I’ve seen a lot of project management software. The truth is that there are many free project management software programs available, but the question is, which, if any, are worth using? There are too many features and too many poorly designed websites to sort through out there. I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say finding the perfect solution can be daunting, even for the most experienced project managers. If this sounds familiar, then let me take some of that burden away from you by providing you with a list of top ten open source project management systems.
Focalboard
Are you searching for an alternative to Notion, Asana, and Trello?
Well, you can go for Focalboard, which is an open-source and self-hosted project management software. It helps to organize, manage, track, and define work across your teams by using the Kanban board view. It has two editions:
- Focalboard Personal Desktop: It is a desktop app for personal and to-do projects. It is a single-tenant that runs on a local server to get optimal performance and speed.
- Focalboard Personal Server: It is a self-hosted server to help collaborate better with your team.
Click over “add new boards” to pick project tasks from the different templates.
Change the created date, priority, sort settings, filter settings, and group by settings according to your preference. You can also drag cards from one column to another to change the group property. In addition, edit the cards whenever you want to know the set of properties and content and the list of comments.
Table views help you view the cards in a single place to hover over the title to open one. Furthermore, every board has card templates and board templates to customize each board as per your team. Get a Personal Desktop on your Mac and Windows or Personal Server on Ubuntu.
Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan is an ideal project management tool for small to larger groups. The software offers the best possible visual overview of each of your projects thereby offering the best possible workflow management. Managing a huge team gets easier with Toggl Plan project management system.
(Image Source: Toggl Plan)
Key Highlights:
- One of the visually attractive features of Toggl Plan is the facility to add team timelines easily. Just add a member, segment them based on the work and add a timeline. Share timelines with the team easily.
- Click, drag and assign tasks easily
- Make long-term plans
- Easy to edit and add more tasks
- Easy to tick items and keep track of the status
- Flexible planning
- Communicate the progress
- Fits any fast-paced workflow
- Does not demand a lot of input
- Offers the best visual understanding of your project plans, deadlines and progress
- Easy to share
Managing your team becomes much simple and easy with Toggl Plan project management software. The software is widely used by start-ups, mid-sized tech companies, construction companies, creative team, project managers of the design studios and by ad agencies that are in need of a simple and easy-to-use tool that would offer the flexibility to handle any number of projects effortlessly.
The software offers a 14-day free trial with any subscription.
ERPNext
Upgrade your daily working style through an open-source project management software ERPNext. It allows you to organize your task, schedule, plan, and analyze the projects by collaborating with your team to accelerate the work.
ERPNext can keep track of your project deadlines with a clear view of the plan. You can manage everything from a single workspace and simplify the projects by discovering a task-driven approach.
ERPNext offers easy collaboration by allowing you to split the project into bite-sized tasks and assign them to your teammates. You will also get access to the progress of your project and its efficiency via priorities and clear scope, milestones, and estimated timelines.
Moreover, ERPNext lets you share and upload multimedia files like images, documents, and videos. Achieve smooth communication with everyone with the help of auto-replies to incoming emails.
Get current and accurate insights anytime you need to stay on top of expenses and budgets, plan better for every project and see how the budget has been spent. It also allows you to build software for open-source projects.
TaskJuggler
Taskjuggler is a free and open source project management software system capable of handling professional projects. The tool is designed to help you to be productive easily and efficiently and effortlessly.
(Image Source: TaskJuggler)
Key Highlights:
- Easily installable on all leading operating systems
- The system lets you plan, collaborate, achieve goals and succeed systematically
- Support for Multiple time-zones
- Error-free handling of cost and cost calculation
- Allows users to manage tasks and resources of the project
- Intuitive editor to edit your task
- Powerful to-do list management
- Detailed reference manual
- Simple installation
- Runs on several operating systems
- Full integration with Vim text editor
When it comes to task management, it is quite natural to lose track of the complex tasks at some point or the other during the entire project phase. A well-designed software tool can help you stick to your task and meet the timeline without any friction. Written in Ruby, TaskJuggler is easy to install free and open source project management system.
The TaskJuggler project management tool includes a set of libraries and command line tools. The software is capable of planning your individual tasks automatically and resolves conflicting situations too. You can define the timeline, and add any breaks in the Gantt diagram. It is easy to assign resources and budget them too.
