Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Jira

Kanboard is a free, open source Kanban project management application written in PHP. It focuses on simplicity and a minimalist interface for visualizing work, limiting work-in-progress, and moving tasks across columns via drag-and-drop. The platform is designed to deliver a no-training-required experience for teams that want the core Kanban methodology without feature bloat — a notable contrast to commercial tools that bundle every workflow concept into a single workspace.

The software includes tasks and subtasks, attachments, comments, swimlanes, time tracking, project analytics, and a flexible query language for searching and filtering the board. Event-based automatic actions let you automate repetitive workflows such as moving tasks, changing assignees, or applying categories based on triggers. Kanboard supports LDAP/Active Directory plus OAuth2 providers like Google, GitHub, and GitLab for authentication, ships a JSON-RPC API and webhooks, and is translated into more than 30 languages.

Kanboard is published under the MIT license and self-hosted as a PHP application backed by SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB, or PostgreSQL. Docker images and official packages for Debian, Ubuntu, and RHEL are available, and a large plugin ecosystem extends it with notifications, Gantt charts, calendar views, custom themes, importers from Trello and Jira, and dozens of other additions. The core author considers the project in maintenance mode, so new major features come primarily from community contributions and plugins — making the plugin directory the primary way to grow the platform beyond its intentionally lean core.

Kaneo is an open source project management tool for teams that want the core of Jira or Linear without the configuration overhead. It runs as a single container next to PostgreSQL, so a self-hosted instance takes minutes to stand up and every task, comment, and attachment stays on your own infrastructure.

Work is organized through board, list, calendar, and Gantt views, with a backlog, filters, and search on top. Tasks carry descriptions, attachments, subtasks, dependencies, labels, comments, and time tracking, while workspaces add invitations, custom roles, live updates, and public project views. Custom columns and fields reshape the workflow, and rules can move tasks automatically when repository activity changes. Notifications go out in-app, by email, or through ntfy, Gotify, and personal webhooks, and the instance connects to GitHub, Gitea, and chat tools, with a REST API, CLI, and MCP server for automation.

Kaneo is MIT-licensed and free to self-host, with no user or project limits. A managed Kaneo Cloud option is available for teams that would rather not run the server themselves. Compared with Jira it is deliberately minimal; compared with Linear it trades some polish for full data ownership.

OpenProject is the leading open-source project management software, empowering teams to achieve great things together. With over a decade of development, it provides a comprehensive suite of tools for planning, scheduling, and tracking projects from start to finish.

OpenProject supports both classic and agile project management, featuring Gantt charts, work packages, sprints, kanban boards, and a built-in wiki. Its time tracking, cost reporting, and budgeting capabilities set it apart from lighter alternatives — making it suitable for enterprises and NGOs managing complex, multi-team projects. The GitHub integration links work packages directly to pull requests for seamless developer workflows.

Available as a self-hosted Community edition (free) or Enterprise cloud/on-premises edition with premium support and add-ons, OpenProject is trusted by organizations worldwide. With features including forums, meeting agendas, bug tracking, and roadmaps, it is one of the most feature-complete open-source alternatives to Jira, Asana, Trello, and Monday.com.

Paca is an AI-native, open-source project management platform designed as a self-hosted alternative to Jira, Trello, ClickUp, and Monday.com. Built for modern Scrum and Kanban teams, Paca enables humans and AI agents to collaborate as equals on the same boards, sprints, and goals. It supports BDD (Behavior-Driven Development), MCP integration, and WASM plugins for full customization. Deploy via Docker or self-host with a PostgreSQL backend.

Plane is an open-source, AI-native project management platform that brings Work, Wiki, and Plane AI together in one workspace. It is a direct alternative to Jira, Linear, Monday.com, and ClickUp — combining issue tracking, cycles, modules, and roadmaps with built-in documentation and AI assistance, while staying self-hostable and air-gap ready.

Work is organized around projects and work items with rich descriptions, attachments, custom states and properties, sub-issues, and relations. Teams plan in time-boxed cycles with burndown and velocity tracking, group deliverables into modules, align execution to initiatives and epics, and switch between Board, Spreadsheet, List, and Gantt views. Custom views, intake and triage, estimates, workflows with approvals, and real-time dashboards cover the day-to-day of product and engineering teams. Wiki adds a Notion-style knowledge base with collections, nested pages, and inline comments, while Plane AI can summarize, draft, plan, search the web, and hand work off to agents.

