Plane

What Plane does

Plane is an issue and project tracker aimed at software and product teams. Work is organized as work items inside projects, and you can group them into cycles, which are Plane’s name for time-boxed sprints with burn-down charts, and into modules, which split a larger project into features or components. Filtered views can be saved and shared, and project pages give each project a place for specs and notes that can be turned into work items.

Every project can be shown in five layouts: a list, a kanban board, a calendar of due dates, a spreadsheet-style table for bulk edits, and a timeline that works like a Gantt chart and shows dependencies. That range is why Plane is compared with Jira for engineering work and with Trello or Asana for simpler task tracking. An intake queue collects requests so someone can triage them before they become real work items.

Editions and licensing

Plane’s open source edition is the Community Edition in the GitHub repository, licensed under AGPL-3.0. The developers say it has no proprietary code mixed in and that its features match the Free tier of Plane Cloud. Paid features live in a separate Commercial Edition, which Plane describes as closed source and built on its own codebase. These include work item types with custom properties, time tracking, a workspace wiki, dashboards, templates, recurring work items, and integrations with tools such as GitHub and Slack.

This split matters if you are leaving Jira or Asana. Plane’s importers for Jira, Asana, Linear, ClickUp, Notion, Confluence and CSV are documented as available only on Plane Cloud and the Commercial Edition, not the Community Edition.

Self-hosting Plane

The Community Edition is installed with a setup.sh script from the GitHub releases, which downloads a Docker Compose file. There are also Docker all-in-one, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes deployments. The stack includes a Django API with background workers, several React frontends, a Node.js service for real-time collaboration, PostgreSQL, Valkey (a Redis fork), RabbitMQ and S3-compatible object storage, all behind a Caddy proxy.

The Docker guide asks for 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM, with 8 GB recommended for production, and strongly advises an external database and storage for production use. Take care which installer you run: the one-line installer on the main Docker page sets up the closed Commercial Edition with its free plan, not the AGPL Community Edition.

Hosted version

Plane Cloud is run by the developers and has a free plan, which the pricing page limits to 12 users, plus paid Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. New features usually reach the Cloud first, then the self-hosted editions, each on its own release cycle.

Limitations

The Community Edition is a complete tracker, but several things teams expect from Jira are reserved for paid editions: custom work item types and fields, time logging, dashboards and the importers. Because the paid editions are a different codebase, moving from Community to a paid plan means switching editions. The self-hosted stack also has many moving parts, more than single-service tools such as Kanboard or Vikunja.

Who it suits

Plane fits software and product teams that want sprints, a backlog, kanban and a timeline in one modern interface and are comfortable running a Docker stack. If you need built-in Jira migration or custom fields without paying, check whether the Community Edition is enough, or compare it with OpenProject and Taiga.