Taskzin vs Redmine and OpenProject (Open Source Compared)

For everyone else, "free" describes the licence rather than the total. This comparison models the real numbers rather than pretending the choice is between paying and not paying.

Quick answer: Redmine and OpenProject have no licence cost and no user limits. They do have infrastructure costs, administrator time, security patching and upgrade work — which for most teams exceeds a subscription. Self-hosting genuinely wins where data must stay on your infrastructure, where user counts are very large, or where you already have platform engineering capacity.

What Open Source Actually Costs

The licence is free; hosting, administration, security and upgrades are not, and they recur every year.

Free licence, real expenses

Downloading Redmine or OpenProject costs nothing. Running it in production for a team of thirty involves a server, a database, backups, monitoring, TLS certificates and someone responsible for all of it.

None of that is hidden or dishonest — it is simply omitted from most comparisons, which present a licence cost of zero against a subscription and stop there.

The four ongoing costs

Infrastructure: server, database, storage, backup, monitoring.

Administration: installation, configuration, user management, plugin management.

Security: patching, vulnerability monitoring, access control, incident response.

Upgrades: version migrations, plugin compatibility, testing, downtime.

The last two are the ones teams underestimate, and they are the ones that cause real problems when neglected.

When self-hosting genuinely wins

Three cases. Data sovereignty requirements that prohibit external hosting. User counts in the hundreds where per-seat pricing becomes substantial. Existing platform engineering capacity where the marginal cost of one more service is genuinely small.

If none of these applies, self-hosting is usually a false economy — and recognising that early saves an expensive detour.

Taskzin, Redmine and OpenProject Compared

Redmine vs OpenProject

Licence cost Subscription Free Free (community) Hosting Managed Self-hosted Self-hosted or cloud User limits Per member pricing Unlimited Unlimited (community)

Modern interface and adoption

Views List, Board, Calendar, Gantt, Table, Timeline Lists, basic Gantt Lists, board, Gantt WIP limits and swimlanes Yes Via plugin Limited Sprints, velocity, burndown Starter and above Via plugin Available Dependencies and critical path Yes, recalculates Basic Yes Docs linked to tasks Yes Wiki Wiki Automations All plans Via plugin Limited Dashboards 30+ widgets on Business Via plugin Available Guests Free, unlimited Unlimited Unlimited SSO, SCIM, audit logs Business and above Via plugin Enterprise edition

Data sovereignty and control

Vendor hosted, full export Complete Complete Admin required None Yes Yes Setup time Under an hour Days Days

OpenProject offers a commercial cloud and enterprise edition — verify current pricing.

Where Open Source Is Stronger

Open source wins on data control, on cost at large user counts, and on the ability to modify the software.

Data sovereignty and control Your data sits on infrastructure you control, in a jurisdiction you choose, with backups you hold.

For organisations with regulatory constraints — certain public sector, healthcare, defence and financial contexts — this is not a preference but a requirement, and it settles the question immediately.

No per-user cost at scale

At five hundred users, per-seat pricing is substantial and a self-hosted instance costs the same as at fifty.

This is the strongest financial argument for open source, and it only applies at scale. Below roughly a hundred users, the administration cost usually exceeds the licence saving.

Modification and extension

You can read the source, change behaviour, and build integrations against the database directly.

Redmine's plugin ecosystem in particular allows substantial extension. Whether you have the capacity to use this is a separate question, and most organisations that cite it never do.

Where Taskzin Is Stronger

Taskzin wins on requiring no operations, on interface and adoption, and on features being present rather than assembled from plugins.

Nothing to operate

No server, no database, no patching, no upgrade planning, no backup verification.

For a team without dedicated platform capacity, this is the entire argument. The alternative is that someone's job quietly includes maintaining a project tool, and that person's absence becomes a risk.

Modern interface and adoption Redmine's interface reflects its age. This matters practically rather than aesthetically — adoption failure is more common than capability failure, and tools people dislike opening do not get updated.

Taskzin is designed for a real project to be running within an hour, with six views over one dataset so different people work the way they prefer. OpenProject is considerably more modern than Redmine and closes much of this gap.

Features without plugins

WIP limits and swimlanes, sprints with velocity and burndown, dependencies with critical path recalculation, automations on all plans, dashboards on Business — all present rather than assembled.

In Redmine, several of these require plugins, and plugins are the main source of upgrade friction. A plugin that breaks on a version upgrade blocks the upgrade, which is how self-hosted instances end up running unpatched versions.

The Honest Cost Comparison

Model infrastructure and administrator time properly, and the crossover point becomes clear rather than theoretical.

Model the infrastructure

A production instance for thirty to a hundred users needs an application server, a database, storage, backup and monitoring — modest but real recurring cost.

Add a staging environment if you want to test upgrades safely, which you should.

Price the administrator time

This is the number that decides it. Realistically: initial setup and configuration measured in days, then ongoing patching, upgrades, user management and incident handling.

Even at a few hours a month, an administrator's time costs more than a subscription for a team of thirty. Price it at their actual rate rather than treating it as free because it is internal.

Where the crossover falls

Below roughly fifty users, hosted is almost always cheaper once administration is priced honestly.

Between fifty and a few hundred, it depends on whether you already have platform capacity — if the marginal cost of one more service is genuinely low, self-hosting becomes competitive.

Above a few hundred, per-seat pricing dominates and self-hosting is usually cheaper, assuming you can operate it well.

Redmine vs OpenProject Redmine is older, lighter and plugin-driven; OpenProject is modern, more structured and commercially backed.

Redmine: older, lighter, plugin-driven

Long-established, stable, modest resource requirements, and extensible through a large plugin ecosystem.

Its interface is dated and much of its modern capability depends on plugins whose maintenance varies. It suits organisations with technical capacity and tolerance for a functional rather than polished experience.

OpenProject: modern, structured, commercially backed

A modern interface, more built-in capability, and a company behind it offering enterprise features and a hosted cloud option.

The community edition is free; several enterprise features sit behind a paid edition. This makes it closer to a SaaS product with a self-hosted option than to traditional open source.

Which self-hosted option fits

Redmine if you have technical capacity, want minimal resource usage, and are comfortable managing plugins.

OpenProject if you want self-hosting without a dated experience, and are willing to pay for the enterprise edition where you need its features. Compare that edition against hosted SaaS pricing, since at that point the cost gap narrows considerably.