Plane ships in three editions: a free Community Edition under AGPL-3.0 for self-hosting, a free Cloud tier, and commercial Cloud and self-managed plans. Self-hosting supports Docker Compose, Kubernetes with Helm, Podman, and one-click platforms, with the Prime CLI handling installs, upgrades, backups, and scaling. Plane runs in the browser, as a desktop app for macOS and Linux, and as an iOS and Android app on commercial editions. It can be extended through a marketplace of integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Sentry, plus Jira/Linear/Asana/ClickUp importers), an open API, webhooks, OAuth apps, and a native MCP server.

Huly (built on the Hardcore Engineering platform) is an open source all-in-one productivity suite designed to replace a stack of paid tools with a single self-hostable application. It bundles an issue tracker, project planner, team chat, wiki, CRM, HR, ATS, and even quality management into one cohesive workspace.

It positions itself as a direct alternative to Linear and Jira for engineering teams, while also replacing Notion or Coda for documentation, Slack or Discord for chat, HubSpot for CRM, and Motion for AI scheduling. Because all modules share a single data model, work items, conversations, contacts, and documents stay in sync without glue code or paid integrations.

Huly is built with TypeScript and runs on Node.js and MongoDB, with first-class Docker and Kubernetes support. The community edition is fully open source under EPL-2.0, while a cloud-hosted tier is available for teams that do not want to manage infrastructure.

4ga Boards is a straightforward, realtime kanban board management system designed for intuitive task tracking and team productivity. Built with a focus on simplicity and elegance, it offers an intuitive UI/UX with a built-in dark mode, advanced markdown editor, and multitasking capabilities that let you simultaneously edit cards while filtering and rearranging boards.

The platform features a multi-level hierarchy (projects → boards → lists → cards → tasks) with collapsible lists and sidebar for easier navigation in complex projects. It supports Google, GitHub, Microsoft, and OIDC SSO for authentication, and offers powerful keyboard shortcuts alongside support for 17 languages. Real-time updates happen without page reloads, and you can export and import boards for portability.

4ga Boards supports Trello import for easy migration and offers flexible deployment options including Docker Compose, Kubernetes, TrueNAS, and manual installation. The tech stack includes React, Redux, Sails.js, and PostgreSQL.

Focalboard is an open-source, self-hosted project management tool created by the team behind Mattermost. It serves as a direct alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana, providing a flexible and customizable way to manage tasks, projects, and workflows.

The tool supports multiple views including kanban boards, tables, galleries, and calendars — giving teams the flexibility to visualize their work the way they want. It comes in two editions: a Personal Desktop app for individuals (available on macOS, Windows, and Linux) and a Personal Server for self-hosted team collaboration.

Focalboard features drag-and-drop task management, customizable properties and card templates, markdown support in card descriptions, and a clean, modern interface. Being part of the Mattermost ecosystem, it integrates deeply with Mattermost's messaging platform as the Boards plugin. While development on the standalone version has slowed, the project remains a solid choice for teams seeking a self-hosted project management solution.

Worklog is a local-first desktop project management application designed for small development teams. Built with Svelte and Tauri, it offers a fast, keyboard-first planning experience with a Kanban workflow and zero cloud dependency for core usage.

The app stores all data locally by default, giving teams full control over their project information. It supports Git integration for contextual task management tied to code changes, making it especially useful for developer workflows.

With its lightweight desktop architecture and minimal resource footprint, Worklog is ideal for teams that want a simple, offline-capable project tracker without the complexity or cost of cloud-based tools like Trello, Jira, or Linear.

Pad is a local-first project management tool built for individual developers and the AI agents that work alongside them. It ships as a single Go binary that runs on your machine, with a SvelteKit web UI on localhost:7777, a pad CLI, and a /pad skill that integrates with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, and JetBrains Junie. All data lives in a SQLite file on your laptop; Pad Cloud is an optional sync and sharing layer if you want multi-device or team workspaces.

Pad organises work into typed collections. Built-in collections cover tasks, ideas, plans, docs, conventions, and playbooks, and you can define your own collections with custom fields (select, text, date, number, URL, relation, checkbox). The web UI offers board, list, and table views with drag-and-drop, keyboard navigation, a Tiptap-based rich text editor with markdown, wiki-style [[links]], and real-time updates from the CLI via SSE.

