5 Free and Open Source Desktop Project Management Tools
Project Management Software applications help Project Manager to track Schedule, Performance, Cost and Resource utilization. Microsoft Project is the industry leader and a proprietary software that costs significant amount of money. If money is a constraint, then don’t think again because there are equally good Project management software applications that cost nothing!
Image Source: TrueSolutions (Project Management Services)
1. GanttProject (Alternative to Microsoft Project)
We had already featured GanttProject last month, which is a cross-platform desktop tool for project scheduling and management. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, it is free and its code is open source.
2. KPlato
KPlato (part of KOffice on K Desktop Environment-KDE) is a project management application for Linux. It supports resource allocation, work breakdown structure, critical paths, Gantt chart and many more. A complete project management application for Linux
3. OpenProj (Alternative to Microsoft Project)
OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions. OpenProj shares the industry’s most advanced scheduling engine with Project-ON-Demand and provides Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more. It is very popular and crossed more than a million downloads in the few months since its launch.
4. Open Workbench (Alternative to Microsoft Project)
Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. Already the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project. It runs on Windows platform with Sun JRE 1.3.1 or higher.
5. TaskJuggler
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Open Source project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks. TaskJuggler runs on Linux/Unix. However, there are ports for Windows and Mac OS exist. For more info, please click here.
Has anyone ever used http://www.aceproject.com ? It’s SaaS but they also offer an open source version called source code.
The source code version of http://www.aceproject.com can be installed on an intranet. It’s easy to install and is quite good.
You may want to checkout the Easy Projects .NET from http://www.easyprojects.net that provides an in-house license. It is easy to install and use. It provides an option to add fields, customize your homepage and add widgets like “what is new this week” to the dashboard. It can be personalized to meet the project needs
Great list, free and open source are definitely desirable attributes when it comes to online project management tools.
Alex
http://www.santexq.com
Thanks Alex. SantexQ looks interesting. We will list it out in online project management tools.
hi
what about the egroupware ?
can you review it also?
thanks
Yes. Thanks for mentioning. We will review it.
Thanks for this i have been looking at various project managment software. I have looked at mind manager, lisaproject, mingle and project pier. I now have some others to review before I make a choice. Which do you think is the best one for students studing project management?
Thanks. Have you tried GanttChart?
Great list. I use open Workbench now and love it. I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the others, just to compare.
Though not an open source application,Planning Force has many useful tools to make your project management easier.
You forgot Planningforce Express Scheduler
http://www.planningforce-express.com/free-scheduling-software.html
Very useful resources indeed for anyone involved in projects.
Thanks for the great links!! For web-based PM, try Web2Project which is a fork of dotProject — both PHP/MySQL based. http://web2project.net
I’ve been using Paymo for project management for a while now. It’s not open source but it’s free