We are delighted to announce our official partnership with XWiki. This adds another important milestone on our journey to establish a fully open, transparent, and data-sovereign ecosystem as a genuine open source alternative to proprietary tools such as Atlassian Confluence and Jira.

A shared vision for digital sovereignty

Both OpenProject and XWiki have always stood for open standards, transparency, and user control. At a time when data sovereignty and digital independence are becoming increasingly important, a strategic collaboration was the next logical step.

Our goal: Together, we want to offer organizations an integrated, open source alternative to Jira and Confluence, combining a solution for project management and knowledge management – and thus a powerful, privacy-friendly as well as cost-effective alternative to Atlassian tools.

“This partnership strengthens the open source ecosystem and marks an important step for organizations to move away from Atlassian — toward digital sovereignty and independence. We are delighted to have XWiki as an experienced and committed partner at our side that share the same vision and values to further advance open and sovereign software solutions.” – Niels Lindenthal, CEO, OpenProject GmbH

Image: Niels Lindenthal (CEO OpenProject) and Ludovic Dubost (CEO XWiki and CryptPad) at the OSXP in Paris.

“Our partnership with OpenProject is a natural extension of a shared commitment to building open, sovereign digital infrastructure for Europe and beyond. At the same time, it’s a strong affirmation of our joint vision: delivering integrated, open source solutions that respect user freedom and data sovereignty. By combining our expertise, we’re creating a compelling alternative to Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence — one that puts control and transparency back into the hands of the user. It’s a step forward for open-source collaboration in Europe, and most importantly, it responds directly to what our customers have been asking for.” — Ludovic Dubost, CEO and Founder, XWiki SAS and CryptPad

OpenProject + XWiki = Open source stack for modern teams

XWiki is a powerful platform for collaborative knowledge management – ideal as a Confluence replacement. OpenProject offers comprehensive project planning, task management, and issue tracking – a strong alternative to Jira.

The combination of both solutions creates an open, modular stack that enables teams to collaborate efficiently without compromising on control, security, or usability.

Image: Overview of benefits of the open source alternative for Jira (OpenProject) and Confluence (XWiki)

Concrete benefits for our users for switching from Jira and Confluence

This partnership is not just a symbolic alliance – it also brings practical benefits:

• Integration in development: We are actively working on an integration between OpenProject and XWiki to enable a seamless user experience.
• Joined sales & support: Both partners will be able to offer each other’s services and support packages.
• Expanded ecosystem: The connection to other open source providers such as Nextcloud will also be further strengthened by this cooperation.
• Both OpenProject and XWiki are part of the openDesk: Therefore both open source applications can also be jointly procured via ZenDiS as part of the openDesk bundle.

Part of the openDesk initiative

Our partnership is part of larger European initiatives such as openDesk, a modular open source suite for public administration and organizations. Under the leadership of the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS), leading open source companies such as OpenProject and XWiki are working closely together here alongside many other well-established open source vendors from Germany and Europe.

For a sovereign digital future

With this partnership, we are sending a strong signal for the open source movement in Europe and worldwide. Together with XWiki, we are providing organizations with tools that enable teams to work independently, securely, and collaboratively without vendor lock-in and without compromises on their data sovereignty.

Last month, we wrote a blog post about our participation in Hack Days 2025, a hackathon organized by the digital directorate of the French government, DINUM (direction interministérielle du numérique). In this blog post, we’ll tell you what we did, what we learnt and what all this means for digital sovereignty.

The event

Hack Days brought together over 300 talented developers, designers and innovators from 17 countries to collaborate on open source projects, notably DINUM’s own suite of applications for the public sector in France, called LaSuite. The event also aimed at strengthening European digital sovereignty by exploring the potential for cross-border collaboration.

The 53 different teams worked together over the course of three days to design, develop and pitch their projects to juries at the lovely Jourdan campus of the historic École normale supérieur (ENS).

Our own team consisted of Wieland Lindenthal, Dominic Bräunlein, Bruno Pagno, Eric Schubert and Parimal Satyal.

