Open source project management tools

Boards, task managers, issue trackers and planners

The tools in this category share tasks and boards, but they start from different ideas of what a project is.

• Kanban boards follow Trello’s model of boards, lists and cards. WeKan is the most complete clone, with swimlanes, automation rules and many importers. Kanboard is minimal and very light, with work-in-progress limits. Nextcloud Deck adds boards to an existing Nextcloud server.
• Task and work managers show the same tasks as lists, boards, calendars, tables or Gantt charts. Vikunja runs from a single binary and suits personal and small-team use. Kaneo is a small, recent tool with a long list of importers. Leantime is aimed at people who are not trained project managers and adds goals, timesheets and strategy canvases. Worklenz adds resource planning, time logs, budgets and a client portal for agencies and service teams.
• Agile issue trackers are built for software teams around backlogs, sprints or cycles, epics and issues. Plane is the modern option with cycles, modules and pages. Taiga has separate Scrum and Kanban modules.
• Classic project and portfolio management adds Gantt planning, time and cost tracking, wikis and many projects in one installation. OpenProject is the broadest tool here. Redmine is the long-established issue tracker, extended through plugins; OpenProject descends from it by way of ChiliProject.

Match the tool to how your team works. A board is enough for a small team moving cards through stages. Sprints call for an issue tracker, and reporting on budgets and dates across projects calls for Gantt charts and time tracking.

Moving off Jira, Trello or Asana

Migration support differs widely, so check it before anything else if you have years of data in a hosted tool.

• WeKan lists importers for Trello, Jira, Asana and monday.com, among many others. Kaneo imports from Jira, Trello, Linear, Plane and PLANKA.
• Taiga ships importers for Trello, Jira and GitHub that the administrator has to configure with API credentials from the source service.
• Vikunja and Nextcloud Deck import Trello boards. OpenProject has a Jira Migrator in beta for Data Center installs.
• Plane’s importers belong to its paid editions, not the open source Community Edition. Redmine, Leantime and Worklenz rely on CSV import.

Run a trial import with your own data and check what survives: comments, attachments, checklists, links between issues and user assignments.

Timing matters for Jira users in particular. Atlassian ended support for its Server products on 15 February 2024. It stopped selling Data Center to new customers on 30 March 2026, and Data Center reaches end of life on 28 March 2029. Teams that must keep project data on their own servers have to plan a move before then. See the Jira alternatives page.

What to check before you choose

1. The open source edition’s limits. Several projects sell extra features: OpenProject unlocks Enterprise add-ons such as single sign-on and portfolio management with a paid token, Plane keeps its paid features in a separate closed-source edition, Leantime sells some plugins, Vikunja Pro switches on time tracking and an admin panel with a license key, and Worklenz sells self-hosted tiers with SSO. Each app page lists what is in the free code.
2. Self-hosting effort. Vikunja runs as one binary on SQLite and Kanboard as a PHP app on SQLite. Plane, Worklenz and Taiga need several services, such as PostgreSQL, Redis or RabbitMQ and object storage.
3. Login and access control. LDAP, OpenID Connect or SAML, and whether it is part of the free edition.
4. Maintenance and upgrades. Kanboard is in maintenance mode. WeKan supports only its newest version, so it expects frequent updates. Taiga’s backend still pins Django 3.2, whose extended support has ended.
5. Hosted option. OpenProject, Plane, Taiga, Leantime, Vikunja, Worklenz, WeKan and Kaneo have hosted services from their developers; Redmine, Kanboard and Nextcloud Deck do not.
6. Integrations and standards. Links to Git commits and pull requests, webhooks and APIs, and calendar sync. Vikunja exposes tasks over CalDAV (RFC 4791), so they appear in standard calendar and to-do clients.
7. License. Whether the code is under an OSI-approved license. The license column above shows the main license; each app page explains the exceptions.

Projects not listed here

PLANKA, a popular Trello-style board, is not listed because its Fair Use License is source-available: it allows personal, internal and non-profit use but forbids running it as a commercial hosted service for others without a paid license. Focalboard’s README says the project is no longer maintained. Huly’s original repository is frozen and its hosted service has shut down, with development moved to a new independent fork that is too young to assess. Phorge develops on its own servers, and its GitHub repository is a read-only mirror.