1d ago

Self Hosted OpenSource Projectmanagement Tool

I would like to self host an OpenSource projectmanagement tool for our non profit association.

It shoud do the regular project management stuff like task, kanban board, meeting notes, contact management, etc. and it should also have a document repository.

I briefely checked

Makeplane: no one click docker container (yeah, I'm a little bit lazy 🙃)
Youtrack: not OpenSource
OpenProject: no solution for documents

Do you have any further recommendations?

21 comments

Seems like an obvious suggestion, but Nextcloud can do that quite well.
- Nextcloud might be overkill, but it does have all those features and more. It's literally made for organizations to keep track of contacts, documents, tasks, kanban like boards, notes and lots of other stuff.
- I kind of like the idea of havin a Nextcloud instance. Thanks for the suggestion.

We use OpenProject at my job and its pretty good. You can use Nextcloud as a document repository and integrate it with OpenProject.
- This is what we will use to replace Microsoft tools.

Did you look through the github project management list?
While it doesn't meet any of your requirements, I firmly believe the best project management software is Taskjuggler. You have to be able to write software to use it, because it's a language for defining tasks and projects, and it can get quite involved. But it is an excellent educational experience that exposes just how much people futz with Gantt charts to get what they want to see, vs the reality. It is also unparalleled in exposing resource use and needs.
At it's most complete, here's a taste of what it looks like to use it:
You declare all your resources and their capabilities (John is junior and is 60% as efficient as Mary). You define a project, broken down into tasks at various and increasing levels of detail, including priorities and estimated effort, and assign teams and resources. When it's all defined, you compile a Gantt chart and it will show you exactly how long everything will take: when things will start and end; and that you can't deliver X and Y at the same time because while you have enough developers, the QA servers can't be used for both at the same time.
It's incredibly tedious and frustrating to use, but after a while when you get the resource definitions really dialed in, I know of no other tool that predicts reality with such accuracy. It's definitely ideal for for the waterfall minded, although it can be used with agile if you keep it to the release scope; you can record both expectations and reality as time passes.
It's not a lightweight process, and I haven't met a project manager yet who could or would use it; it's quite intensive. You do have to define a complete and comprehensive picture of everything impacting your project, and honestly i think that's most of the value as most teams just wing a bunch of stuff - which is why estimations are so frequently wrong. It does tend to eliminate surprises, like the fact that half your dev team just happen to be planning vacations at the same time in the middle of the release cycle, or Management is having a big two-day team building event. If you can see it in a calendar, you put it in the plan and assign the people it affects, and the software calculates the overall delivery impact.
It's a glorious, powerful, terrifying and underused tool, and satisfies none of your declared requirements.
- Thank you for the github list. I have not seen that.
  Regarding Taskjuggler: I thin I understand the advantages. However, it seems a little bit over the top for planning some work in our voluntary non profit association.
  
  It's over there top for everyone. I wish it were easier to use, but then it wouldn't be as effective.
  As I said, much of its value probably comes from the rigor it makes you exercise to really get its value. It costs a lot of effort, though, and you're on the right path with kanban: use the most lean process that works.

I personally use Forgejo.
It has kanban boards, tasks, wiki and obviously git repos where you can store documents, not sure how convenient it is for this though

Maybe Kanboard? Or Taiga?
- My vote goes to Kanboard. Awesome service by the people behind Miniflux.

OpenProject has some nice solution for documents: https://www.openproject.org/docs/user-guide/documents/ and https://www.openproject.org/docs/user-guide/file-management/ . Aren't these enough for you?
Also: OpenProject includes a good wiki for a project. It's in many cases a better alternative to a document storage, since there is no "download - edit - upload" workflow, so there are no race conditions. (i.e. two people download a doc, edit the doc independently and whoever uploads last "wins" while deleting the previous uploaders changes.)

Vikunja is opensource and can be selfhosted

I had to use https://leantime.io/all-about-open-source-project-management/ and ended up not hating it. I think it checks all your boxes

Logseq to some extent, but it's set up to be a journal/ meeting notes where you tag pages, add documents, etc. it would be up to how you've tagged things. Does have a graph view of your pages and whiteboard feature.
Personally it wasn't exactly what i wanted out of a PKM but it is really powerful. It's intended to handle taking notes efficiently from meetings and then somewhat self organizing the notes as long as you tag stuff.

While I prefer a bare docker compose, plane does basically have a one-click script to run it.
- I've seen that. But then I need to spin up a VM. Nextcloud provides this AIO docker container...
  
  I don't think the requirements are any different. setup.sh just sets an ENV variable or two and then calls docker compose to get it running.
  https://developers.plane.so/self-hosting/methods/docker-compose#install-community-edition

Please consider gitlab . Its on-prem fulfils most of your requirements, and when installed by omnibus RPM it kinda does it all for you. It's going to be maybe 5 commands on top of a bare machine setup.
And please consider spaces and hyphens. Gluingwords togetherlike thatcan make it hard to read.

Gitlab Id say. It even works as a OAuth server. The docker container is very easy to setup.

There are tons of it, it really depends on how much time are you willing to invest to set it up vs how many features you want. Taiga, kanboard and leantimes are all viable alternatives. My best bet would be redmine, with a couple of plugins it can provide everything you need and more. I don't think there is a single docker container but there are a couple of prebuild VMs that we used successfully for a while and on the plus side is no feature are locked behind some subscription model like other powerful alternatives.

21 comments