Our pitch

Before we explain the project in more detail below, here’s a clip of our five-minute pitch:

In the first round of the hackathon, the teams made a 3-minute pitch privately to the juries for a chance to be selected in the top 10 projects. OpenProject was luckily one of those ten, and we were then invited to make our 5-minute public pitch (above) the next day.

The jury consisted of Stéphanie Schaer, director of DINUM; Markus Richter, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization in Germany; Boris Van Hoytema, Quartermaster of the Open Source Program Office within the Ministry of the Interior in the Netherlands; Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the founder of VLC; and Valérie Dagand, managing director of Numeum.

We were very happy to be part of the top three winners, coming in second place.

We would like to congratulate all the winners of the hackathon:

• First: Visio Room Connector, which made Meet (LaSuite’s video conferencing tool) compatible with real-world video conference rooms (SIP Video Interoperability).
• Second: Hacking Borders - Integration Docs with OpenProject (that’s us!)
• Third: Math & chart integration into Docs, which made it possible to write and display LaTeX in Docs.
• Public vote: Panographix, which makes it easy for public servants in France to create and share interactive databases and charts directly within Docs using Grist.

Our project

For OpenProject, our goal in the hackathon was to build a deep integration with Docs, a collaborative note-taking app that’s part of DINUM’s LaSuite.

Note

Docs also recently joined the openDesk ecosystem initiated by ZenDiS in Germany. OpenDesk brings together powerful open source tools like OpenProject to offer a digital workplace for public institutions. The collaboration between DINUM and ZenDiS around Docs and OpenProject is an example of cross-border cooperation in digital sovereignty.

Docs is built on BlockNote, an open source rich text editor built on the concept of ‘blocks’. A block can be anything from simple text, a heading, a quote, an image or more complex elements like embedded media, file attachments or custom plugins.

We wanted to harness this extensibility to create a two-way integration such that users could seamlessly go from editing a draft text document in Docs to extracting tasks and text to OpenProject, where they can exist and evolve in a project context.

Such an integration made a lot of sense to us to harness what each tool does best. Docs is a powerful medium to jot down ideas and collaborate with other people, but plain text is not actionable. You cannot easily set an assignee, assign dates, track status, add comments, attach files or integrate with GitHub; all that, however, is very simple to do in OpenProject.

Our integration makes it possible to:

• Write a bullet list in plain text and easily turn it into a set of tasks in OpenProject.
• Select text from any part of a document and turn it into a user story or work package in OpenProject. We even implemented a basic LLM layer to convert the text to fit a predefined format.
• Maintain a ‘live’ link between objects: a change in Docs is reflected near-instantly in OpenProject and vice-versa. This makes it possible to avoid content duplication and have a single source of truth.

Enterprise-grade integration

We used open, enterprise-grade standards like OpenID connect to support single sign-on. This is because we believe that ensuring users can be logged in with the same credentials on OpenProject and on Docs is key to making the user experience seamless and increasing user adoption of both tools.

We also wanted to build the integration in as generic a manner as possible. Because Docs is built with BlockNote, we decided to approach the integration as an OpenProject block within the editor itself, which will make it possible for any other application using BlockNote to also integrate with OpenProject. This was important to use because we believe that lowering the cost of integration between open source tools is key to European digital sovereignty.

What we learnt

We were very impressed with the turnout, the excitement around open source, the quality of the teams and the projects and the organization of such an event. Some learnings we came back with:

• Broad interest in sovereign open source software: The event highlighted a significant interest across Europe in developing sovereign open source software. The turnout and enthusiasm were clear indicators that dependence on American big tech is increasingly a concern and that there’s value in working together with other European open source projects.

• Diverse strategies across Europe: We observed that different countries have varying strategies for supporting open source development. LaSuite in France has decided, for example, to create and maintain their own forks of open source software, with a consistent UI and UX. Here in Germany, ZenDiS’s approach is to fund the development and integration of existing software that’s served within a unified bundle called openDesk. There is increasing interest in using parts of LaSuite in the Netherlands, too.

