Every few weeks, I find myself in conversations with potential and existing customers about moving to self-hosted Plane. These customers span a whole range, from Indie hackers that want complete, granular control over their dev workflows to Defense, Gov, and other regulated companies that want compliance out of the box.

Two things become clear when I put these conversations against the backdrop of the self-hosting groundswell.

• Productivity and application software, including project and work management, is seeing the highest demand for self-hosted alternatives than ever before.
• There’s a strong counter-movement for all things self-hosted, driven primarily by developer and infra software that has always been self-hosted-first.

I say counter-movement because the industry is still skewed to cloud-first and -only productivity software and I see our fellow players in work management bet on cloud-only futures.

Top self-hosted project and work management software in 2025

This list keeps the drivers of self-hosting in general in the background while comparing the top available options in four broad categories.

A quick overview of what I compared in the four categories for each tool on this list. Let me know what's off and what I am missing.

Plane

Launched in 2023, Plane is a simple, flexible, and extensible project management product that's available on the cloud and for self-hosting. With over 500K+ Docker pulls, 31K+ GitHub stars—the current #1 in the category—, 100+ contributors, and a thriving community, it's quickly become an alternative to not just Jira Server and Pivotal Tracker, but Jira Cloud, ClickUp, Asana, Monday.com, Linear, and others.

Modern and modernizing teams now love Plane for scaled adoption, the right balance between feature completeness and ease of use, and predictable pricing.

• Features and user experience
  Plane's biggest strength is the simplicity of usage for both new and advanced users. With contextual toggles, new teams can turn off features that they don't need immediately in clicks and turn them on later. Advanced teams like how features that shouldn't be intrusive aren't, but aren't too far away when needed.
  Plane ensures 100% parity between its Cloud and self-hosted options so neither option trade offs features, experience, or controls. In fact, the self-hosted option comes with more security and governance controls than the Cloud, including an airgapped offering for regulated industries.
  Across all plans, Plane packs,
  For more mature teams with well-defined processes and workflows, Plane lets you,
• Five layouts
• Sprints Cycles
• Modules
  Estimates
• Unlimited views
• Unlimited pages
• Unlimited issues
• Plan bigger with Epics and Initiatives
• Track all projects
• Keep everyone caught up to progress
• Organize in teams
• Collaborate across projects and in real-time when building your knowledge library
• Visualize and snapshot your progress
• Share your work and knowledge with the world
• Self-hosting Experience
  Unlike other self-hosted productivity tools, Plane installs with a single-line command or a single choice on native command-line interfaces available for the Commercial and Cloud Editions. No third-party dependency apart from Docker or Kubernetes. No seven-step configs. No maintaining packages for updates.
  

• 
  1. Installing Plane is a less-than-five-minute affair.
  2. Both CLIs come with health, monitoring, and version update choices that make managing your self-hosted Plane a delight.
  3. Backups and restores are super-easy via those CLIs.
  4. Switching from the Community Edition to the Commercial one to unlock more features is straightforward and hassle-free.
  5. The Community Edition is already available on Docker Hub, Artifacts Hub, Digital Ocean's marketplace and Coolify's one-click services. The Commercial Edition is coming to all these platforms + Digital Ocean's App Platform, Heroku, Amazon's AMI, and Railway in 2025.
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  Plane follows an open-core model, offering two editions for two audience groups.
• The Community Edition, licensed under a permissive AGPL 3.0, for those that are open-source-only, looking to customize and contribute to the product
• Community Edition
• Unlimited issues and projects
• Core project views (List, Kanban, Calendar)
• Basic issue templates
• GitHub sync
• File attachments up to 250MB
• Beautifully crafted CLI
• Public API access
• Community support
  

• The Commercial Edition for advanced features by maturity of teams in three tiers
  Each one of these tiers, except Free, comes with unlimited users and unlocks progressively advanced features so you can start low and upgrade when only when your scale of work calls for it.
• The Community Edition, licensed under a permissive AGPL 3.0, for those that are open-source-only, looking to customize and contribute to the product
• Community Edition
• Unlimited issues and projects
• Core project views (List, Kanban, Calendar)
• Basic issue templates
• GitHub sync
• File attachments up to 250MB
• Beautifully crafted CLI
• Public API access
• Community support
• The Commercial Edition for advanced features by maturity of teams in three tiers
• Challenges
• Imports, especially from Jira Cloud or Server, and integrations to cloud-first products will need additional components that let those products talk to your self-hosted Plane. It's a secure connection between your instance and third-party products, but the very nature of cloud-first products forces Plane to open up a connection over the Internet.
  