The agent integration is what sets Pad apart. Conventions are trigger-based rules ("run tests before marking a task done"), and playbooks are multi-step workflows the agent can follow on demand — for example /pad ship PLAN-42 or /pad release 0.5.0. Running /pad onboard in an agent session inspects your codebase, detects build and test tooling, and adapts collections, conventions, roles, and playbooks to match the project. Every agent action is attributed in the activity feed.

Compared to Linear, Jira, and Notion, Pad is fully offline-capable, requires no account, and is priced only by optional cloud usage. It is best suited for solo developers and small teams who want their project data local and want their AI coding tools to act on the board rather than just read from it.

Doska is a free, open source kanban board app built around a Markdown editor. Every card is a Markdown document with syntax highlighting, task lists with completion counters, and a slash menu for quick formatting. The app is local-first: your boards live in the browser's IndexedDB, work fully offline, and sync to a destination of your choice — a local folder or a self-hosted server — shortly after every change, so the app never makes you wait on the network.

Boards cover the day-to-day kanban essentials: deadlines, priorities, card sorting, tags, assignees, file and image attachments, a cross-board deadlines view, an always-on-top quick note window, and an activity history. When you connect the sync server, Doska adds multiple user accounts, shared and public boards, live updates across devices, and single sign-on via any OIDC-compatible provider. An integrated MCP server lets AI clients such as Claude read and work with your boards.

Self-hosting is a one-line install script or a docker compose file that bundles the sync server, the web interface, and an optional Postgres database; attachments can be stored on the server or on S3-compatible storage. Unlike Trello, which hosts your boards in Atlassian's cloud and restricts things like attachment size and the number of open boards per workspace on its free plan, Doska keeps everything on hardware you control with no paywalled features — and folder sync means your cards remain plain Markdown files you can open in any editor.

What is osTicket

osTicket is a widely-used open source support ticket system. It integrates inquiries created via email, phone, and web forms into a single multi-user web interface, so agents can manage, organise, and archive every support request and response in one place. Built in PHP and released under the GPL-2.0 license, it has been in active development for over a decade and is one of the most popular self-hosted alternatives to commercial help desk suites like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout.

Key features

• Unified ticket queue: Every customer request — whether it arrives by email, web form, or API — lands in a ticket queue where agents can reply, add internal notes, transfer between departments, and see when another agent is already viewing the same ticket to avoid double answers.
• Ticket filters and auto-responses: A rules engine lets you route tickets to specific departments and teams, set priorities, trigger canned auto-responses, and escalate issues without writing code.
• Help topics and custom forms: Build per-department intake forms that capture the exact fields you need (product, version, environment, attachments) before a ticket is even opened.
• SLA plans and reporting: Define service-level agreements with grace periods per department and priority, then measure response and resolution times with the built-in reports and exports.
• Knowledge base, tasks, and collaboration: A public and internal knowledge base, lightweight agent tasks, canned responses, and a plugin and theme system for extending the interface.

Self-hosting and how it compares

osTicket runs on a standard LAMP-style stack: PHP 8.2–8.4 with the mysqli extension, MySQL 5.5 or later (MariaDB works), and Apache or IIS. Deployment is a git clone followed by php manage.php deploy --setup /path, with git pull and a redeploy for upgrades. There is no database abstraction layer to configure, and no official Docker image — community images exist.

Compared to Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Help Scout, you avoid per-agent monthly fees and keep full control of customer data, but you take on updates, backups, and uptime yourself, and you miss the AI assistants, chat widgets, and marketplace integrations those suites bundle. For teams that want a capable, battle-tested help desk without the SaaS price tag, osTicket is still the default open source choice.

Peppermint is an open source, self-hostable help desk and ticket management platform aimed at small support teams. It is positioned as a lightweight alternative to Zendesk, Jira Service Management, and Zoho Desk, focused on a clean UX and easy deployment.

Peppermint provides a shared inbox, ticket pipelines, knowledge base, internal notes, and customer-facing ticket tracking, plus a built-in CRM for managing contacts and organisations. It exposes a REST API for connecting to existing tools, and supports SSO and role-based access control.

The project is built with Next.js, Node.js, and Prisma, runs on PostgreSQL, and is released under a source-available license. It is a strong fit for startups and small businesses that want Zendesk-grade ticketing without per-agent fees.

