Best Open Source Project Management Tools

Project management is where "open source is free" collides with "your time is not." The tools below all run fine for a small team, but difficulty scales with features. A kanban board is a weekend deploy. A full portfolio and budgeting tool is a running responsibility.

Plane

Plane is the most modern tool here: issues, cycles, modules, and a spec-workflow that product teams recognise from Linear or Jira. The community edition is AGPLv3, and the project moves fast, which is a feature until it is a problem. Upgrades are regular and occasionally breaking. If your team wants a fast, opinionated tracker with views, Plane is the one. If you need stability over motion, wait a release cycle before committing.

Focalboard

Focalboard came out of Mattermost as a Trello-style board tool, MIT licensed, with both a personal desktop edition and a server edition. It is genuinely easy to run and pleasant to use. The caveat is real: Mattermost refocused its effort in 2024 and Focalboard's future has been quiet since. It still works and is fine for personal kanban, but I would not build a company process on a project with an unclear roadmap. Check the repo's activity before you rely on it.

Leantime

Leantime is deliberately different. It markets itself as a project management tool for non-project managers, covering everything from ideas to launch, with goals and strategy maps rather than just tickets. It is AGPLv3. If your team has people who bounce off Jira, Leantime's focus on "what are we trying to achieve" rather than "where is this ticket" lands well. The tradeoff is that it is less precise for teams that genuinely want sprint mechanics.

Taiga

Taiga has been the agile community workhorse for over a decade: Scrum, Kanban, issues, and a clean UI that was modern before "modern PM" was a marketing category. It is AGPLv3 after moving from MPL in 2021, so check the licensing page if you plan to offer it as a service. Taiga suits open source communities, student teams, and agencies that run real sprints. Its weaknesses are the classic AGPL ecosystem ones: fewer integrations than SaaS trackers, and the community edition lags the enterprise edition.

Wekan

Wekan is the most direct open source Trello: lists, cards, checklists, swimlanes, and a Meteor-based app that is MIT licensed. It is simple to self-host with Docker. For a small team that only needs kanban and nothing else, it is hard to fault. The tradeoffs: Meteor hosting is a niche skill if you need to debug it, and the UI is showing its age.

Vikunja

Vikunja is a Go backend with a clean frontend that does lists, kanban, Gantt, and calendar views from the same tasks, plus sharing and a public API. It is AGPLv3 and about the easiest proper project tracker to run, a single binary plus a database. Its strongest fit is personal productivity and small teams that want task management without an approval workflow or dashboards. If you need Jira-grade reporting, it is not that.

OpenProject

OpenProject is the heavyweight: Gantt, budgets, timesheets, document management, and a governance model built for public sector and consulting. It is GPLv3. It does more than everything else here, and it shows in operations. The Rails stack wants a real server, regular maintenance, and a good look at memory usage. Choose it when you need project budgeting and portfolio reporting, and skip it when a kanban board would do.

Choosing

For a product team that wants speed and modern UX, start with Plane. For a non-technical team, Leantime. For a simple board, Vikunja or Wekan. For budgets and reporting, OpenProject. Before you self-host anything, spend an hour reading the license and the GitHub activity, because AGPL tools come with service obligations and young projects come with churn. A tracker you maintain badly is worse than the SaaS subscription you were avoiding.