ZenTao

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 842 words

ZenTao is the most complete free Jira replacement that most English-speaking self-hosters have never heard of, and the reason is geography rather than quality. It comes from Qingdao, has shipped continuously since 2009, and its 1,685 GitHub stars badly undercount a user base that is mostly Chinese engineering teams. What you get in the open-source edition is a full Scrum tool: products with backlogs of stories, projects with sprints and tasks, a test module with cases and bug reports, documents, and a built-in chat. What you have to accept is that ZenTao has opinions about how software gets built, and it will not bend.

Product, project, test: the model you must accept

Jira lets you configure a project into any shape. ZenTao gives you one shape. Product managers own products and write stories. Projects, made of sprints, draw stories from products and break them into tasks for developers. Testers write cases against stories and file bugs against builds. Every screen is one of those three roles looking at that pipeline, and the terminology is fixed. If your team already works roughly that way, ZenTao feels like it was built for you, because it was. If you run a kanban with three columns and want nothing more, the model is dead weight and you will spend the first week hiding modules.

The upside of a fixed model is reporting that works without setup. Burndown charts, story completion by product, bug density by module and test coverage by build are all there on day one, which is the part of Jira that costs an admin a month of configuration.

Open source versus Biz and Max: what is free

The open-source edition, licensed AGPL-3.0, covers the core product-project-test pipeline, documents, kanban boards, the built-in chat and the API with LDAP login. At last check the paid Biz and Max editions add workflow customisation, deeper reporting, and DevOps and enterprise features on top. The line has moved over the years and the vendor's page is the only reliable source for where it sits today. For a team of 5 to 30 building software, the free edition is sufficient, which is not something you can say about the free tiers of most hosted project tools.

Install: one container, one MySQL, one port

The vendor publishes an easysoft/zentao image that bundles PHP and Apache and listens on port 80, and it expects a MySQL database, which you can run alongside or point at an existing server. Give it the 1 GB it asks for and back up the database on a schedule, because everything lives there. Upgrades between versions run a migration on first load, so take a dump before each pull. Put it behind a reverse proxy with TLS, hook up LDAP if you have it, and disable open registration in the admin settings; the default installation has the admin account and nothing else, which is correct.

Deployment is Medium difficulty mostly because the install wizard and the documentation assume some familiarity with the model described above, not because the software itself is hard to run.

The interface is dense and the translation is uneven

The English interface is complete, but ZenTao is a Chinese-first product and it shows: screens are packed with fields, menus are deep, and some labels read like direct translations. Nothing is broken; a lot is unfamiliar. Budget a half day for whoever will administer it to learn where things are, and expect the occasional support answer to point at a Chinese forum thread. Community help in English is thin. If your team is going to resent that, pick something else; if they value function over polish, they will stop noticing within a fortnight.

OpenProject, Redmine and Taiga: when the western tools fit better

OpenProject is the bigger project in this space, with Gantt charts, time tracking and a friendlier interface, and it is the safer pick for teams that want traditional project management alongside agile boards. Redmine is the lightweight issue tracker with 15 years of plugins if you mainly want tickets and a wiki. Taiga is the prettiest Scrum and kanban tool if you do not need a test module. ZenTao's specific edge over all three is the integrated QA workflow: test cases, test runs and bugs linked to stories and builds, which none of them do natively. The rest of the field is in the project management category.

What I'd do

A software team that already runs Scrum with a QA function, tired of paying for Jira: ZenTao open source in the container, MySQL alongside, nightly dumps, LDAP for login, a week of trial with two real sprints before committing. Any team that mainly wants tickets, a wiki and boards, or that will judge a tool by its interface: OpenProject. ZenTao is the right answer for a narrower group than its feature list suggests, and for that group it is the best free thing available.