© New York Times
© New York Times
© Getty Images
© Getty Images
© New York Times
© New York Times
© New York Times
© Getty Images
© New York Times
© New York Times
© New York Times
© Getty Images
© New York Times
© Getty Images
© New York Times
OpenProject 16.0 has been released and this new major version introduces a range of new features and improvements. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on the latest updates. Please take a few minutes to learn what changes for you. We will summarize the most important changes in this blog article and, as always, please see our release notes that contain all changes, features and bug fixes.
In this blog article, we will present these feature updates:
We are especially excited about this improvement: Meeting backlogs make organizing and preparing meetings even easier — and help make the transition from classic meetings to the newer one-time and recurring meeting types even more powerful.
In OpenProject 16.0, users can now collect and manage agenda items flexibly using the new backlog feature. For one-time meetings, the Agenda backlog offers a space to store topics that are not yet scheduled but might be added later. For recurring meetings, the Series backlog allows teams to track open points across all meetings in a series and move items between occurrences as needed — without having to manually copy or recreate them.
Agenda items can easily be dragged from the backlog into a meeting or moved back again. Work packages can also be added directly to the backlog. Even if a meeting has no agenda yet, it can still maintain a list of important topics through the backlog.
Here’s an example of an Agenda backlog for one-time meetings:
And this is how a Series backlog for a recurring meeting looks like – with the option to move an agenda item to the current meeting:
Meeting backlogs bring more flexibility, better preparation, and a clearer structure to the way teams organize discussions — and are another great step toward making OpenProject’s meeting management even more efficient. Learn more about OpenProject meeting management in our documentation.
As we announced earlier in this blog article, the Classic meeting type is no longer available in OpenProject 16.0. Existing classic meetings have been automatically converted into one-time meetings. No data is lost during this transition, apart from the meeting history.
To manage your meetings going forward, you can choose between one-time and recurring meetings. These dynamic formats give you more flexibility to structure your agendas and meeting workflows. For documenting decisions and results, you can use the Outcome feature, which replaces the classic Minutes functionality.
A new Enterprise add-on, available in the Professional plan and higher, allows adding internal comments to work packages. Internal comments are visible only to authorized users and help teams keep sensitive information separate from public discussions.
Learn more in the release notes.
This feature is a further step to replace Atlassian Jira Service Management functionalities.
Consistent naming of work packages is now easier than ever. Users of the Enterprise Professional plan and higher can now automatically generate work package subjects based on predefined patterns. Subjects are created automatically during work package creation and do not need to be entered manually.
Learn more in the release notes or read this blog article to see examples of use cases.
Tracking and reviewing time entries is now even more convenient. OpenProject 16.0 introduces the My time tracking module, which is personal to each user and must be activated by an administrator. Users can view, edit and log time entries either in a structured list or in a new calendar view for better overview.
Learn more in the release notes or read this blog article to see examples of use cases.
We are happy to share that a feature previously available only as an Enterprise add-on is now released to the Community version with OpenProject 16.0: Displaying different types of work package graphs directly on the project overview page.
This means that all users can now display graphs directly on the project overview page to visualize important project information and communicate project status at a glance. Users can choose between different graph types, such as bar charts or pie charts, depending on their needs.
With 16.0 OpenProject has updated its Enterprise offering. Each Enterprise plan (Basic, Professional, Premium, Corporate) now comes with a clearly defined set of Enterprise add-ons on top of the additional services and support levels.
This means that, going forward, some new Enterprise add-ons will be introduced in higher-tier plans. For example, the new Internal comments Enterprise add-on is part of the Professional plan.
Important information about these changes:
If you are not yet using an Enterprise plan, you can easily test all Enterprise add-ons:
We have updated the feature comparison on our pricing page to reflect these changes.
Follow the upgrade guide for the packaged installation or Docker installation to update your OpenProject installation to OpenProject 16.0. We update your hosted OpenProject environments (Enterprise cloud) today, May 21, 2025.
You will find more information about all new features and changes in our Release notes or in the OpenProject Documentation.
If you need support, you can post your questions in the Community Forum, or if you are eligible for Enterprise support, please contact us and we are happy to support you personally.
A very special thank you goes to the City of Cologne, Deutsche Bahn and ZenDiS for sponsoring released or upcoming features. Your support, alongside the efforts of our amazing Community, helps drive these innovations.
