OpenProject

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 860 words

OpenProject wants 2 GB of RAM as a floor and is only comfortable at 4, which makes it the heaviest tool in the project management category by a wide margin and also the most complete: Gantt charts, work packages with real hierarchy, agile boards, time and cost tracking, a wiki, meeting minutes, LDAP, and a permission model built for organisations. If your team runs plans with deadlines, budgets and someone who asks for a roadmap, nothing else self-hosted comes close. If you want a light Kanban board for 3 people, this is the wrong download and you will resent the memory.

The all-in-one image is the sane path

OpenProject ships a single container that bundles the Rails app, its background workers and a PostgreSQL server, and that is the right choice for a first install. Pin to a major version tag rather than latest, mount two volumes, and set a handful of environment variables:

services:
  openproject:
    image: openproject/openproject:16
    environment:
      OPENPROJECT_HOST__NAME: projects.example.com
      OPENPROJECT_HTTPS: "true"
      OPENPROJECT_SECRET__KEY__BASE: change-me-to-64-random-characters
    volumes:
      - ./pgdata:/var/openproject/pgdata
      - ./assets:/var/openproject/assets
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:8080:80"
    restart: unless-stopped

Put a reverse proxy in front for TLS, log in as admin with password admin, and change it immediately; the first-run wizard forces you to. Substitute whatever the current major tag is when you read this. The double underscore in variable names is the convention for a dot in the setting name, so OPENPROJECT_HOST__NAME sets host_name; it trips people up exactly once. A separate Postgres via DATABASE_URL is supported and the better choice once you already run one.

Ubuntu and Debian packages are the other legitimate route

For teams that prefer no Docker, the project maintains packages for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL and SUSE with an interactive openproject configure step that sets up Postgres, the web server and TLS. Bare-metal is heavier to upgrade across major versions, and the Rails asset compilation on a 2-core box takes a while, but it has been the supported production path for a decade and it works. Pick one route and stay on it; migrating between them is a database dump and a support-forum afternoon.

What Enterprise gates and what it does not

OpenProject is GPL-3.0 and the community edition is the real product, but the company sells an Enterprise add-on with features enabled by a licence token, and the line moves. At last check, free covers work packages, Gantt, basic boards, time tracking, the wiki, LDAP authentication and the API. Enterprise covers the advanced action boards (boards driven by status, assignee or version), custom theming and logo, some team planner views, and parts of the SSO and directory-sync story. The one that catches most self-hosters is boards: the basic board is free, the boards that automatically move cards by field value are not. Check the current feature comparison on openproject.org before promising your team a workflow, and pair it with Authentik over LDAP if you need central login without paying.

Upgrades and backups on a Rails monolith

Major upgrades run database migrations that can take minutes on a large instance, so do them with a backup taken first. With the all-in-one image that means the pgdata and assets volumes; with a separate database, a pg_dump plus the assets directory. Restore into a scratch container once before you trust it. Minor versions arrive roughly monthly and are safe to apply; jumping several majors at once is where things go wrong, so read the upgrade notes and step through them. Memory grows with attachments and users; a 20-person team with a year of history is comfortable at 4 GB and cramped at 2.

Who should pick Plane, Redmine or Leantime instead

Plane is the tool most developers actually want and uses a fraction of the memory; it does not do Gantt-driven planning or cost tracking to the same depth. Redmine is OpenProject's ancestor and still fine for issue tracking on tiny hardware. OpenProject is for the organisation that has a project office, or wishes it did.

What I'd do

If the team is under 10 people and the work is software, install Plane and keep 3 GB of RAM for something else. If the team plans in phases with dates and money, run OpenProject's all-in-one image pinned to a major tag on a box with 4 GB free, behind a reverse proxy, LDAP or OIDC for login, nightly volume backups with one tested restore. Try the free edition for a quarter before deciding whether the Enterprise boards are worth it; for most teams they are not, and the Jira alternatives list has lighter options if the answer turns out to be neither.