• Auto-updates are not available yet. While on the roadmap, they are yet to go live. Manual upgrades are easy on the Commercial Edition, but need two steps more on the Community one.
  

Jira Server

Jira Server was the cornerstone of self-hosted project management for over a decade. As Atlassian's flagship on-premise project management solution, it dominated the enterprise segment, particularly for software development teams.

• Licensing, plans and pricing
  For teams on the hunt for alternatives, Atlassian offers some pretty daunting upgrade options, often 10 times more than your last spend on Server.
• Jira Data Center
• Starts at $42,000/year for 500 users
• Requires enterprise-grade infrastructure
• Licensing model is not straightforward.
• Annual renewal is a must.
• Jira Cloud
• Starts and scales competitively
• Enjoys the latest and the greatest from the Jira stable
• Doesn't work for folks who can't move to the Cloud for any number of reasons
• Long-term Support versions
• Jira Core and Confluence have some long-term versions with EOL dates through 2026.
• Upgrading to these versions, if you don't have a dual license already, is a 30-to-90 day evaluation-only move.
• You must make an upgrade to the Cloud or to the Data Center.
  

OpenProject

Around since 2012, OpenProject is one of the oldest open-source project management products still around. With over 20M downloads of their Community Edition and strong adoption in the mid-market, particularly in the EU, it has a long-standing reputation for being squarely open-core and a top choice for modern project management teams.

• Features and user experience
  While OpenProject has a near-complete feature set, missing only a few expected features, it feels like a tool from the last decade right out of the gate. There are several kinds of boards that are just views in other tools, workflows are config-heavy permission tables that you will need to be careful about, and Gantt Charts are PDF exportable that, as expected, don't always render right, especially for long-haul projects.
  
  

• 
  Missing features that mid-sized and enterprise teams expect
  More than the missing features, though, the interface and the experience are designed for function, not form with strong reminders of internal tools from the 2000s. AND, OR, and other operators take up half the screen, Wikis and Pages lack the experience of most modern knowledge products, and nested controls in almost all Settings make navigation a challenge.
  Modern teams used to delightful experiences will find OpenProject challenging to use and new users will struggle with unintuitive feature adoption. While Agile is advertised, OpenProject is clearly skewed to legacy Waterfall methodologies.
• Sheet and List layouts: While not critical, the Sheet and List let you operate on tasks in bulk and are good for unfurling multi-level sub-tasks.
• Limited visualization options: Charts AKA Graphs are limited to just two—Bar and Pie. Modern dashboarding capabilities with a combination of various different kinds of chart widgets are missing.
• Automations: Important for scale teams, this is a really useful feature that gives you back time for state changes, movement of tasks, and continuous updates.
• AI: OpenProject is yet to adopt AI in their product, which may work for Construction and Manufacturing teams for a while longer, but for most knowledge workers, could be a big miss.
• Self-hosting Experience
  Unlike Plane, set-up and installation need a Postgres database running. 8GB+ RAM is recommended and 2+ CPU cores for Production instances. Familiarity with running Apache Web Server, Nginx, Ruby environments, system dependencies, and self-managed tuning are necessary. While Docker options exist, they are not recommended for Production installs and relegated to evaluation only.
  Performance can vary significantly based on users and data. Screens can take several seconds to load, especially views with several hundred tasks or long-haul Gantt Charts. The response time tends to increase notably as projects accumulate more history and files.
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  OpenProject, like Plane, has a Community and an Enterprise Edition.
• Community Edition
  Licensed under a GPL 3.0, this edition works for basic project management with the expectation that teams adopting OpenProject will work in their own features, customizations, and workflows. Features include,
• Basic project management
• Issue tracking
• Simple Gantt charts
• Wiki and Docs
• Basic time tracking
• Internal forums
• Boards and project overviews
• Enterprise Edition
  This is their money edition which forks Support from feature sets by tier and has a bunch of add-ons to unlock functionality. Features include,
• Two-factor authentication
• LDAP synchronization
• Advanced Gantt charts
• Custom fields
• Placeholder users
• Advanced project templates
• Team planner
• Resources management
• Advanced reporting
• Professional support
• Challenges
• Users often struggle with navigation and basic workflows that should be intuitive in today's project management tools.
• Performance becomes a significant concern as your instance grows. What is "just a minor delay" can quickly evolve into frustrating wait times and noticeable performance degradation over time.
• The absence of a mobile app is restrictive to teams on the go and in the field.
• While alternatives have comprehensive integrations and roadmaps for more, OpenProject has limited itself to just two ones, neither of which is to other productivity tools like Slack or Teams.
• Flexibility of hierarchies and customizations hit the ceiling faster than expected.
• The total cost of ownership (TCO) often exceeds initial estimates when you combine infrastructure requirements with ongoing maintenance hours. Increase in infra is a periodic affair.
• Bug reports from users highlight the need for careful testing before updates, which is good as a practice but gets old soon if you have to do that with every release. Finding a stable version that works for your specific use case is a chore when you have to try several versions before you settle on one.
• While OpenProject has well documented Support tiers with SLAs and type of support available, most of what is now table stakes lives on their Enterprise plan. Agile and fast-moving teams may find themselves frustrated with their SLAs and turn-around times.

