If you searched for self-hosted project management software, you are probably asking one of two different questions. Either "which of these can I run on my own server for nothing", or *"which of these will still be affordable when the team is twenty-five people"*. The answers are not the same tool, and most comparisons of this category never separate the two.
Six projects come up repeatedly: OpenProject, Plane, Vikunja, Redmine, Taiga and Leantime. All six can be self-hosted. What they charge for, and what they need from your server, differ enormously -- and in two cases the published headline price is not what a small team actually pays.
Every figure below was read on each vendor's own pricing page on 15 September 2026, with both billing states recorded where a vendor shows two. Nothing here is taken from a directory, a review site or another comparison.
What they charge
| Project | Self-hosted | Paid tiers, as published | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vikunja | Free, forever -- "Self-host Vikunja for free, forever" | Cloud only: Personal 4€/month (40€ yearly, −20%) · Family 10€/month for up to 5 users (99€ yearly) · Organization 5€/month per user (50€ yearly). A Pro add-on for self-hosted instances is advertised as "Now in private beta" | 2026-09-15 |
| Redmine | Free -- GPL v2 | None. There is no price anywhere on the project's site; there is no commercial edition to buy | 2026-09-15 |
| Leantime | Free -- Community Edition, AGPLv3, "Core functionality included" | Pro $10 user/month billed monthly, $8 user/month billed annually ("get 2 months free"). There is no free cloud tier, by choice: "We've chosen to eliminate our limited free SaaS tier" | 2026-09-15 |
| Taiga | Quote only -- "On premise · Contact Sales" | Free tier "Gratis" · Basic 20€ per month (200€ when billed annually) · Premium 60€ per month (600€ when billed annually). Both paid tiers say "Unlimited number of users" -- these are metered on storage, not seats. Private Cloud is "Contact sales" | 2026-09-15 |
| Plane | Community edition, free | Free $0 · Pro $8 per seat/month monthly, $6 annually · Business $15 monthly, $13 annually · Enterprise Grid "Quote on request" | 2026-09-15 |
| OpenProject | Community edition, Free, "No minimum users" | Basic €5.95 per user/month · Professional €10.95 · Premium €15.95 · Corporate "On request". ⚠️ Minimums apply -- see below | 2026-09-15 |
The two headline prices that are not the price
OpenProject's €5.95 comes with a 25-user minimum. The page states it beside the tier: *"25 minimum users"* on Basic and Professional, "100 minimum users" on Premium. So the smallest Basic subscription is 25 × €5.95 = €148.75 a month, Professional starts at €273.75, and Premium at 100 × €15.95 = €1,595.00. For a team of six wanting one Enterprise feature, the relevant number is €148.75, not €5.95. The Community edition, by contrast, carries "No minimum users" -- so the honest read is that OpenProject is free at any size, or expensive from twenty-five up, with nothing in between.
Taiga's paid cloud tiers do not meter seats at all. Basic at 20€ a month says *"Unlimited number of users"*; the limit is storage. A twenty-five-person team on Taiga Basic pays 20€ a month where the same team on OpenProject Basic pays €148.75. That is not a like-for-like feature comparison -- but if your constraint is headcount rather than features, it is the most important line on this page.
OpenProject also publishes a period toggle most comparisons miss: 1 year, **2 years (5 months free), 3 years (8 months free), 4 years (11 months free)** and now 5 years (15 months free) (re-read 11 October 2026), with *"1 month (+€1.00 per user)"* -- and the page notes that the monthly option "is available only for Cloud Basic". A self-hosted Enterprise license is therefore an annual commitment or longer.
