Top Open-source Project Management Software Solutions

Effective project management is essential for ensuring project success. It's the key to completing projects on time, within budget, and exceeding stakeholder expectations.

Successful project management requires both skilled project managers and robust project management software. The right software can enhance communication, planning, and tracking, which are critical to project completion.

Choosing the best project management software depends on your team's unique needs, abilities, and workflow. The way these factors interact will significantly influence your project's success. Each project management solution we’ve analyzed offers unique features that could benefit your team, including charts, graphs, and visualization tools to improve understanding and communication.

At its core, project management software should ensure the right people and resources are assigned to the right tasks at the right time. Additionally, some open-source solutions include features like custom notifications, budget tracking, and advanced task scheduling.

Whether you consider additional tools essential or optional, our goal is to help you find the right project management software for your team. Use our guide to explore the top seven project management solutions and find the best fit for your organization.

4 Advantages of Project Management Software

To accurately assess how much value project management software can deliver to your teams, we first need to look at precisely what it can deliver for your business. Far from a comprehensive list, these features represent what project management software is best suited to doing to deliver value to your organisation.

1. Creating Clearly Defined Roles and Tasks

The simplest way to ensure consistent and non-overlapping progress on a project is to ensure every team member knows exactly what role they have to fill. It’s perhaps the single most important and often the most overlooked factor of project success.

Clearly defining the roles of every team member ensures everyone has their own area to focus on. Most importantly, defining clear roles guards against forgetting some small details or overlapping large tasks. When project management is clearly defined, everyone knows who to ask for direction and resources.

High-quality project management software ensures that everyone is pulling towards the same goal at once—even when there are many moving pieces in play.

2. Creating Clear and Organised plans to Improve Collaboration

Every team member has a unique area of knowledge and expertise. As a project grows in size and complexity, it can be difficult for all stakeholders to keep and touch with these areas of responsibility and keep up to date across the entire project.

Effective project management software should aim to make this level of collaboration completely straightforward. Insights delivered by timelines, GANT and burndown charts, sprint boards, and related tools ensure that the progress and status of a project can be seen at a glance.

3. Improving how Efficient and Effective a Team Can be

With a clearly defined model of their role and how it fits into the project, the final thing team members need to succeed is a roadmap to reach their destination.

Effective project management software allows you to define this roadmap and the goals that go into it. These goals should serve to motivate your team and provide direction and momentum in achieving them. By aligning team members and optimising your tasks to provide clear deliverables—you can ensure everyone is moving in a direction that will impact on these goals.

4. Provide Real-Time Budget and Resource Management

One of the most critical assets that project management software can provide is the tools and resources to manage project finances. Something that’s too easily placed at the back of the priority list for teams, project management software can help bring finance to the forefront of thinking and planning.

Assisting project managers in tracking the budget spent against tasks completed—a high-quality project management solution can reduce the opportunities for runaway finances and budget overrun late in the project.

The Project Management Lifecycle

One of the greatest difficulties in project management is that no two projects are ever identical. A software project will vary greatly according to its scale, domain, and the knowledge and experience of the engineers constructing it.

The project management lifecycle attempt to identify key stages in the process and help teams identify where they are and what needs to be done to further advance the project.

1. Scoping

Often labelled as analysis or research, this is the phase where you will assemble your project team and identify your goals and timescale.

During this phase, you may lean on tools such as the project roadmap, an early version of the planning schedule, and a record of deliverables you’ll want to be created by the end of the project. The level of detail required and the amount of input needed at this stage will depend primarily on the scale of the project and the number of people involved.

2. Planning

When a project is beginning to take shape, and you have a rough outline of what you want to achieve and when you want it completed—it’s time to put down tangible plans to move toward these goals.

This is the most critical phase towards defining the success of a project. The ability for a project to meet its goals and expectations on time and within budget will largely be defined by how accurate and effective your planning turns out to be.

The outcome of this phase should be an account of how the team will spend its time to meet key milestones and an alignment between shareholders on accurate costing and a complete timeline for the project.

3. Execution

While a great deal about the success of a project will be defined in the planning phase, the vast majority of time spent on a project is spent in the execution phase.