Redmine

Around from more than half-a-decade before OpenProject, Redmine is a veteran of the project management software category and continues to persist with its original architecture and design philosophy. While it enjoys expected popularity, particularly among Linux-centric organizations, Ruby on Rails communities, and traditional development teams, its age shows in nearly every aspect of the product.

This is the site. Their product is not much different.

• Features and experience
  Using Redmine in 2024 should feel like going back in time. Much like OpenProject, the interface is utilitarian and clearly prioritizes function over form. It has remained unchanged since its first release, which lends to familiarity, but trades off so many principles of modern UX and UI design that even cash-crunched start-ups will find it difficult to use on day zero, let alone at scale.
  Issue tracking, time management, and documents are all a boring story of clicks after clicks and every multi-step workflow has more page loads than an adware link on spurious sites.
• Self-hosting experience
  Redmine stays true its legacy here, too. Familiarity with Ruby on Rails and database configs are a must along with Gem dependencies management. It boasts a plug-in system that requires several server restarts. A passionate community has contributed Docker images that feel like wrappers around dated installation methods instead of native container implementations.
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  Redmine licenses per legacy open-source—all its features are free, you pay for Support by tiers. That Support is available from third-parties, not Redmine itself. That Support is available from third-parties, not Redmine itself.
  While the software is free, organizations should consider the hidden costs:
• GNU General Public License v2
• Free to use and modify
• No Commercial Edition
• Community-driven support
• Paid support available via third parties
• Dedicated Ruby expertise needed
• Significant maintenance overhead
• Custom development often required
• Training for dated interfaces
• Integration development costs
• Challenges
• Enough can't be said about the pitfalls of the interface, the product, and the site. Even though Redmine is well maintained and has several recent updates, the software itself has stubbornly stuck itself in time.
  Navigation follows the early web's patterns, every submit action leads to full-page loads, to think about real-time functionality would make for good humor, and JavaScript is so limited in its use, one is forced to think if it was a failed experiment that someone forgot to refactor.
• Performance troubles owe themselves to the architecture from a different time.
• Integrations are via APIs only and follow REST patterns from the same era as the architecture and the interface. They lack the modern web's underlying features like webhooks or event streaming.
• The list of plug-ins is refreshingly extensive at first glance. Dig a little deeper and it's a graveyard of abandoned code and once-hopeful tools. Many plugins haven't been updated in years and finding ones that work with current versions can be challenging.
• Most critically, the technology stack itself—Ruby on Rails 4.2 through to 5.0—remains several major versions behind the latest, making security and maintenance veritable nightmares.

Microsoft Project • Professional and Server

One of the oldest in this category, Microsoft Projects, like all other Microsoft B2B products, is a comprehensive, end-to-end project management offering with several editions and tiers. The complexity of choices notwithstanding, just two of those are viable self-hosting alternatives for teams.

Project Professional

A cut above Project Standard that's designed for the individual, Professional offers some advanced project management features that teams need when they start climbing up in their maturity. However, this gets too restrictive too quickly.

Features and experience

Reminiscent of the time it launched but infinitely better than Redmine or OpenProject in its interface and experience—because Microsoft—, Professional is still limited to only some project management features. Dependencies, resources, cost, reports, and planning are all included. All five Plane layouts are also included with customization options.

However, collaboration takes a serious hit, courtesy how Microsoft packages their plans. Without SharePoint,

• Projects are offline files stored on your desktop.
• You can only share files with your team via emails, some other file sharing software, from a local server, or via offline devices like USBs.
• Only one of you can edit a file at a time.
• You have to manage versions yourself.
• There are no task updates.
• There are no team comms in the context of tasks.

Some of you will remember what it was like editing files before Google Docs and Microsoft 365. That's exactly what this is.

With SharePoint, things look up a little, but only a little.

