Open source alternatives to Jira and Trello: what self-hosting really costs

A small team usually starts searching for "jira open source" at one of two moments. Either the per-seat bill for a hosted tool has started to feel heavy, or someone has read that Atlassian is ending its self-managed products and wants a way to keep data on their own servers. Both are fair reasons to look. The catch is that the license fee is only one line of the cost, and for a team of five to twenty people it is often not the largest one.

This article lays out what the open source options actually are, what running one involves week to week, and how to tell whether self-hosting fits a team of your size.

Jira and Trello are not open source, and the self-managed door is closing

Neither Jira nor Trello has ever been open source. Jira was available as a self-managed product, first as Server and later as Data Center, but the source code was never published under an open license. Trello has only ever been a hosted service.

The self-managed route is also narrowing. Server licenses stopped receiving support in February 2024. In 2025 Atlassian announced that its Data Center products will reach end of life on March 28, 2029, with sales to new customers ending on March 30, 2026. The dates are published on the Atlassian Data Center end of life page. After the end-of-life date, affected licenses become read-only.

So a team that wants Jira-style tracking on its own hardware has a real decision to make. The options are:

• Move to Atlassian Cloud and accept hosted data.
• Move to a different hosted tool.
• Move to an open source tool and run it yourself.
• Move to an open source tool but pay its maker to host it.

The last option is easy to overlook, and it matters, because several open source project tools now offer a hosted version of the same code. Choosing an open license does not force you to become a server administrator.

The main open source candidates

The tools below are the ones most often considered as a replacement for Jira, Trello, or both. Each is published under a recognised open source license and has a public repository.

Tool	License	Closest to	Paid hosting or support from the maker
OpenProject	GPL v3	Jira plus Gantt planning	Yes, Enterprise plans on cloud or on-premises
Plane	AGPL v3	Jira and Linear style issue tracking	Yes, cloud and self-hosted paid plans
Taiga	MPL 2.0	Scrum and kanban for agile teams	Yes, a hosted service at tree.taiga.io
WeKan	MIT	Trello style kanban boards	Community project
Redmine	GPL v2	Classic issue tracker with plugins	Third-party hosts only

OpenProject

OpenProject covers work packages, Gantt charts, agile boards, time tracking and wikis. The Community edition is free with no minimum user count. Paid Enterprise plans start at €5.95 per user per month with a 25-user minimum, according to the OpenProject pricing page. It is one of the closest matches for teams that used Jira alongside a separate planning tool.

Plane

Plane is a newer issue tracker with cycles, modules and custom views. The code is AGPL v3, and it can be installed with Docker or Kubernetes. The hosted free plan allows up to 12 users, and the Pro plan is listed at $8 per user per month, or $6 billed annually, with the same pricing offered for self-hosted installs.

Taiga

Taiga targets agile teams, with backlogs, sprints and kanban boards. It is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and maintained by Kaleidos.

WeKan

WeKan is the most direct open source answer to Trello: boards, lists, cards, labels and swimlanes. It uses the permissive MIT license and receives frequent releases. The project states that only the newest version is supported for security fixes, which has practical consequences covered below.

Redmine

Redmine is a mature Ruby on Rails issue tracker under GPL v2. It is plain by modern standards but has a very large plugin ecosystem and runs on several databases.

One tool that still appears in older lists is Focalboard. Its standalone repository now carries a notice that it is not maintained, so it is not a safe foundation for a new team.

What self-hosting actually costs

The license is free. Everything around it is not. For a small team the real costs fall into four groups.

Infrastructure. A modest virtual server, a managed database or a disk you back up, a domain, and TLS certificates. For a small team this is usually a modest monthly amount, but it never drops to zero, and it grows if you add a staging copy to test upgrades.

Upgrades. Open source project tools release often. WeKan, for example, states that only the latest version is supported. Every release means reading the changelog, taking a backup, running migrations and checking that attachments and integrations still work. Skipping upgrades is how a self-hosted tool ends up running with known vulnerabilities.

Backups and restores. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a backup. Someone has to schedule database dumps, copy file attachments, store them off the server, and test a restore at least occasionally.

Sign-in and access. Hosted tools handle password resets, two-factor sign-in and single sign-on for you. On a self-hosted install, email delivery for invitations and resets must be configured, and SSO or LDAP support is sometimes reserved for a paid edition. Plane, for example, lists LDAP support under its Enterprise tier, so check the edition table before assuming a feature comes with the free install.

Uptime and monitoring. When a hosted tool goes down, its vendor is paged. When a self-hosted tool goes down on a Sunday night, nobody notices until Monday standup, when the whole team is waiting. A basic uptime check, disk space alerts and a certificate expiry reminder are small to set up, but they have to exist, and someone has to receive the alerts and act on them. Expired certificates and full disks are the two most common reasons small self-hosted installs stop working, and both are entirely preventable with a little routine.

