Picking a project management tool isn't just about features. With open source, you're also weighing the license, how painful self-hosting actually is, whether the community is alive, and whether the project will still exist in two years. This guide covers nine tools worth your time, with honest notes on where each one falls short.
We cover Worklenz, Plane, OpenProject, Taiga, Redmine, GitLab PM, Leantime, Wekan, and Vikunja. full comparison table or read each tool in detail below.
Why teams choose open source for project management
The most common reason: data ownership. Healthcare teams, legal departments, and government agencies often can't send project data to a US-based SaaS vendor. Self-hosting an open source tool solves that without negotiating custom contracts.
Cost matters too, though it's more nuanced than the simple math suggests. Self-hosting isn't free: you pay for a server, maintenance, and someone's time when upgrades break things. A 20-person team on a $15/user/month SaaS pays $3,600 a year. That same team on a $20/month VPS pays $240. The savings are real, as long as someone on your team is willing to own the infrastructure.
Then there's vendor risk. When a company stops investing in a tool, the code freezes, security patches slow down, and you end up migrating anyway, just on a worse timeline. With access to the source, you have options: fork it, find a community maintainer, or patch it yourself.