This phase is where your team will work towards implementing deliverables, building the project, and moving towards a minimal viable product (MVP), or a complete service. During this period, the bulk of project management work involves assigning tasks, time and workload management, and shifting plans when necessary to ensure the project stays on track.

4. Reporting

When important milestones have been met, and the execution phase of a project draws to a close—reporting is a critical final step that could otherwise be easily overlooked.

It’s this phase that helps to correct issues and errors that have cropped up from each of the earlier phases within the project. Accurate reporting helps to increase the visibility of these issues and ensure they’re ones that have been addressed and prevented for future tasks and projects.

Choosing the Best Project Management Software

The project management solution that works best for you is dependant largely on the size and shape of your organisation and the teams that support it.

A fully distributed team working across multiple countries and continents may appreciate a more robust solution that provides up-to-date notifications and a clear record of deadlines and reporting. A team working on more experimental research and development tasks that are less well-defined may prefer more robust time-tracking solutions and more flexible options.

Regardless of the size of a team, the benefits of project management software can pay large dividends. Simply tracking tasks against time spent and deadlines approaching is a powerful motivator and a way to review what’s working well and what’s holding things back in a team dynamic.

The larger a team gets, the more effective processes and tools are in keeping projects on track and all team members aligned.

Key Features to look out for in Project Management Software

• Effective planning. A fundamental part of project management software should be the ability to keep and track plans to implement, test, and deploy the software
• Task tracking. Good project management software should give you clear information about the current status of a project and how it’s likely to hold up in the future
• User Experience. Project management software should enable more work to be done, not get in the way of that work with unnecessary process
• Budget Tracking. Being able to track resources spent on equipment, consumables, and people against time spent on task and against the progress of a project is a key feature to look out for
• Allocating Resources. High-quality project management software should allow you to maximise resource allocation to ensure everything is ready and in use at the right time
• Documentation. It should be an ideal place to store planning and requirements documents to keep the project in line and on-track

Here, for you to review, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of effective free and open source project management software packages. Each one combines many of the features listed above and some include several more to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of projects being undertaken within your organisation.

7 Best Free and Open Source Project Management Software packages

1. Redmine

An open-sourced project management software solution that allows you to add unlimited users and storage—Redmine is widely known as one of the most flexible web-based project management tools out there.

Built on the Ruby on Rails framework, Redmine features an exceptionally strong user and developer community and often features as one of the single most popular open-source project management software packages. It’s a solution that can be configured to a large number of use cases—from taking care of a single project with just a few discrete tasks to managing multiple ongoing projects and teams at once from a single dashboard.

Redmine is ideally suited for small to mid-sized organisations and businesses looking for a budget-conscious way to manage their projects.

Top Features:

• Open Source
• Custom data dashboard
• Comprehensive document management system
• Customisable notifications on tasks
• Role-based security access control
• Increased collaboration through in-built instant messaging
• Integrates with multiple database solutions
• Customisable and easy to use workflows

2. Jira

Atlassian’s project management software, Jira, is one of the software industry’s most universally used and most widely appreciated tools. Its widespread adoption, amongst many of the industry’s largest and most productive businesses, speaks to how powerful the software suite can be for the organisations it serves.

Optimised for agile software development, JIRA is built with Kanban task management in mind to help project managers keep on top of the workflow while the wider team progresses with project tasks.

Jira is designed to be flexible in the way it’s deployed. The philosophy of the software is centred around conforming to the way your team works and not forcing your team to adapt to yet another project management software solution. Jira enables you to choose from a pre-configured workflow or create a customised way of working to support your requirements.

Scalable from free plans for small businesses, Jira can suit almost any use case for an organisation and enable you to put project management at the forefront of your thinking.

Top Features:

• Free tier and paid plans for future expansion
• Scrum boards, Kanban boards, agile methodologies
• Rich array of automation tools available
• In-depth reporting and data visualisations
• Role-based security and access controls
• Supports a wide array of productivity add-ons
• Integrates with existing Atlassian tools
• Mobile apps for extended interactions
• Free tier supports up to 10 users

3. ProjectLibre

ProjectLibre is an open-source project management software solution designed to compete with enterprise packages. Inherently scalable and indispensable amongst firms that deploy it, ProjectLibre is well-suited to businesses in a wide range of technology sectors.