What they need from your server
This is where the category divides much more sharply than price does.
| Project | Stack, from the project's own install docs | Practical floor |
|---|---|---|
| Leantime | PHP 8.2+, MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+, Apache or Nginx | Ordinary shared hosting |
| Vikunja | Single Go binary; SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL; packages for Debian/Ubuntu, RPM, Arch, Alpine, FreeBSD, plus Docker and Kubernetes | A small VPS, or shared hosting that allows a binary |
| Redmine | Ruby on Rails; MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite or SQL Server. Sidekiq with Redis is the recommended adapter for background jobs in production | A VPS |
| Taiga | Docker Compose (taiga-docker) | A VPS with Docker |
| Plane | Docker, Compose, AIO, Swarm, Kubernetes or Podman; external PostgreSQL, Redis and object storage (S3, MinIO or GCS) for production | A VPS with Docker, plus three services to keep alive |
| OpenProject | Packages, Docker Compose, all-in-one container or Kubernetes Helm; PostgreSQL | Its docs give a minimum of Quad Core CPU (≥ 2 GHz), 4096 MB memory, 20 GB free disk |
If you are on shared hosting, the list is one item long. Leantime is the only one of the six that runs on PHP and MySQL, which is what a £4-a-month cPanel account gives you. Vikunja comes closest after it, because a single binary with SQLite has no services to orchestrate.
If you have a VPS, everything on the list is reachable. If your instinct is "I will just put it in Docker", note that Plane's production guidance expects Postgres, Redis and an object store as external services -- that is three more things that can be down at 09:00 on a Monday.
Honest verdicts, by the shape of the team
Two to five people who want it free and want it today. Vikunja. Free to self-host with no asterisk, SQLite means no database server to run, and the packaging list is the longest of the six. The caveat to know before you commit: the self-hosted Pro add-on is in private beta, so if your plan depends on those features arriving, that is a plan built on an unreleased product.
A team already running PHP and MySQL. Leantime, and it is not a close call -- it is the only one of the six that installs on the hosting you already pay for. Its Community Edition is AGPLv3 with "Core functionality included". Be clear-eyed about the trade: Leantime has **no free cloud tier at all**, so if you later decide you would rather not run it, the exit is $10 per user per month.
A team that needs the paperwork -- Gantt, baselines, formal methods. OpenProject, on the Community edition, for as long as Community does what you need. The moment you need one Enterprise feature, the price is €148.75 a month and not €5.95, so treat that as the real decision point and make it deliberately.
A team that will grow past twenty-five and cares more about headcount than features.
Taiga's cloud, at 20€ a month for "Unlimited number of users". And read this honestly: Taiga's self-hosted path is the least transparent of the six, because on-premise is "Contact Sales" -- you cannot price it from the page, which for some buyers is itself the answer.
A software team that thinks in issues and sprints. Plane, and budget the ops. $6 per seat per month annually is competitive, but the self-hosted production footprint is the largest here.
An organization that will still be running this in 2036. Redmine. It is twenty years old, GPL v2, has no commercial edition to be repriced, and releases on a steady cadence (6.0.11 shipped 2026-08-26). It will look dated next to Plane. It will also still be there, and nobody can change its license terms on you.
What none of this tells you
Every price above is a list price read on one day. Three of the six will quote you instead of selling from the page -- Taiga's on-premise and Private Cloud, OpenProject's Corporate, Plane's Enterprise Grid -- and a quote is not a price until it is in front of you. We record what the page publishes; we do not guess at what a salesperson would say.
Nothing here is a judgment on which tool manages projects better. That depends on how your team works, and no comparison table settles it.
Ownware does not sell a project management app
We should say this plainly, because you may have arrived here from a search we do not answer.
Ownware has no project management product. No tasks, no boards, no Gantt, no milestones, no sprints. If that is what you need, one of the six above is your answer and not us.
Two of our products sit beside the category without being in it, and it is worth knowing which job each actually does:
- Clockora -- a self-hosted staff timesheet: *"hours by project, exact totals, approvals", and its page says "No invoicing" in the same breath. It answers how much time went into which project*. It does not hold the work itself -- there is nothing in it to assign, no board, no due date on a task. Teams pair it with a PM tool rather than instead of one.
- Approva -- amount-based purchase approval chains. Worth being precise, because the word "approvals" is doing two jobs in this category: Approva approves spending, by amount, through a chain of approvers. It does not approve project work or sign off deliverables.
Try the Clockora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Both are one-time licenses for software you run on your own server, which is the only thing they have in common with the six above. If what you want is the work itself tracked, buy one of the six -- most of them cost nothing -- and come back to us for the hours and the purchase orders if you ever need them.