Redmine

What Redmine does

Redmine has been developed since 2006 and is still actively maintained by community volunteers. It is a self-hosted web application written in Ruby on Rails. Its core is a configurable issue tracker: an administrator defines trackers (such as bug, feature or support request), statuses and per-role workflows, and adds custom fields to issues, time entries, projects and users. Many projects can share one installation with role-based permissions.

On top of the issues it offers a Gantt chart and a calendar, time tracking, and a wiki and forum for each project, plus news, documents and file areas. It can browse source code repositories in Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar and CVS which makes it a natural issue tracker for development teams. Issues can be created by email, and users can sign in against one or more LDAP directories.

Plugins and integrations

Much of Redmine’s reach comes from its plugin and theme ecosystem. The official plugin directory has many third-party plugins, including agile and kanban boards, checklists and more, so a Redmine install can be shaped into something close to Jira. Plugins are third-party code with their own licenses, quality and upgrade schedules, so check that each one supports your Redmine version before you upgrade. The core has a REST API, and data can be brought in from CSV files for issues, time entries and users.

Self-hosting Redmine

You install Redmine from a release archive or a source checkout and run it like any Rails application. The current install guide requires Ruby 3.3, 3.4 or 4.0. Redmine supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQL Server, so a small team can start with SQLite. Optional tools add extra functions: ImageMagick for thumbnails and Gantt PNG export, Ghostscript for PDF thumbnails, and Pandoc for previews of Office documents. redmine.org does not publish its own Docker image, though it lists third-party bundles such as the TurnKey appliance and the Bitnami stack.

Redmine publishes a clear support policy. The latest minor version is fully supported, the previous one gets bug and security fixes, and the one before that gets important security fixes only. Official development happens in Subversion. The GitHub repository is a mirror maintained by the community, so bug reports and patches go to redmine.org rather than GitHub.

Hosted version

There is no official hosted service. redmine.org links only to an unofficial third-party demo site. If you do not want to run it yourself, you will need a third-party host.

Limitations

The core has no kanban board, backlog or sprint planning. These come from third-party plugins. The interface is traditional and form-heavy compared with newer tools, and there are no built-in importers from Jira, Trello or Asana beyond CSV. Running it means looking after a Ruby environment and its gems, plus any plugins you install.

Who it suits

Redmine suits technical teams and organizations that want a stable, fully GPL issue tracker with time tracking, a wiki and repository browsing, and are happy to manage a Rails application and choose plugins. If you want a more modern interface on similar foundations, OpenProject descends from Redmine by way of ChiliProject. For agile boards out of the box, see Taiga or Plane.