Plane

Plane is the open-source project management platform most often compared to Linear, both for its keyboard-first UI and for how directly it competes with heavier tools like Jira and Asana. Work is organized into issues, grouped into cycles (Plane's word for sprints) and modules (feature-scoped groupings), with sub-issues and issue relations for modeling dependencies — the same primitives power users expect from a modern issue tracker, not a generic kanban board bolted onto a database.

What sets Plane apart from most self-hosted competitors is momentum: the project has crossed 50,000 GitHub stars and ships releases on a near-weekly cadence, backed by a company (Plane) that also sells a hosted cloud version. Self-hosting is a single Docker Compose command, standing up Postgres, Redis, and object storage automatically, and the Community edition has no seat or project caps — you can run it for an entire org on one VPS.

The honest caveats: the core is AGPL-3.0 licensed, which is more restrictive than a permissive MIT license if you plan to embed or resell a modified version over a network — you'd need to publish your changes. A handful of enterprise features, like SAML-based SSO and some admin controls, are reserved for the paid cloud or enterprise self-hosted tiers rather than the free Community edition. And because the stack includes Postgres, Redis, and Minio, self-hosting comfortably wants at least 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM — trivial for a team server, but more than a single-container app. For teams that want Linear-grade UX without a per-seat bill, Plane is currently the strongest open-source contender.