Worklenz

What Worklenz does

Worklenz is project management software aimed at teams that run several projects at once with the same people, such as agencies, consultancies and internal service teams. Projects are broken into tasks with priorities, due dates, comments and files, and the tasks can be shown as a list, a kanban board or a Gantt chart. Templates let you start a new project from a standard structure.

Where Worklenz differs from most open source tools in this category is in the layer above tasks. Resource planning lets managers assign people to work and see capacity, a visual scheduler helps avoid overloading anyone, and a planner shows timelines across all projects together with each member’s utilization. People can log time on tasks, and the finance module tracks budgets, costs and profitability per project. A client portal gives clients their own view of the work.

Reporting and data portability

Analytics cover project health, team workload and performance, alongside the utilization figures from the planner. Tasks can be imported from a CSV file and whole projects exported to CSV. No direct importers for Asana, monday.com, Trello or Jira are documented, so moving over usually means exporting a CSV from your current tool and mapping columns.

Self-hosting Worklenz

The recommended method is Docker Compose from the cloned repository. A setup script generates secrets, sets URLs for your domain, obtains a Let’s Encrypt certificate in production and starts PostgreSQL, Redis, SeaweedFS for file storage and an Nginx proxy next to the application. A management script handles status, logs and database backups. A manual install needs Node.js 20 or newer, PostgreSQL 15 or newer and S3-compatible or Azure Blob storage. Email invitations go through an SMTP relay you configure.

The README states that the self-hosted open source distribution includes the Planner, Finance and Client Portal modules for every organization. The pricing page also lists paid self-hosted Business and Enterprise tiers that add single sign-on, a plugin marketplace and custom branding; those are not in the public repository.

Hosted version

Worklenz Cloud is run by the developers. The pricing page lists a Free plan with unlimited users and a limit on active projects, and paid plans with a trial.

Limitations

The self-hosted stack has more moving parts than lighter tools: database, cache, object storage and proxy all need upkeep, although the Docker setup bundles them. Single sign-on is a paid add-on rather than part of the AGPL code. Worklenz is built for planning and tracking work across people, not for software issue tracking: the README does not describe sprints, story points or Git integration. Migration from other tools is limited to CSV.

Who it suits

Worklenz suits agencies and service teams that want task management, resource planning, time logs and budgets in one self-hosted tool, which is the territory of monday.com and Asana. For classic project planning with Gantt charts, milestones and cost reports, compare OpenProject and Leantime. For software teams, Plane is a closer fit.