Recently, the software hit a milestone of over 5 million downloads worldwide. Since its release in 2012, the project has gone from strength to strength and delivered great value and efficiency to the organisations it serves.

Future cloud-based versions are set to build on the success of the desktop software by opening it up to a multi-project, multi-user version accessible by browser.

Top Features:

• Open source
• Compatible with Microsoft Project
• Detailed work breakdown structure charts
• Powerful reporting functionality
• Easily import and export project data
• Powerful value costing tools
• Ability to import-export database
• Resource histograms

4. Taiga

Taiga is an open-source project management platform ideally suited to agile projects. Taiga’s vendor also offers premium plans that feature more users, project support, and cloud storage to help streamline projects.

Taiga’s project management software prides itself on being easy to use and featuring a modern UI. The shallow learning curve and modernised approach of the software makes it an ideal solution for cross-functional teams or organisations that are accustomed to existing commercial solutions.

Positioning itself in direct competition with highly popular enterprise offerings—Taiga remains highly customisable in both design and workflow.

Top Features:

• Open source software with premium support available
• Kanban boards
• Scrum capabilities for teams
• Robust issue and bug tracking tools
• In-depth reporting tools available
• Customisable user roles and permission setting
• Educational pricing available
• Customisable integrations with most widely used tools

5. OpenProject

OpenProject is open-sourced web-based project management software designed around agile project management. Featuring a free community version and premium version of the platform, OpenProject is well-suited to fit into organisations with varying requirements for enterprise support and setup.

Community versions of the software come with powerful project management features and enough tools and reporting options to undertake large scale commercial projects. Ideally suited for agile project management teams, OpenProject is more than capable of servicing small to mid-sized organisations in a wide range of industries.

Top Features:

• Open source
• Designed around agile project management
• Customisable time tracking tools
• Tools to support team collaboration
• Extensive budget tracking tools
• Rich array of forecasting tools
• Excellent reporting capabilities

6. TaskJuggler

TaskJuggler is a flexible and powerful open source project management package designed to handle projects even at vast scale with minimal effort.

Modern and powerful enough to be compared amongst any of the most popular commercial solutions, it offers powerful task and budget management systems. The customisations available to construct and fit with existing workflows enables the solution to be deployed to suit software, hardware, and physical infrastructure projects.

Perhaps the most versatile project management software on the list, TaskJuggler is well-placed to come into almost any-sized firm and improve processes and workflows in a very short time frame.

Top Features:

• Open Source
• Support for task and resource management
• Budget management and cost calculations
• Works across multiple platforms and operating systems
• Detailed documentation and reference manuals
• Integrates with command-line tools
• Detailed profit/loss analysis
• Comprehensive and flexible reporting tools

7. Freedcamp

Freedcamp offers a uniquely powerful, modern, and attractive project management software suite that’s free to use at scale.

Featuring a comprehensive suite of features, tools, and integrations—Freedcamp offers free-tier pricing for an unlimited number of users for an unlimited period of time. With more extensive features available under various levels of paid plans, it’s a project management software solution capable of scaling with your organisation and its consistently evolving requirements.

Few project management suites are as comprehensive or complete as Freedcamp. Offering extensive issue tracking, documentation, invoicing, reporting, and notifications just to start—it’s a software package capable of handling many supporting tasks within your business.

Top Features:

• Free tier for unlimited users for an unlimited time
• Powerful software functionality that can take care of a lot of functions
• Powerful reporting and dashboard
• Smooth, responsive, and modern design credentials
• Easy to navigate and easy to learn
• Extensive project visualisation tools
• Powerful time tracking functionality
• Mobile applications to maximise connectivity

Project Management Software for your next Projects

Each of the project management software solutions discussed here has something to offer your future projects. Whether an open-source solution meets the ethos and requirements of your firm or an enterprise package can offer a great deal on complex requirements; effective project management software is the next major step you can take to level up your organisation.

Offering accountability, tracking, reporting, and ready-made ideas for improvement—project management software is the single most impactful and efficient thing you can do today to advance your business in a positive direction.