• Power of integrations: The hackathon highlighted the value of integrations in making tools work together seamlessly. These integrations not only enhance user experience by reducing friction when trying to use multiple open source software but can also lead to higher adoption and user satisfaction.

What next?

We were thrilled to take part in the hackathon and were impressed with both what the other teams developed and how well organized it was. We would like to once again thank the LaSuite team for organizing such an inspirational event and for bringing so many like-minded people and companies together! We truly believe that open source is more powerful when we all work together.

We were also pleasantly surprised by the interest in our Docs–OpenProject integration.

What we worked on in the hackathon was of course an incomplete proof of concept, but we certainly don’t expect to leave things at that. We are currently exploring ways to integrate BlockNote more generically with OpenProject and will also evaluate where we can take our integration with Docs.

You will surely hear more more about this from us very soon.

If you are looking for a project management software and compare different solutions, you will eventually stumble upon Monday.com. We took a closer look at the software and compared it with the free open source software OpenProject to provide a comprehensive overview.

Monday.com was founded in February 2012 as daPulse. After various previous big funding rounds, the company raised another $150 million in Series D round, becoming Israel’s New Top Unicorn. Monday.com offers a suite of tools for process management, project management, productivity, and team management. The platform’s features are diverse and continually evolving. But what about data sovereignty?!

OpenProject on the other hand is free and open source software developed by an active community. Originating as a fork of the open source project management software Redmine in 2011 as an open source project, OpenProject emphasizes data security and privacy. The core development team created OpenProject to address these concerns, licensing it under GNU GPL V3 to ensure software freedom. The software code is published on GitHub. OpenProject is continuously developed and actively maintained by an international community.

Let’s talk about data sovereignty

Monday.com is a cloud-based solution available exclusively as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). As a company primarily operating in the United States, the handling of your data is not entirely transparent. Being proprietary software, users are subject to Monday.com’s terms and decisions, creating potential vendor lock-in issues. Here are some excerpts from Monday.com’s terms of service regarding YOUR CUSTOMER DATA:

• “[…]Subject to these Terms, Customer grants us a worldwide, royalty-free, limited license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, perform, export, and display the Customer Data… This license also includes the right to make modifications and derivative works.[…]” [1]

Additionally, Monday.com’s data policies state:

• Data Location:”[…]We and our authorized Service Providers (defined below) maintain, store and process personal data in the United States (US), Europe, Israel, Australia, Guatemala, the Philippines, Brazil, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom (UK), and other locations[…]”[2]

• Data Sharing: “[…]In exceptional circumstances, we may disclose or allow government and law enforcement officials access to your Personal Data.[…]” [2]

What constitutes exceptional circumstances? The ambiguity around terms like “exceptional circumstances” raises real concerns about data privacy.

OpenProject, being open source project management software, can be installed on-premises, providing full control of your data. As an open source software the software code is published on GitHub, being openly monitored by the Community. With a free software, you have the flexibility to use and modify it as needed. The Cloud version is hosted by OpenProject on servers in the European Union, compliant with GDPR and German data privacy and security regulations. For ultimate data sovereignty, you can opt for the on-premises version, maintaining full control within your infrastructure.

Feature comparison

Both Monday.com and OpenProject offer robust collaboration features to meet your project management needs. Monday.com is often praised for its user-friendly design and intuitive interface. However, many of its functionalities rely on third-party integrations, which can introduce dependencies on external updates.

In conclusion, Monday.com is a powerful, web-based project management tool known for its usability and design. However, if data security and sovereignty are top priorities, OpenProject stands out as the preferred choice. As a free and open-source software with a comprehensive feature set, OpenProject ensures greater control over your data.

For a detailed comparison, visit this page to see why OpenProject is the best open source alternative for Monday.com.

[1] https://monday.com/l/legal/tos/

[2] https://monday.com/terms/privacy