• Projects sync back to your SharePoint server.
• Versions are automatically managed.
• Tasks sync with SharePoint task lists and changes flow back to project files.
• Teams can update their tasks and manually sync their updates.
• Team comms come in, with task-level discussions and comments.
• Notifications and alerts become real.
• Permissions and access controls are unlocked.

Should sound great by now. Well, not really. Conflicts with real-time updates across your team are common, some updates need everyone to stop working on a project, syncs are manual, not automated, and real-time remains far out of reach.

• Self-hosting experience
  Professional is a desktop app, so you install it on each member's device. However, In choosing Professional, you are also choosing Windows Server for self-hosting SharePoint—you don't want to get into the without-SharePoint scenario—, which is its own spate of considerations.
  Additionally, you don't just need SQL Server expertise, but also deep familiarity with Windows Server, roles on Windows Server, and network + authentication protocols that work with Windows Server. Familiarity with all of these doesn't mean it's a straightforward setup either. Complex SharePoint configs, technical expertise with SharePoint, and client-side configs are necessary.
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  I am getting a little tired of saying Microsoft—aren't you—, but it is Microsoft and how they operate, everything said and done.
  Licensing is complex. Professional needs its own licenses with or without SharePoint. With SharePoint, you now need to shell out for two different licenses—the SharePoint server license and client-licenses for each team member.
  So, three kinds of licenses for just team collaboration. Sweet.

Project Server

Enter Microsoft's enterprise-grade, enterprise-first project management software. This is an all-you-can-eat buffet of features. You wish it, you got it.

Features and experience

• Ignoring that Server feels distinctly enterprise and not in the modern sense, it's got everything most mature teams can want from a project management product. Complex dependencies, workflows, views, customizable layouts, rules, permissions, resource management across projects, and enterprise-grade IdP Sync via Azure Active Directory are all there.
  If that's good news to you, think again.
  Pit Microsoft Server against Jira Server or Cloud or Data Center and you start falling in love with Jira again, that's how complex configuring Microsoft Server is. Every single config has a dependency on something else. Often, there are nested dependencies. Sometimes, there are dependencies on other Microsoft enterprise products like PowerBI or Exchange or PowerApps. Coding for development of apps that work with Server—yep, you will need apps for mobile surfaces, forms, other data collection interfaces, custom approval workflows for stakeholders, custom business logic separate from configs in Sever, and much more—has to be ticked right out of the gate.
  As for end-users, the experience varies dramatically between power users and casual team members. Sever is power-user-first, so new members need to go through a steep learning curve, almost always via partner-enabled training and certifications for functional use.
• Self-hosting experience
  Take the self-hosting experience you have with Professional + SharePoint, ratchet up the complexity ten times, and you are still nowhere close to getting started. No exaggeration.
  Deployments in your datacenter need large machines ranging from 16 cores, 64GB RAM for SharePoint Server to 128GB RAM for SQL Server. For just 100 users, you need three of each plus at least 500GB storage. At scale, you are deploying server clusters for everything, including Search and Cache. Private cloud deployments are marginally better at the cost of, well, long-term OpEx.
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  Much like self-hosting, this gets more complex from Professional's licensing.
• SharePoint Server licenses are needed for deploying and managing it. You need as many licenses as Server admins.
• SharePoint Server client-access licenses are need for all Project Server members. These unlock collaboration via SharePoint Server.
• Project Server licenses are needed for all Project Server members. These are client-access licenses or CALs for using Project Server.
• Then there's SQL Server licenses for all Server users, should your Project Server users also need that access.
• External users need special configs, licenses, and access. That's a whole other rabbit hole.
• Challenges
  'Nuff said.

Leantime

Compared to any of the others, Leantime is a relatively newer entrant in the category. Started in 2022, the product positions itself uniquely for research and development.

