The full agency workflow, projects, billable hours, budgets, invoices, and client portals, in a platform you can audit, self-host, and never get priced out of.
No credit card required. Free forever plan available
Search for open source agency software and you find CRMs, dev-team issue trackers, and DIY starter kits. Worklenz is the rare complete platform: agency operations end to end, under an AGPL-3.0 license.
Agencies sign NDAs, work under GDPR, and sometimes serve clients who forbid third-party clouds outright. Self-hosted Worklenz keeps briefs, budgets, hours, and the client portal itself on infrastructure you control.
Open source "agency solutions" often mean assembling a CRM, a tracker, and an invoicing app into something fragile. Worklenz ships the whole loop working out of the box: brief to board to billable hour to invoice to client update.
Agencies
Projects delivered
Billable hours captured
See what our customers have to say about their experience with Worklenz.
We are working with Trello until we have discovered Worklenz. The boards is better than Trello bzz you can view % of tasks completed and also the roadmap is more attractive than others. We are waiting the new features that make possible importer boards and projects from other platforms to migrate and centralize all project's information in one site.
Product Manager (EdTech) and Agile Coach at The Bridge
Amaizing product which is very simple and easy to use. Worklenz has revolutionized our workflow. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, task management is a breeze. Time tracking, insightful analytics, and seamless integrations make it a must-have for any team serious about productivity. Highly recommended!
Founder & Leadership at Loons Lab
This is an excellent product. We practically experienced how productivity can increase after fully integrating this with our daily task schedule
Senior Lecturer at Sabaragamuwa University, Sri Lanka
We are working with Trello until we have discovered Worklenz. The boards is better than Trello bzz you can view % of tasks completed and also the roadmap is more attractive than others. We are waiting the new features that make possible importer boards and projects from other platforms to migrate and centralize all project's information in one site.
Product Manager (EdTech) and Agile Coach at The Bridge
Amaizing product which is very simple and easy to use. Worklenz has revolutionized our workflow. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, task management is a breeze. Time tracking, insightful analytics, and seamless integrations make it a must-have for any team serious about productivity. Highly recommended!
Founder & Leadership at Loons Lab
This is an excellent product. We practically experienced how productivity can increase after fully integrating this with our daily task schedule
Senior Lecturer at Sabaragamuwa University, Sri Lanka
Proprietary agency platforms charge $12 to $30 per user per month. At agency headcounts, open source stops being a philosophy and starts being a line item.
Timers and timesheets feed client billing directly. Every hour your team works is captured where it can be invoiced, on software that costs nothing per seat.
Budget versus actual per client project, updated as time is logged. See which retainers earn their keep, with the data in your own database.
Freelancers and staff on one capacity view. Adding twenty contractors for a big campaign costs nothing extra on Community self-hosting.
Hours, margins, and delivery status across every client, from a system you can query directly in PostgreSQL if the built-in reports ever fall short.
Book people onto campaigns weeks ahead, across clients.
Client invoices from tracked time, generated inside the platform.
Assets and deliverables on your own MinIO or S3 storage.
Repeatable structures for retainers, campaigns, and site builds.
Stage-gate campaigns so clients always know where things stand.
Morning summaries of all client work, sent via your SMTP.
Open source has strong project management tools (OpenProject, Plane, Taiga), strong CRMs (SuiteCRM, Twenty), and strong invoicing apps. What it has barely produced is the connected version: one platform where the campaign board, the billable hour, the budget, the invoice, and the client's view of progress share a database. That connection is exactly what agencies pay Productive or Scoro $12 to $30 per user per month for.
The closest open source attempts are starter kits like AgencyOS, built on Directus and Nuxt, which give a development team a foundation to build their own system. That is a real option if you have spare engineers. Worklenz is the other path: a finished, maintained agency platform, open source under AGPL-3.0, that works on day one.
Agency data is client data. Unreleased campaigns, product roadmaps under NDA, financials, legal matters. When a client's security questionnaire asks where their information lives, "on our own servers, in our own database" is a shorter conversation than a third-party subprocessor list.
Practically, self-hosting Worklenz means running Docker on a VPS or internal server: clone the repository from GitHub, run the quick-setup script, and the stack (React frontend, TypeScript API, PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO) comes up together. The Community edition is free with unlimited users. Business ($99/month) and Enterprise ($499/month) self-hosted plans add SSO, custom branding, backup tooling, and support, still with no per-user fees.
Some agencies want the license benefits without running servers. Worklenz Cloud is the same open source codebase, operated for you, with a free plan covering unlimited users and up to 3 active projects. Because both editions are one product, an agency can start on cloud, win the enterprise client with strict data rules, and move to self-hosted that quarter.
Either way the code stays inspectable on GitHub, the roadmap is public, and the exit path is guaranteed by the license rather than promised by a sales team.
What agencies actually find when they look for an open source operations platform.
| Worklenz | DIY stack / AgencyOS / general PM tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Works on day one | Yes, finished product | Starter kits and stacks need engineering time |
| Billable time + budgets + invoicing | All native, connected | Separate apps glued together |
| Client portal | Included | Build it yourself |
| Maintenance | Maintained upstream, regular releases | You maintain the glue |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Varies by component |
| Cost at 25 people | Free (Community) or $99/mo flat | Free software, paid engineering |
Comparison reflects the open source landscape as of mid-2026.
Common questions about running an agency on open source Worklenz
Very few. Most search results are CRMs, developer issue trackers, or starter kits like AgencyOS that require you to build the actual product. Worklenz is a complete agency platform (projects, billable time, budgets, invoicing, client portal) released under AGPL-3.0.
The software is free on the Community edition with unlimited users and projects. Your costs are infrastructure (a capable VPS typically runs $20-$60/month) and occasional update maintenance. Business ($99/month) and Enterprise ($499/month) plans add SSO, branding, backups, and support.
Yes. The client portal is part of the platform, so it runs wherever you deploy Worklenz. Clients access their project view through your domain, and their data stays on your infrastructure alongside everything else.
You can run, modify, and self-host Worklenz freely, for internal agency use, modifications never have to be published. The AGPL's publication requirement only applies if you offer a modified Worklenz to others as a public network service.
If you can run Docker, you can run Worklenz: clone github.com/Worklenz/worklenz and run ./quick-setup.sh. Most teams are working in it the same day. Cloud is the zero-setup alternative on the same codebase.
Worklenz starts at the signed brief: delivery, time, budgets, billing, and client communication. CRM is on the roadmap. Agencies typically keep their existing CRM or proposal tool for pipeline and plug Worklenz in for everything after the win.
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