Also, a big thanks to our Community members for reporting bugs and helping us identify and provide fixes. Special thanks for reporting and finding bugs go to alex e, Klaas vT, Daniel Elkeles, Regina Schikora, Çağlar Yeşilyurt, and Александр Татаринцев.
Last but not least, we are very grateful for our very engaged translation contributors on Crowdin, who translated quite a few OpenProject strings. This release we would like to particularly thank the following users:
Would you like to help out with translations yourself? Then take a look at our translation guide and find out exactly how you can contribute. It is very much appreciated!
As always, we welcome any feedback on this release. 💙
© Getty Images
This is a security-focussed release for FreshRSS 1.26.x, addressing several CVEs (thanks @Inverle) 🛡
A few highlights ✨:
Notes ℹ:
This release has been made by @Alkarex, @Frenzie, @hkcomori, @loviuz, @math-GH
and newcomers @dezponia, @glyn, @Inverle, @Machou, @mikropsoft
Full changelog:
Login
<iframe srcdoc=""> #7494, CVE-2025-32015<button formaction=""> #7506Content-Security-Policy HTTP headers to favicons #7471, CVE-2025-31136Referrer-Policy: same-origin #6303, #7478ext.php #7479, CVE-2025-31134mod_filter to ensure that AddOutputFilterByType works #7419
Important
Update May 2025: Internal comments have been released with version 16.0, and are included in our Enterprise professional plan.
With OpenProject 16.0, scheduled for May 21, 2025, we will introduce a new way to communicate with your team: internal comments in the work package Activity tab. This blog post will talk about why we developed this feature, how you can use it and how it might evolve in the future.
OpenProject is as much a tool for team communication as it is for project management. In public offices, hospitals, universities and small and large companies, teams use OpenProject to manage the exchange of information.
Most of this information is contained within individual projects and our users sometimes work across multiple projects, each with a limited set of users with different roles. Each of these roles comes with a different set of permissions. For example, project admins generally have full, unrestricted access to the project, project members might have the ability to create only certain types of work packages or execute certain status changes, while external (non-project) collaborators might only be able to read and write comments. This approach allows for fine-grained access control.
In version 13.1 of OpenProject, we introduced work package sharing. This made it possible to invite users who are not project members to individual work packages in a limited capacity, with rights to only view, view and comment, or even modify the shared work package.
Sharing is especially useful when you need to involve people in very specific, small scopes. They might be external collaborators, clients, suppliers or observers. However, until now, anyone who could view a work package could also view all the comments in the Activity tab. This might not always be ideal. There might be times when a core team might want to discuss things related to a work package confidentially amongst themselves and keep that conversation separate from what is visible to all other stakeholders.
That’s where internal comments come in.
Internal comments lets core project members limit the visibility of certain comments to a select group that is a smaller subset of project members.
To use this feature, a project admin will be able to enable internal comments for their project. By default, these internal comments are only visible to the project admin role. To expand who can view these comments, instance administrators can grant a new set of permissions (to view, write and edit internal comments) to any number of roles.
Users who have these roles within their project will then see a checkbox under the comment box labeled “Internal comment”:
Checking this will turn that comment into an internal comment. The background color of the comment box will change to indicate this.
Once posted, the comment will also be marked in the same color, along with a lock icon, to distinguish it from regular comments.
Users without the necessary permissions will not be able to see these comments, nor that new comments were posted. They will not be visible in neither the Activity tab nor the other places where user activity is reported, like the user activity and project activity pages.
Internal comments can enable more efficient communication within a project. They can allow teams to ensure all relevant information stays in one place, facilitate multi-layered communication when external clients or suppliers are involved and also be useful in helpdesk scenarios.
A project can include a number of different stakeholders and not all stakeholders should be privy to all information. Ideally, all discussion around a single topic or work package should happen in the same place but because there are currently no visibility controls, confidential conversations need to currently happen elsewhere. This is often a separate work package (in a different project), a Matrix chat room or email. All of these introduce inefficiencies by introducing information duplication and blind spots.
With internal comments, all information and stakeholders can be gathered in one work package that is considered the single source of truth and core project members are nevertheless able to communicate amongst only themselves.
Projects often involve external clients or suppliers. They can be invited to a project or an individual work package with specific, limited roles. This reduces the need to organize outside the project context using different incompatible tools.