Security exposure. A project tool holds client names, internal plans and often file attachments. Putting it on the public internet makes it a target like any other web application. That means keeping the operating system patched as well as the application, restricting database access, and reviewing who still has an account after people leave.

The largest item is almost always people's time. If the person who looks after the server is also the lead developer or the operations manager, every hour spent on an upgrade is an hour not spent on the work the tool is meant to track. For a team of five, even two hours a month of administration is a real share of one person's attention.

When self-hosting is the right call

Self-hosting is not a mistake. It is the right answer in some situations, and it helps to be specific about which ones.

Data must stay on your infrastructure

Some contracts, public sector rules and research agreements require that project data never leaves a specific network or country. If that is a hard requirement, a self-hosted open source tool is often the cleanest way to meet it.

Someone already runs servers

If the team already operates its own infrastructure, with monitoring, backups and an on-call habit, adding one more application is a small marginal cost. The skills and the routines are already paid for.

The team is large enough for seat prices to dominate

Per-seat pricing scales with headcount. Administration effort scales much more slowly. At fifty or a hundred users, the difference between a paid hosted plan and a self-hosted install can pay for real administration time. At five users it usually cannot.

You need to modify the tool

An open license lets you change the code. If the workflow truly cannot be expressed in any existing tool, owning the source is valuable. Most small teams, though, find that their needs fit a standard kanban board, a Gantt view and a calendar once they stop trying to copy an old setup exactly.

When a hosted tool is the better fit

For a team of roughly five to twenty people with no dedicated administrator, a hosted tool tends to cost less in total, even when the self-hosted software is free.

A few questions help make the call honestly:

• Who will apply the next security update, and on which day?
• When was the last restore test, and who did it?
• What happens to the server if that person leaves or goes on holiday?
• Does the team need sign-in features that are only in the paid edition anyway?

If those questions do not have clear answers, the free license is hiding a cost rather than removing one.

It also helps to separate the two reasons people search for open source in the first place. If the real concern is price, compare free tiers of hosted tools, since several give small teams full features at no cost. If the real concern is lock-in, look at export formats and import tools rather than hosting. A hosted tool that can take in a Trello export and give back your data in a usable format addresses lock-in without a server. The Trello import page shows what that looks like in practice, and the comparison with Trello lays out plan limits side by side.

A realistic migration path

Whichever direction you choose, moving off Jira or Trello goes more smoothly in stages.

Start with one active project

Pick one project that is currently running, not the whole archive. Move it, use the new tool for two weeks, and note what is missing. Most gaps turn out to be habits rather than features.

Decide what to leave behind

Closed tickets from three years ago rarely need to be migrated card by card. An export stored as a file is often enough for reference. Migrating only live work keeps the new tool clean and makes the move faster.

Rebuild views, not every field

Jira installs accumulate custom fields over time. Before recreating them, check which ones anyone actually filters or reports on. Usually a status, an owner, a due date and one or two labels cover most real use. Gantt and calendar views then fall out of the dates you already have.

Set a date to switch off the old tool

Running two systems in parallel for months splits attention and guarantees that some tasks live in the wrong place. Set a cut-over date, announce it, and make the old tool read-only after that date.

If you are also weighing hosted options, the full list of comparisons covers the tools most small teams consider alongside Jira.

What to change first

Before installing anything, write down whether the driver is cost, data location, or lock-in, and who would own a server if you ran one. If nobody can own it, try a hosted tool with a genuine free tier first; Pinateca is free for up to 5 people and 10 boards and includes kanban, Gantt and chat from the start.

Q1. Is there an open source version of Jira?

No. Jira has never been released under an open source license. It was available as self-managed Server and Data Center editions, but the source was not open. Open source tools such as OpenProject, Plane, Taiga and Redmine cover similar issue tracking needs.

Q2. What is the closest open source alternative to Trello?

WeKan is the most direct match, with boards, lists, cards, labels and swimlanes under the MIT license. Focalboard was once a common suggestion, but its standalone repository is now marked as not maintained.

Q3. Is self-hosting cheaper than paying for a hosted tool?

For large teams it can be, because seat prices grow with headcount while administration effort grows slowly. For a team of five to twenty people without a dedicated administrator, the time spent on upgrades, backups and sign-in setup usually outweighs the license savings.

Q4. What happens to Jira Data Center after 2029?

Atlassian has announced that affected Data Center products reach end of life on March 28, 2029. After that date the licenses become read-only, so teams need to move to Atlassian Cloud or another tool before then.

Q5. Can I get an open source tool without running my own server?

Yes. OpenProject and Plane sell hosted plans built on their open source code, and Taiga runs a hosted service as well. This keeps the option to self-host later while removing server work today.