Plane

The open source project management tool that actually looks and feels modern. Plane takes Linear's clean design philosophy and builds it on AGPL — you get Kanban boards, sprints, modules, rich text editing, and burn-down charts without paying $10/seat/month.

Linear is the UX benchmark but closed source and pricey at scale. Jira is the enterprise default — powerful but bloated. Taiga and OpenProject are older OSS alternatives that feel dated. Plane hits the sweet spot: modern enough to not hate, open enough to self-host.

Self-hosting is genuinely easy — a single engineer can have it running in under an hour. It's SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant, supports air-gapped deployment, and lets you plug in your own AI API keys for built-in intelligence.

The catch: AGPL-3.0 license means any modifications to the server must be open sourced if you serve it to users. The plugin ecosystem is thin compared to Jira's decades of integrations. And while the UI is polished, it still lacks some Linear niceties like keyboard-driven workflows and instant search.