Project Management

Plane62.1k★

Plane is a self-hostable project tracker for the work most teams buy Jira or Linear for: work items, cycles (sprints), modules, pages for docs, intake for triage, and five layouts including board, calendar and Gantt. The open source Community Edition is AGPL v3 and free with no user cap. The free cloud plan stops at 12 users. Self-hosting runs on Docker Compose or Kubernetes, and it's a real stack: 13 services, including Postgres, Valkey, RabbitMQ and an S3-style object store. Fine if you already run containers. The free tier is thinner than the marketing suggests. GitHub, GitLab and Slack sync, custom properties, the workspace wiki and time tracking start at Pro: $6/seat/month billed yearly, $8 month to month. SAML or OIDC SSO, workflows and intake forms sit in Business at $13 yearly or $15 monthly. LDAP and audit logs are Enterprise Grid, quote only. Solo and small teams: free. Need integrations: Pro. Need SSO: Business. The catch: paid features aren't in the open source code. Upgrading a self-hosted install means switching to the closed Commercial Edition, with a 10-seat minimum on new licenses. Five people wanting GitHub sync on their own server pay for ten.

Focalboard26.5k★

Focalboard is a self-hosted Trello, Notion, and Asana alternative with Kanban boards, calendars, and table views. It looks good. It works. And the maintainers stopped working on it. The README says it plainly: this repository is currently not maintained. Mattermost moved development to a plugin version at mattermost/mattermost-plugin-boards, which is the place to go if you want to keep getting updates. If you self-host this version, you get a standalone server you run via Docker or an Ubuntu install. Desktop apps exist for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The data model is solid; the UI is still pleasant. It's stable software, just frozen. No security patches, no new features, no issue triage from the original team. Solo developers: if you've already deployed Focalboard, keep using it until something breaks, then look at Plane or AppFlowy. Small teams: don't start a new deployment here. The plugin version inside Mattermost is the maintained successor. Large teams: same answer, and the Mattermost plugin route gives you a single platform for chat and project management. The catch: it's not maintained. The license is also proprietary, not OSI-approved open source. Two reasons to look elsewhere for new work.

openproject17.0k★

OpenProject is an open source alternative to Jira and MS Project that handles both styles of project management in one tool: classic plans with Gantt charts, and agile boards and backlogs. Add time and cost tracking, wikis and meetings, and it's a whole suite. GPLv3, from a Berlin company. The free Community edition is self-hosted only, through Docker Compose, Linux packages or Helm. No Rails expertise needed, but you own a PostgreSQL database and the upgrades. It's more generous than you'd expect: Gantt, time tracking, project templates, custom fields, two-factor auth and LDAP login are all free. Paid tiers cost the same per user per month in the cloud or on your own servers: Basic $7.25 (€5.95), Professional $13.50 with a 25-user minimum, Premium $19.50 with 100. Basic adds the team planner and baseline comparisons; SSO starts at Professional. Twenty users on cloud Basic run about $145/mo against roughly $158 on Jira Standard, but self-hosted Basic has a 25-user, annual minimum, so a 20-person team pays for 25 (about $181/mo). Solo and small teams: Community. Teams that need SSO: Professional. The catch: Jira is free for up to 10 users and has a far bigger integration catalog. OpenProject wins when your project data has to stay on your servers, not on price.

kaneo9.7k★

Kaneo is project management without the Jira overhead: boards, lists, calendar and Gantt views, a backlog, subtasks, dependencies, time tracking and custom fields. It's MIT licensed, and self-hosting is free with unlimited users and every feature, SSO included, which is rarer than it should be. It runs as one app container plus Postgres, via Docker Compose, Helm, Coolify or Railway. Plan on 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of disk, S3-compatible storage for attachments, and Redis only if you run several API instances. It talks to GitHub and Gitea, has a REST API, CLI and MCP server, and imports from Trello, Jira, Linear, Plane and PLANKA. Kaneo Cloud now exists: $4/month for one person or $5/user/month for teams ($40 and $50 a year billed annually), with a 14-day trial and no card. Solo: free self-hosted, or $4 to skip the server. Small teams: free, or $5 a seat. Larger teams: check reporting first. The catch: the scope is deliberately narrow. Kaneo's own site says budgeting, baseline comparisons and sprint burndown reports are out of scope, so teams that live on velocity charts will miss Jira. It also ships fast, five releases in one day this week, so pin versions.

Vikunja6.0k★

Vikunja is a self-hosted task and project manager sitting between Todoist's simplicity and Asana's structure. It is a single Go binary with a Vue frontend, AGPLv3, and it ships at a steady pace rather than in bursts. Self-hosting is straightforward in a way that Mautic and SuiteCRM are not. Pull the binary, point it at SQLite or Postgres, run it. No PHP runtime, no Apache config, no extra layers. List, Kanban, Gantt, and calendar views, plus labels, subtasks, recurring tasks, attachments, and webhooks are all in the box. Mobile apps and a browser extension round it out. Solo users who want their data on a Raspberry Pi or a VPS can install it tonight. Small teams tired of paying Todoist or Trello per seat should self-host and move on. Teams that want somebody else on call can buy Vikunja Cloud from the same project, which starts at 4 euros a month for one person and 5 euros per user a month for an organization. The catch is scope. Vikunja is a task manager, not a documents-plus-projects suite like Notion or ClickUp. If you want one tool for tasks and wiki and databases and chat, this is not it. Pair it with Outline or AppFlowy when you need documentation alongside.

Mindwtr2.4k★

Mindwtr is a Getting Things Done app that keeps your data on your own device. It runs the full GTD loop, capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage, so you can get every task and idea out of your head and then see the next concrete thing to do. It's a Tauri desktop app with a React Native mobile companion, and sync is optional and user-controlled through Dropbox, WebDAV, or your own server. The design choice that matters is local-first. Your tasks live on your device by default, and you decide if and where they sync, no vendor holding your data hostage. Optional AI features run against your own API key, so that stays your call too. It's completely free and already shipping in the Microsoft Store, App Store, Google Play, and Flathub. For a solo user or a whole team, it's a no-cost alternative to Todoist, TickTick, OmniFocus, or Things. The catch is twofold. It's AGPL-3.0, a strong copyleft license that matters if you plan to fork it into a commercial product, though for personal use it's irrelevant. And it's opinionated: it's built around GTD specifically, so if you don't work that way, its structure will fight you rather than help.