At a glance — how these 3 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 56,553 · Go | Flagship | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 53,396 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 5,962 · Ruby | Mainstream | Active | Unknown risk No clear SPDX id — treat as all-rights-reserved until verified |
The alternatives
gitea
Git with a cup of tea! Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD
go-gitea/gitea Updated 2026-06-27 plane
🔥🔥🔥 Open-source Jira, Linear, Monday, and ClickUp alternative. Plane is a modern project management platform to manage tasks, sprints, docs, and triage.
makeplane/plane Updated 2026-06-26 redmine
Mirror of redmine code source - Official Subversion repository is at https://svn.redmine.org/redmine - contact: @vividtone or maeda (at) farend (dot) jp
redmine/redmine Updated 2026-06-26 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
Leaving Jira is less a tool swap than admitting how much of your process lived inside automation rules nobody documented.
When I evaluate Jira alternatives, I start from an uncomfortable question: how much of your team’s workflow is actually in Jira’s automation engine rather than in anyone’s head? That’s the trap. The issues, the sprints, the labels — all of that exports cleanly via CSV or the Cloud Migration Assistant. What doesn’t export is the web of triggers that silently move a ticket from “In Review” to “Done” when a PR merges, or pings a lead when an Epic stalls. None of the OSS options here reproduce that automation layer, and most teams underestimate how much they leaned on it until it’s gone.
So my framing isn’t “what replaces Jira” but “which of Jira’s three faces does this team actually use” — the tracker, the dev-workflow hub, or the cross-team coordination surface.
For a software team that lives in Git, I’d look hardest at Gitea (56.4k stars, MIT). It’s the most permissively licensed option and the only one that folds issue tracking into the same place as Git hosting, code review, and CI/CD. If your Jira value was mostly “tickets linked to commits and pipelines,” collapsing all of that into one self-hosted binary is a genuine simplification, not just a lateral move.
For teams that want the Jira-shaped product-management experience, Plane (52.2k stars, AGPL-3.0) is the obvious modern candidate — issues, cycles, modules, roadmaps. It’s the closest thing to a like-for-like console. Two caveats I’d weigh openly: it’s AGPL, so if you plan to build a hosted product on top, read the license terms first; and its JQL-equivalent querying isn’t as expressive as Jira’s, which matters more than people expect once you’ve built dashboards around saved filters.
Redmine (5.9k stars, Ruby) is the unglamorous choice I wouldn’t dismiss for an ops-heavy or non-engineering org with a long plugin tail.
The thing I’d verify before committing: map your custom fields and write down every automation rule first. Standard fields (assignee, priority, labels) carry over; custom fields and triggers are manual rebuilds. And there’s no OSS substitute for the Jira–Confluence link, so budget for a separate docs strategy rather than pretending it’ll come along for free.
Comparison notes
Three open-source trackers come at Jira from different generations. Plane is the modern one — issues, cycles (sprints), modules, and roadmaps in a self-hostable TypeScript codebase. GitLab Issues ties tracking tightly to software development with native CI/CD, and Redmine is the veteran Ruby option whose strength is a deep plugin ecosystem. Three Jira capabilities are hard to match: Plane has no equivalent to Jira's workflow automation engine, which moves issues between statuses on triggers; JQL's query flexibility outstrips most of these alternatives; and Jira's Confluence link between issues and documentation has no open-source stand-in.
Migration tips
- Export Jira projects as CSV or use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant for bulk export including issue history
- Map Jira issue types (Story, Bug, Epic, Task) to your OSS tool's issue type schema before importing
- Recreate Jira custom fields in your target tool — standard fields (assignee, priority, labels) transfer cleanly, custom fields require manual setup
- Document Jira workflow automations before migrating — they must be manually recreated in your OSS tool
- Update CI/CD integrations (GitHub Actions, Jenkins) that reference Jira ticket IDs in commit messages or branch names
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing Jira isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 3 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → gitea. 56,553★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
- You want a strong-copyleft project that resists vendor capture → plane. AGPL-3.0 licensed — downstream forks must stay open, which is what some teams explicitly want.
License & commercial-use notes
With a Jira replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 3 projects here fall into:
- Permissive (gitea) — MIT / Apache / BSD / ISC — modify and embed inside a commercial product with no copyleft obligation. The safest bucket for shipping in a proprietary codebase.
- Network copyleft (plane) — AGPL / SSPL — the copyleft trigger extends to offering the software over a network, so a hosted deployment of a modified version can oblige you to publish your changes. Read the exact terms before building a paid hosted product on these.
- Unverified license (redmine) — GitHub returned no clear SPDX id. Treat as all-rights-reserved until you read the project's LICENSE file directly — do not assume commercial use is permitted.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 3 projects
Of the 3 projects listed, 3 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
How do these 3 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
3 of 3 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from Jira's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 3 of 3 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
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