• Features and experience
  Leantime has all the basic features if you are just getting started with disciplined project management. Checking all the boxes for tasks, sub-tasks, layouts—Kanban, Calendar, Timeline—with customizability, and visualization, Leantime's nice for businesses looking to get their teams talking off of a single tool. Baking file management right into the product, it is differentiated from Plane with an in-app video recorder, screen capture, and a media viewer.
  It's not so much its features, though, as much as the interface and the experience that are a blocker to considering it a viable alternative to Jira Server or hosted products. While more modern than others above, it feels prescriptive, dated and tacky. In-context toggles and controls are absent, roles are a little unusual—Editor, Commenter—, and a lot of customizability is traded off in the name of simplicity.
  For a range of methods and methodologies ranging from just-starting to we-have-best-practices, Leantime isn't a good fit.
• Self-hosting experience
  Built on PHP, Leantime is easy to host for those experienced with the LAMP stack. Installation needs,
  Docker installs are available, but they seem an afterthought which is lent credibility by the time of its last update—2022.
• PHP 7.4 or higher
• MySQL or MariaDB database
• Apache Web Server and Nginx
• Composer, a PHP dependency management tool
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  Leantime is available as both a hosted and a self-hosted product. The self-hosted edition comes with a AGPL v3.0 license, same as Plane, and is permissive for changes in deployed environments.
• Challenges
• PHP has known scaling challenges that are well documented. It's not impossible or even difficult to solve for them, but it does need hands-on experience with scaling PHP systems.
• Leantime's integrations leave much to be desired. For the time it has been around, it only claims Slack, Discord, and Mattermost. Its APIs are well documented but limiting in scope.
• Docs and Wikis are super-dated with a large breadth of components and features missing.
• While it is community-supported, there seems to be no dedicated push from the company to bring the open-source, self-hosted edition to the same level of experience as the cloud.

Taiga

Around from 2014, Taiga positions itself as an Agile-focused open-source project management product. Popular amongst developers and Agile teams, its adoption has struggled to break out of its core niche.

• Features and experience
  Taiga checks all the boxes for basic Agile and Lean methodologies. There are Kanban and Scrum boards that you can keep switching between. There are the usual suspects in Backlogs and Sprints with their burndown charts. There are Epics for organizing overarching work in a project. There are custom fields for issues and epics. There are integrations with GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gogs. There's also built-in team chat.
  So far so good.
  Where Taiga starts to fall back is with dashboards, reports, project updates, layouts, advanced dependencies, and time tracking amongst many others. Taiga's stance of soft-reporting is perhaps not as much a testament to their claims of flexibility as it is to a prescriptive blanket rule for all data viz, including the most basic ones. With just two layouts, Taiga's not trying to woo non-tech teams over. It's just clearly saying, "Developers welcome".
  
  

• 
  Even for that audience, Taiga leans towards traditional design philosophies over modern ones. All controls are hidden away from the work interfaces, which at first glance is nice, but soon becomes a chore, especially for managing states and swimlanes. Their Project Timeline is a news feed, not a visual timeline. Multi-project epics, which Jira championed, isn't the greatest way to organize overarching work.
  

• Self-hosting experience
  Taiga's architecture is a reminder of Plane's earliest day of self-hosting. You need to install the Python backend and the Angular frontend separately. You will need,
  While docker-compose files are available, the deployment of two separate services is considerably more challenging, even for slightly less-technical teams teams that are used to single Docker images. On top of that, configurations are manual and need some serious familiarity and knowledge of Docker.
  Consequently, updates need managing both the frontend and the backend for the latest and greatest from the House Of Taiga.
• a Python environment
• PostgreSQL database
• RabbitMQ for async tasks
• Apache and Nginx
• Licensing, plans, and pricing
  Taiga has a traditional open-source model with a self-hosted edition with an AGPL v3.0 license and an on-your-premises edition, the only difference between the two being priority support and scheduled updates.
• Challenges
• Opinionated Agile and Lean principles, hardcoded into both features and the experience
• Performance issues with larger projects
• Occasional sync problems between the frontend and the backend, leading to errors
• Sub-optimal docs for advanced configurations and use cases
• Community supported, thus slower overall development
• Limited third-party integrations, DIY integrations with APIs
• Technical Docker installation

So, which self-hosted project management tool is right for your team?

I'd love to say Plane and I'd be glad if you try us out, but the answer is more nuanced than that.

1. OpenProject works if you are starting out and are sure you don't need automations, AI, more than their layouts and visualization options in the mid-term. You are also cool with a less-modern interface and are skewed to Waterfall than any flavor of Agile.

2. Leantime works if you are low on the project management maturity curve and can wait to adopt advanced work management features. You are cool living with prescriptive experiences using it everyday and are sure you have time before you make a switch.

3. Project Professional is for you if you are a Microsoft shop and already use SharePoint Server for other Microsoft apps.

4. Project Server is great if you have the money for all the licenses, SharePoint Server and SQL Server expertise handy, either in-house or via partners, and are very high on the project management maturity curve.

5. Choose Taiga if you are a dev-only team that likes getting their hands dirty with code-level customization unique to your use cases and workflows.

6. Don't use Redmine. Come on.

P.S.: Should you find a tool that we haven't covered, send it to directly to me and I will make sure I update this article soon.