Self-hosted Jira alternatives: OpenProject, Plane and Vikunja compared

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Lists of Jira alternatives are plentiful, and most share a problem: they are copied rather than checked. One of the most frequently named candidates is no longer maintained, and another only looks dormant because the lists point to the wrong repository.

This article first checks what is still alive, then compares the three active candidates, and answers the question the decision usually turns on in companies: where does the free edition end.

All details from the repositories and vendor pages, as of October 2026.

Table of contents

• What is left of the usual recommendations
• The three active candidates
• Three ways to draw a commercial boundary
• OpenProject
• Plane
• Vikunja
• Single sign-on as the dividing line
• What a migration from Jira really costs
• Which one for which situation
• How we approach this at WZ-IT
• Further guides

What is left of the usual recommendations

Before comparing features, the date of the last commit is worth a look, in the right repository.

Taiga appears regularly in recommendation lists, often with a link to kaleidos-ventures/taiga. That repository has been dormant since December 2023. The production version, however, lives in taigaio/taiga-back and taigaio/taiga-front and is still maintained: 6.9.0 shipped in October 2025, 6.10.0 to 6.10.3 in April and May 2026, and fixes continue into October 2026. Taiga is therefore an option for agile teams, but it evolves considerably more slowly than the three candidates below.

Focalboard has moved from mattermost/ to mattermost-community/ and carries a README notice that it is currently not maintained and that anyone interested in becoming a maintainer should get in touch. The Mattermost plugin version continues separately; the standalone tool does not.

Focalboard is therefore not a viable basis for a new deployment. Anyone using it anyway should do so deliberately, not because it appeared on a list.

The three active candidates

Figures from the public repositories, as of 12 October 2026.

Three ways to draw a commercial boundary

For open-source software with a commercial offering there are three architectures, and they differ above all in how well you can see the boundary in advance.

The third architecture is the least conspicuous. With OpenProject you install the same software whether or not you hold a contract; a key unlocks features. The source therefore does not tell you what belongs to the free edition, because all of it is in there.

That is not an accusation. It only means the test "is the code open" says nothing here about the usable scope. That question is answered by the vendor's feature overview alone.

How such boundaries can shift over the years we assembled in the chronicle of licence changes.

OpenProject

OpenProject comes from Berlin and is the candidate closest to Jira in the classic sense: work packages, Gantt charts, time tracking, budgets, wiki, reporting.

The Community Edition is under GPL-3.0, self-hostable and has no user limit. That is more than many vendors permit in a free edition.

The paid tiers are called Basic, Professional, Premium and Corporate. They hold, among other things:

• portfolio management across multiple projects
• resource planning
• advanced baseline comparisons
• single sign-on

The last point is the most significant for companies, and we return to it below.

Activation happens through a licence key in the same installation. A trial can be requested through the admin interface, which makes comparison before a decision easier.

Plane

At more than 60,000 stars Plane is the most visible project in the comparison and the youngest. Its orientation is agile: issues, cycles, modules, views as list, board or calendar. Anyone coming from Jira Software who worked in sprints finds their footing quickly.

The public repository is entirely under AGPL-3.0. It contains no directory with a differing licence; the source of the paid tiers is not published.

For assessment this means: what you self-host is fully inspectable. What the paid tiers add can only be taken from the feature overview.

On authentication Plane draws the line much like OpenProject: the Community Edition offers password, one-time code and a few OAuth providers such as GitHub or Google. OpenID Connect and SAML for your own identity provider such as Keycloak or Authentik are only available in the Pro and Business tiers.

Vikunja

Vikunja is the leanest of the three and the most honest about its scope: it manages tasks, not projects. Lists, kanban, Gantt, calendar, labels, reminders.

It is under AGPL-3.0, written in Go, and correspondingly modest in memory use. For a small team on a shared server it is the most resource-efficient route.

Since version 2.4.0 in July 2026 there is also Vikunja Pro. A licence key unlocks an instance-wide admin panel, per-task time tracking and audit logs. The Pro code lives in the same public repository under AGPL-3.0; according to the project, no existing feature has moved behind the paywall. As of October 2026, the product page lists Pro as a private beta with a waiting list.

What it cannot do belongs to the assessment: no portfolio management across projects, no budget tracking, no reporting at OpenProject's scope. Vikunja does not replace Jira but covers the part Jira was oversized for in many teams anyway.

Single sign-on as the dividing line

Across these comparisons a pattern emerges worth stating: the commercial boundary runs strikingly often at integration with central user management.

With OpenProject, single sign-on via SAML or OpenID Connect is an Enterprise feature from the Professional tier, whereas LDAP sign-in is included in the Community Edition too (only group synchronisation is Enterprise); with Plane, OIDC and SAML start at Pro. With Seafile, LDAP integration sits in the Professional Edition. That is no coincidence: it is the feature that turns a tool from a personal one into a company one, and therefore the point at which paying customers separate from the rest.

For the decision this yields a simple test question that comes before any feature comparison: do accounts have to be managed centrally? If so, integration with Keycloak or Authentik belongs in the cost calculation, and for single sign-on via OIDC or SAML it means a contract with two of the three candidates. Vikunja connects OpenID Connect and LDAP in the free edition, OpenProject at least LDAP in its Community Edition.

What a migration from Jira really costs

Moving the data is the easy part. Issues, comments and attachments can be migrated.

The effort sits in what Jira has accumulated over years:

Workflows. A grown Jira has status transitions with conditions, post-functions and validators. None of the alternatives reproduces that one for one, and trying to rebuild it is the most common reason migrations fail.

Automations. Rules that assign issues, set fields or trigger notifications have to be rethought.

Custom field types and permission schemes. Both are transferable, but rarely mechanically.

Reports and evaluations. Whatever someone exports monthly has to be producible in the new tool, or it comes back after three months.

The route that works in practice: do not rebuild the estate, but start with a team whose process is simple and migrate the rest afterwards. What is not missed does not have to be rebuilt.

Which one for which situation

Still unsure which tool fits? In the project and service tools selection you try all candidates as demo instances and receive a reasoned decision paper. From €3,900 excl. VAT, credited against the rollout.

How we approach this at WZ-IT

We start with the question of what is actually used in Jira today, not what is configured. In the environments we have seen, the difference between the two is regularly considerable, and it decides whether a lean tool suffices.

Then we settle the authentication question, because with two candidates it triggers cost and with one it does not. Only then does the feature comparison follow.

We take on operations on request, including updates, backup and a restore test. A migration counts as finished with us once a recovery has worked at least once.

Further guides

• Open-source licence changes - how boundaries shift over the years
• Nextcloud, Seafile, OpenCloud or ownCloud - the same boundary question for file storage
• Authentik versus Zitadel - identity providers for single sign-on
• Keycloak at WZ-IT - connecting central authentication
• Managed open source - operating open-source applications

Unclear which tool fits how you work? We look at what is actually used today, settle the authentication question and support the migration. Book a call

Sources

• OpenProject on GitHub
• OpenProject: editions and pricing
• OpenProject: LDAP connections
• Plane on GitHub
• Vikunja on GitHub
• Taiga: dormant rewrite kaleidos-ventures/taiga
• Taiga: maintained backend taigaio/taiga-back
• Taiga: maintained frontend taigaio/taiga-front
• Plane: OIDC SSO (Pro, Business)
• Plane: SAML SSO
• Vikunja: OpenID Connect
• Vikunja 2.4.0: Pro and a new API
• Vikunja Pro
• Focalboard: notice about the lack of maintenance