-host by default. You already run your own Postgres and your own CI. One more service is not a burden, and you would rather read the code than a trust page.

Regulated and public sector teams. Where the data is not allowed to leave the building, and where an auditor will ask what the software does with it.

Universities and research groups. Large fluctuating headcount, a small budget, and a real need to keep records after the project ends.

Nonprofits and volunteer projects. Unlimited contributors at no licence cost, which is exactly the shape of volunteer work.

And to be equally clear about who should not: if you want it running this afternoon with nobody maintaining it, use the Cloud edition. Self-hosting means somebody patches the server and takes the backups. If that person does not exist in your organisation, the honest answer is that this is not for you.

How do you install it?

The quickest route is Docker. Clone the repository and start it:

git clone https://github.com/Orangescrum/opensource-community-edition.git
cd opensource-community-edition
docker compose up -d

It also installs on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RHEL, Rocky, Windows Server, macOS, from an Amazon machine image, or from source. Requirements are PHP 8.2 or later, PostgreSQL 16, and Apache, with Nginx also supported. It is built on CakePHP 4.

It runs with no internet connection. An air-gapped install is a normal deployment for this software, not a special case, and not an enterprise upsell.

Full instructions for every method are on the download page.

What does the AGPL v3 licence mean in practice?

  • Run it internally, for as many people as you like, and nothing changes for you.
  • Change it, and you can keep using your changes.
  • Distribute it, or run a modified version as a network service, and you publish your changes under the same licence.

We chose the AGPL knowing it binds us as well as everyone else. It closes the loophole that lets a company take open source, run it as a hosted product, and give nothing back.

If you want the longer explanation of open source and where this edition sits, we wrote one: what open source project management actually means.

What support is available?

Community support: the public GitHub issue tracker and the Orangescrum Community Support Google Group.

There is no service level agreement. Guaranteed response times come with the commercial editions. We would rather say that plainly than let you find out during an incident.

Can you move to a paid edition later?

Yes. There is a supported migration path from the Community Edition to both the Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

Your projects, tasks, time records, and history move with you, and our team runs the migration rather than leaving you to script it.

The reverse is worth saying too. Because you hold the database, you are not locked in either direction. That is the point of running it yourself.

How can you contribute?

Open an issue when something breaks. Ask for what is missing. Send a pull request.

Reading the code and reporting what does not work is genuinely useful, and so is fixing the install instructions for the distribution nobody tested. Every issue and every pull request is handled in public, where anyone can read the history.

Get Orangescrum Community Edition

Download it: orangescrum.com/open-source/free-download
Understand open source project management: orangescrum.com/open-source
Source code: github.com/Orangescrum/opensource-community-edition

Star it if it is useful to you. Tell us what breaks.