Plane is free for twelve people, or for everyone if you run it

Plane scores 74, joint highest in project management with OpenProject, and its freedom pillar at 82 is the strongest number any tool here posts. That reflects the combination the score is built to reward: a real free hosted tier plus an OSI-approved license and a public repository, so nothing anyone else controls can be switched off underneath you.

Where it does not top the table is feature depth, at 76 against OpenProject's 86. OpenProject gives away Gantt charts with dependencies, time tracking and cost tracking, and Plane charges for time tracking even on hardware you own. Read the two scores as a fork rather than a ranking: Plane is the better free experience for a software team that wants to start this afternoon, OpenProject is the deeper free feature set for anyone willing to run a server properly.

On Plane Cloud the free ceiling is people: 12 members per workspace (as of July 2026), with projects, work items, cycles, modules, pages, five layouts and 500 AI credits per seat included. Twelve is the second-highest hosted allowance in this category behind ClickUp's uncapped plan, so most teams reach it as a hiring milestone rather than a monthly frustration.

Self-hosting removes that cap and adds a different bill:

• You run it. Plan on Docker familiarity and an afternoon for the initial setup, plus updates and database backups nobody else will take.
• A server you pay for, which is small money but not zero.
• Paid features stay paid. This is the part people miss. Time tracking, templates, recurring work items, dashboards and the workspace wiki sit behind Pro at $6 per seat even when the software is running on your own hardware.

Two more honest notes. The integration catalogue is thinner than Jira's marketplace, which matters if your workflow depends on a specific tool talking to your tracker. And Plane is young, founded in 2022, so releases move fast and rough edges show up more often than they do on a twenty-year-old product.

Pro at $6 per seat per month billed annually is the cheapest first paid step of any tool in this category, and it is priced the same whether Plane hosts you or you host yourself. What it buys is the working layer around the tracker: time tracking, templates, dashboards and the workspace wiki. Business at $13 adds project templates, recurring work items and intake forms.

The honest reading of that ladder is that self-hosting saves you the seat licence, not the feature licence. If your reason for installing Plane is that a 13-person team should not cost money, you are right and the Community Edition solves it. If your reason is that time tracking should not cost money, self-hosting does not help, and OpenProject does.

The feature people upgrade for, judging by what sits at the first rung, is time tracking. It is the single most common paid-only feature across this whole category, free on exactly one tool we cover.

Yes. Our score of 74 would normally point at a with-limits answer, and we are departing from it because neither free route counts down toward a wall: the cloud plan caps team size at 12 and meters nothing, and the self-hosted build caps nothing at all. A ceiling you only meet by hiring your thirteenth colleague is a different animal from a 250-issue allowance.

Who genuinely pays nothing: a product team of eight running cycles and modules on Plane Cloud, indefinitely, with no card on file. A larger engineering org with someone comfortable running Docker, on the Community Edition, also indefinitely. Who ends up paying: anyone who wants time tracking or recurring work items, because those are $6 a seat on both routes, and any cloud team that grows past twelve.

For the alternatives if neither route fits, free Plane alternatives is the ranked list, and Jira's free plan is the hosted comparison worth making, since it covers 10 users with a deeper agile toolkit and no self-hosting option. The full category sits at best free project management tools.