Tegon is an open source, developer-focused issue tracking and project management tool. It is positioned as a clean, modern alternative to Jira and Linear with an emphasis on fast workflows, keyboard shortcuts, and AI-assisted triage.

Tegon ships with issues, projects, sprints, cycles, and roadmaps out of the box, plus a notification model and integrations designed for engineering teams. The product roadmap also includes AI-driven suggestions for assigning, prioritising, and summarising work, and the codebase is structured so teams can self-host and extend it with their own integrations.

Tegon is released under AGPL-3.0 and is built on TypeScript and React. It is a good fit for small engineering organisations that want a no-per-seat, self-hosted Jira replacement without the operational overhead of running something heavier.

Scrumboy is a lightweight, self-hosted project management application built for agile teams. It supports full scrum workflows including sprint creation, activation, and closing, alongside customizable Kanban boards with user-defined lanes and "Done" states.

Real-time collaboration is powered by Server-Sent Events (SSE), allowing multiple users to see board updates instantly. Scrumboy also supports anonymous shareable boards — anyone with the URL can access and collaborate without logging in, making it great for demos or external contributors.

It includes role-based access control at both the system and per-project level, TOTP/2FA authentication, an append-only audit trail, and full backup/import support (JSON). The app ships as a single Go binary with an embedded SQLite database, making it easy to self-host via Docker Compose or direct binary deployment.

Windshift is a self-hosted work management platform that combines task tracking, workflow automation, and team collaboration in a single deployable application. Built with Go and Svelte, it offers a lean architecture that runs comfortably on modest hardware, including a Raspberry Pi.

Windshift covers the full lifecycle of team work: configurable workspaces with custom fields, statuses, priorities, and item types; kanban boards with drag, rank, and filter; nested hierarchy to organize work at any depth; milestones for planning and tracking delivery; and dashboards with widgets for every surface. Beyond standard project tracking it ships with built-in test management (cases, runs, results), time tracking with project billing, and an asset management / CMDB module.

Compared to cloud-only tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, and ClickUp, Windshift gives teams full control of their data with a single binary, optional SQLite or PostgreSQL backend, SSO/OIDC, WebAuthn, and integrations for GitHub, Gitea, and Jira project import. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0.

TaskView is a self-hosted project and task management platform designed for small and growing software teams that want full control over their data. It combines projects, tasks, custom Kanban boards, sprints, time tracking, and developer integrations in a single platform you can run on your own infrastructure — without the complexity of enterprise project management systems.

The platform supports flexible workflows with configurable projects, statuses, boards, roles, and permissions, alongside features like task dependencies, recurring tasks, sprints, and Markdown content. Built-in analytics cover team workload, productivity, billable time, and financial reports. Identity is handled through SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SCIM provisioning, with scoped API tokens and fine-grained permissions for integrations.

TaskView integrates with the tools development teams already use — GitHub, GitLab, signed webhooks, and a TypeScript API client — and ships with an MCP server so AI assistants can search, create, and update tasks through a secure token. Web, iOS, and Android clients are available, and the entire product is distributed under the TaskView Source-Available License, which permits self-hosting and internal use.

Devlane is a modern project management platform built for development teams. It organizes work into workspaces and projects, tracks issues with assignees, labels, priorities, and parent/child links, and groups work into time-boxed cycles (sprints) and modules for clearer scope.

The project positions itself as an open-source alternative to Jira, Linear, Monday, ClickUp, and Plane, focusing on a fast, opinionated workflow rather than feature breadth. It includes lightweight docs (pages), rich-text comments powered by TipTap, activity feeds, saved views, and basic analytics for tracking progress.

The backend is written in Go (Gin + GORM) with PostgreSQL, Redis, and optional RabbitMQ and MinIO for queues and object storage. The web UI is a React + Vite + TypeScript single-page app styled with Tailwind CSS. Devlane can be self-hosted via Docker or run from source, though it requires more infrastructure than lightweight alternatives (PostgreSQL and Redis are mandatory, with RabbitMQ and MinIO for full functionality).

A note on licensing: Devlane is released under a custom Devlane Software License, MIT-style use and modification rights, but selling the software or offering it as a hosted service to third parties is prohibited. This makes the codebase source-available rather than OSI-approved open source.