OpenProject

OpenProject grew out of the ChiliProject fork back in 2012 and has since become the most enterprise-oriented open-source project management tool available — the one open-source option that takes Gantt charts, budgeting, and governance as seriously as tools like Microsoft Project or Jira Align. Its interactive roadmap view supports drag-and-drop dependency editing, critical-path highlighting, and baseline comparisons, on top of the more familiar agile boards, backlogs, and sprint planning most PM tools offer.

The permission and workflow model is built for organizations with formal process requirements: work package types carry their own custom fields and status workflows, LDAP and SAML are supported for enterprise identity, and time tracking rolls up into cost and budget reports — features that show up a lot in public-sector and larger-enterprise deployments where OpenProject has real traction.

The trade-offs are real. The Ruby on Rails stack is noticeably heavier to run than the Node or Go-based tools now common in this category, and the UI's density reflects its enterprise roots — it takes longer to feel fluent in than Plane's Linear-style interface. A handful of governance and reporting features are reserved for the paid Enterprise on-premises add-on rather than the free GPL-3.0 Community edition, though the Community edition remains fully functional with no user cap for teams that don't need those extras. For organizations that specifically need real Gantt charts and audit-friendly governance in an open-source package, OpenProject remains the most capable option.