Open Source Alternatives
Open Source Project Management Alternatives to Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse)
Project management tool for software teams.
Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) is a trademark of its respective owner.
Updated May 2026
What you gain
- ✓No per-user pricing starting at $8.50/user/mo
- ✓Full ownership of your stories, epics, and iteration data
- ✓No vendor dependency for engineering project management
- ✓Self-hosted deployment with custom workflow states
What you give up
- △No Shortcut's streamlined story/epic/iteration model for engineering teams
- △No built-in Doc Hub for collaborative team documentation
- △No managed Iterations with velocity tracking and burndown charts
- △No GitHub and GitLab integration with automatic story updates
Switching Cost
Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) has moderate lock-in. Stories, epics, and iterations export via API as JSON. The workflow states and label taxonomy need recreation. Teams can migrate the data in a few hours. The hidden cost is the VCS integration: if your team's workflow uses branch names to auto-update Shortcut stories, those Git hooks and integrations need reconfiguration in the new tool. Most small-to-mid engineering teams can complete the full switch in 1-2 days.
| Plane | openproject | |
|---|---|---|
| Overlap | 75% | 65% |
| Migration | moderate | moderate |
| License | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Best for | Small teams | Teams with DevOps |
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Drop-in Replacements
Ranked by feature coverage
Plane
7375% coverageOpen source Jira/Linear alternative
Plane is the open source alternative to Jira, covering sprints, kanban boards, and roadmaps without the Jira prices or the Linear waitlist. It's what Jira should have been: clean UI, fast, and you can self-host it.
openproject
7665% coverageOpenProject is the open source alternative. It covers traditional project management (waterfall, Gantt) and agile (Scrum boards, backlogs) in one tool.
Building Blocks
Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) is a platform. It bundles multiple capabilities into one subscription. These tools each cover one piece. Teams often assemble 2–3 of them instead of paying for the full suite.
AWS Cognito