SHSelfHostIndex

Project Management & Tasks

Plan work and track tasks with self-hosted alternatives to Trello, Asana, and Jira.

96 self-hosted apps · 183 comparisons

All project management & tasks apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 414 words

The most common failure in self-hosted project management is deploying a Jira replacement when what you needed was a corkboard. The apps in this category span an order of magnitude in complexity, from Kanboard's minimalist PHP boards in 256 MB to OpenProject's gantt-charts-and-cost-tracking suite at 2 GB and Hard difficulty, and the extra features are not free: every view, role, and workflow you install is one more thing your team has to agree to use.

How to choose by ceremony weight

Start with how much process you actually run. If work is "cards move left to right", you want a board: Planka or Kanboard. If you run sprints, cycles, backlogs, and roadmaps, you want an issue tracker: Plane, which has become the standard self-hosted answer to Jira and Linear with 58,284 stars and a genuinely modern UI. If you answer to clients or management with timelines, budgets, and milestone reports, you want classic project management: OpenProject, with gantt charts, time and cost tracking, and the strongest permission model here. Second axis: footprint and organizational plumbing. Planka runs in 256 MB; Plane and OpenProject both want 2 GB and more operational care, and if you need LDAP for company logins, OpenProject and Wekan carry it natively.

Where to start

Planka for small teams leaving Trello: real-time boards, labels, due dates, and an interface your least technical teammate already understands, on Postgres in one compose file. Plane for software and product teams who think in issues and cycles rather than cards; it is resource-heavy and some corners are still maturing (first release was 2023), but it is the one tool here a team coming from Linear will not treat as a downgrade. OpenProject for organizations with formal reporting needs, accepting that it is the heaviest install and gates some features behind a paid tier.

Kanboard deserves a word as the contrarian pick: a 2014-vintage codebase, a dated look, and it will still be running unchanged in five years on hardware you forgot about. For a solo operator tracking their own projects, that stability is worth more than any roadmap view.

The first-timer default is Planka. It deploys in an afternoon, needs almost nothing from you afterwards, and teaches you what your team actually uses before you commit to anything bigger. Upgrade to Plane when you catch yourself faking sprints with board columns, and not before.

Curated picks

Easiest Project Management & Tasks to self-hostBest API Project Management & TasksBest Beginner-Friendly Project Management & TasksBest Cross-Platform Project Management & TasksBest Docker Project Management & TasksBest Free Project Management & TasksBest LDAP Project Management & TasksBest Lightweight Project Management & TasksBest Multi-User Project Management & TasksBest No-Database Project Management & TasksBest Offline-First Project Management & TasksBest Plugins Project Management & TasksBest PostgreSQL Project Management & TasksBest Real-Time Project Management & TasksBest Single-User Project Management & TasksBest SQLite Project Management & Tasks

Project Management & Tasks comparisons

183 head-to-head comparisons in this category.

See all comparisons →