TaskJuggler is a very powerful tool with a complete set of time, resource, and cost management features with customized reporting functions. You can visualize your project status based on time, cost, and resources. In short, the tool lets you describe your project and its component task easily and manage them on the scheduled time.
Leantime
As the name suggests, Leantime offers “lean” project management that innovators and startups would love. It is designed to work flawlessly from project ideation to final delivery. This open-source tool is written in PHP and JavaScript and uses the MySQL database.
Its feature list includes kanban boards for task management, calendar and table views, Gantt charts for milestone management, and Lean Canvas for research boards. In addition, it offers timesheet management, project dashboards, retrospectives, reports, two-factor authentication, and multiple user roles.
You can integrate Leantime with Slack, Zulip, and Mattermost; and export tasks, milestones, and timesheets to CSV. It uses a local file system or AWS S3 for file storage, and this tool is available in English, Russian, Spanish, and Dutch.
ProjectLibre
ProjectLibre is an open source project management software system widely accepted as the real alternative to Microsoft Project. The software was mentioned recently by CIO magazine as, “The software is scalable from small business all the way up to Fortune 500 companies.” Recently, the software hit a major milestone by crossing 1,15,000 project managers around the world, surpassing 4,000,000 downloads in over 200 countries.
(Image Source: ProjectLibre)
Key Highlights:
- Compatible with Microsoft Project
- Import/Export capabilities
- Gantt charts
- Network diagrams
- Work breakdown structure charts
- Resource breakdown structure charts
- Value costing
- Resource histograms
- Facility to set dependencies
- Easily create a project baseline, define work and allot resources
- Powerful reporting functionality
Having an enormous global reach, ProjectLibre is the preferred open source project management system. Written in Java language, the software is ideal for small to a big team and for simple to complex project management. ProjectLibre supports multiple languages. It has been translated into 21 languages.
Benchmark your performance, quickly identify your efforts and issues, scale quickly, and employ a data-driven systemic approach to every project. Use ProjectLibre.
Targetprocess
Targetprocess is one of the most sought-after project management systems that allows its users to visually manage multiple and complex projects and sub-tasks. This systematic approach adapts well to your management approach allowing you to reduce clutter and manage issues easily.
(Image Source: Targetprocess)
Key Highlights:
- Quickly plan, track and identify issues
- Work using your custom process
- Have all your work in one place
- Communicate and collaborate with the team member right within the software
- Create custom views
- Customized graphical reports
- Forecasts your performance
- Clutterless visibility
OpenProject
OpenProject is the most popular open source project management software that comes with some of the best, and powerful project collaboration capabilities. The OpenProject Community software offers the power-packed basic features as free forever. It can support the team throughout the project lifecycle. The software is ideal for small and average-sized businesses.
(Image Source: OpenProject)
Features that come free with OpenProject Community include:
- Task management
- Time tracking
- Team collaboration
- Project planning
- Gantt charts
- Budgeting and reporting
- Agile project management
In addition to the above capabilities, the software allows its users to take backlogs, use task boards, bug tracking and road mapping.
Key Highlights:
- Create and visualize your project from one single dashboard
- Communicate the roadmap effectively with your team member in real-time
- Effortlessly define the project objectives, work and timeline.
- Create a detailed plan of each of your project and structure them systematically
- Easily organize and assign the task
- Embed work packages easily
- Structure workflow patterns intelligently with custom actions
- Data is completely protected
- Majority of the features are fully accessible
- Quick issue tracking facility
- Easy time tracking
- Customize reports for accurate insight into project performance
- Easy to navigate
In short, the free version of OpenProject project management system is capable of meeting the most basic organizational needs for managing tasks, time, budget and collaborating across the team. If your team requires advanced project management features, you can opt for the fully featured paid version of the software.
Microsoft Project, Wrike, Asana, Zoho Projects, FunctionFox are also the best project management software solutions that you can consider.
Conclusion
Studies confirm that nearly 9.9% of every dollar is wasted owing to poor project performance. Also, there is an indication that more than 50% of organizations are struggling to bridge the strategy-implementation gap.
Project management software helps you accelerate your workflow, promote better communication, save time and money. I hope the above discussed open-source and free project management tools help you achieve these benefits to complete each project successfully.