About VATES

VATES is an open-source virtualization stack editor out of Grenoble, France. With around 100 employees and rapid growth following VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom, the company needed a way to scale internal operations without losing control of its projects and teams.

They had been using WeKan, an open source Trello alternative, but it was slowing them down. Performance issues, lack of updates, and limited scalability meant the tool could no longer keep up with the company’s pace. After evaluating alternatives, VATES decided to replace it entirely with Plane.

The challenge

As VATES expanded, their existing setup with their previous project management tool became a bottleneck. Performance had degraded to the point where even simple actions slowed down collaboration. Linking between cards was cumbersome and unreliable, especially across departments, making it difficult to connect related work across teams.

The leadership team explored options, including Tuleap, a powerful French open-source ALM; however, many of its technical features were unnecessary for VATES’ use case, and configuration appeared as complex as Jira for simple workflows. Jira itself wasn’t an option either, it’s not open source, not available on-premises for smaller teams, and lacks the user-friendly configuration that Plane provides.

Why Plane was the best fit

When VATES discovered Plane through GitHub and LinkedIn, several things stood out immediately for them.

• Plane’s on-premise deployment model gave them full control over their data and made migration simple. While VATES follows an open-source philosophy, selling services and support while keeping the product freely installable from source, the team appreciated Plane’s active open-source community and clear product vision.
• The user experience and performance were a step change compared to the previous solution, removing the slowdowns that had previously frustrated teams.
• The feature set was broad enough to serve developers, managers, and executives, covering both day-to-day execution and high-level planning.
• Projects, Cycles, Epics, Initiatives, and customizable views provided the flexibility to manage work across every level of the organization.

Implementation and rollout

The migration from the previous solution to Plane took just two weeks. Developers went first, replicating workflows and states on Plane. Soon after, each department created its own project in Plane, while a central VATES project was set up to connect parent work items and cross-department initiatives. All 100 employees onboarded in weeks.

To extend adoption further, VATES integrated Plane with GitHub for developer workflows and connected Plane data to GRIST, an open source BI tool, via our APIs to cover custom, DIY analytics and dashboards.

A year on Plane

One year later, Plane has become the system of record for projects, documentation, and cross-team collaboration at VATES. The shift has been significant.

• Company-wide adoption
  The move from fewer than 20 users on the previous solution to more than 100 on Plane killed silos, duct-tape data stitching, and unnecessary delays.
• Improved performance
  Everyday project management became faster and smoother, with performance no longer a point of frustration and customizability the answer to unique needs.
• Scaling with clarity
  Leadership gained visibility across initiatives and epics, while teams continued to focus on their own work items and cycles.
• Structured growth
  VATES got the structure to grow in a rapidly evolving virtualization market without having to rely on multiple fragmented tools.
• Security and compliance
  VATES created specific work-item types, epics, and modules to identify and monitor security issues and tasks in each project. The team also maintains a dedicated project, and soon initiatives, to collect and track all security-related work, including ANSSI CSPN, CRA, and GDPR requirements.