OpenProject gives away Gantt charts and asks for a server in return

OpenProject scores 74, joint highest in this category with Plane, and its feature depth pillar at 86 is the standout number on the whole page. Against the other free tiers on this site, nothing else gives away Gantt charts with dependencies, work packages, agile boards, time tracking, cost tracking, meetings and wikis with none of it metered. ClickUp charges $7 per user for Gantt and time tracking; Asana charges $10.99 for timeline.

What keeps the total at 74 rather than higher is generosity at 72, and that is entirely about the missing free cloud tier. A tool that requires a server before it gives you anything cannot score at the top of a pillar measuring what you get for nothing. Freedom at 80 pulls the other way: GPL-3.0, a public repository, no seat counting, and project data on hardware you control is the strongest ownership position of any actively maintained tool in this category.

The first limitation is structural: there is nothing to sign up for. Free means the self-hosted Community Edition, and the hosted product offers a 14-day trial before paid plans that start at 5.95 euros per user per month with a 25-user minimum (as of July 2026). If nobody on your team wants to own a server, nothing here is free and this is the wrong page.

For everyone else, the costs are operational rather than financial, and per our editorial rule they get stated plainly:

• Installation and upgrades are your job. Budget admin time, not just a machine.
• Backups are your job too. Nobody else is taking a copy of your project database.
• Uptime is your job. When a Gantt chart is unreachable on a Monday morning, you are the support desk.

Inside the software the restrictions are narrow. Advanced boards and custom themes are reserved for Enterprise, and that is close to the whole list. The honest product criticism is about age rather than tiers: the interface is functional and dated next to Linear or Plane, and teams used to modern trackers usually notice within an hour.

The paid ladder here is not really an upgrade path from the free plan, it is a different purchase. Enterprise cloud or on-premises starts at 5.95 euros per user per month, and the 25-user minimum is the number to read twice. That is roughly 149 euros a month before anyone discusses features, which prices out exactly the small teams who would otherwise be the natural first customers.

Professional at 10.95 euros per user adds priority support and onboarding, with the same 25-user floor.

What you are buying at either tier is support, hosting and a handful of enterprise add-ons, not capability. The Community Edition already has the work packages, the Gantt charts, the time tracking and the boards. That makes OpenProject unusual in this category and worth saying clearly: the paid plans sell you somebody else's operations team, not features held hostage. If your organisation already runs its own applications, the free route is not a compromised version of the paid one.

Yes, within limits, and the limit is a skill rather than a quota. Nothing is metered, nothing expires, and no feature people actually use for classic project planning is held back. What stands between you and a free OpenProject is a machine, Docker and somebody willing to apply updates, which is a genuine barrier and not one we are going to wave away.

Who pays nothing here: a public-sector team, an agency or a company with any existing IT capability, at any size, forever. A 40-person organisation that would owe Asana over $5,000 a year at Starter prices runs OpenProject for the cost of a VPS. Who cannot: a two-person consultancy with no technical help, and anyone who needs a hosted account today, because the trial is 14 days and the smallest paid plan bills for 25 users.

If self-hosting is off the table, free OpenProject alternatives lists the hosted tools worth considering, and Plane's free plan is the open source option with a real free cloud tier attached. The full ranking is at best free project management tools.