However, the core project team might want to keep some of their conversation private and limited to a smaller group, for example when discussing rates, negotiations, sensitive financial information or contextual information. With restricted visibility comments, the core team can have a meta-level conversation within work packages that external clients or suppliers cannot access.
Implementing internal comments is also a step towards making OpenProject a capable helpdesk tool. Customer support teams can write internal notes only they can view, along with public comments and responses the customer can read and react to.
This will be supplemented in the future with other important helpdesk features such as the ability to set up OpenProject to automatically create work packages based on incoming emails to certain addresses and allow responding to comments via email.
We are excited to release internal comments this May with version 16.0.
As an open source software company, we value the ideas and feedback of our user Community. If you have opinions about these changes or have feature requests, feel free to join our Community instance and share your thoughts.
We would like to thank ZenDiS for sponsoring this feature. We hope you are looking forward to this update as much as we are looking forward to releasing it.
Finding the best project management software suited for your organization is a challenging task. We have put together the important criteria to help you make that choice. As an open source software, we of course advocate for choosing an open source project management software.
We prepared a latest overview of the top 5 open source project management software in 2025 for you to compare and see which one could enable you to tackle your challenges best. Take a look at the feature sets, hosting options, prices, security of the open source project management solutions to make an informed decision for your organization.
Please also make sure to check your potential project management software provider’s privacy policy and data security strategy in detail. In a project management software, confidential data is being processed so you have to make sure your data is in the right hands and being protected.
Here are our 5 best open source project management tools in 2025 with different advantages:
OpenProject is the leading open source project management software, licensed under GNU GPL v3.
The software code is freely available on GitHub and the changes to the source code are transparently traceable any time. With OpenProject there is no vendor lock-in.
OpenProject meets the highest data protection and security requirements. The company, based in Berlin, Germany, focuses on developing a secure and privacy-compliant European alternative for project management and team collaboration.
With OpenProject, users retain full control over their data. With the self-installed version hosted on its own servers, OpenProject offers the highest level of data sovereignty. Alternatively, hosting is provided on demand on secure servers within Germany. Subcontractors are based in the EU, and there is no user tracking on websites or within the application.
As self-hosted versions, the Community and Enterprise on-premises editions provide users with data sovereignty. You will benefit from a set-up with ultimate control over your data and with your preferred technical set up.
If you don’t have the capacity or knowledge to host OpenProject in your environment, we offer the Enterprise cloud edition with secure hosting in the EU or on request in Germany. With the OpenProject Enterprise cloud, you will benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. You can rely on hosting in a high security data center and redundant infrastructure, built for high availability and performance. Continuous encrypted data backups in separate locations, regular data privacy assessment and certification by external auditor are part of the security strategy.
OpenProject maps the entire project lifecycle, from project planning, execution and project controlling, to project closure. The software supports classic, agile and hybrid project management. The software includes extensive project management functions, such as project and milestone planning (Gantt charts), task recording, agile boards, project wiki, pre- and post-processing of deadlines, forums, time and cost recording, budgets.
Also, UX and UI play an important role at OpenProject. We invest heavily into our interface design team so that the use of OpenProject is as intuitive as possible and users don’t need much training or a documentation quest before jumping right in.
The software is flexibly configurable, can be adapted to individual requirements and is suitable for the respective company processes. With a powerful API, additional systems can be connected if required.
OpenProject is one of the software solutions that are used for openDesk – the Sovereign Workplace. The vision of the Sovereign Workplace is to offer a true open source alternative to Microsoft and Google throughout Europe. And OpenProject is ‘openDesk’ ready, which means the current version (and upwards, of course) can be used as part of openDesk.
OpenProject is continuously developed and maintained by an active developer community. New functions, improvements and updates are released regularly. This also allows a quick reaction to possible security gaps.
OpenProject offers professional support and training. This ensures that users receive both technical and functional support in order to work with the software in the best possible way.
The OpenProject Community edition covers a wide range of features and plugins and is free of charge. This is an on-premises version that requires you to host it in your own environment.
The Enterprise cloud and on-premises editions offer you professional support as well as additional premium and security features. Consequently, these are paid plans. Pricing starts from €5.95 per month per user, long-term subscriptions though are cheaper.
OpenProject offers a 14 days free trial which you can extend on request.
GitLab is a source code management and DevOps platform that can also be used for project management, licensed under MIT open source license. It has a clear focus on software development. The users benefit from fast deployments, standardization, automation and increased security of the software development process.
GitLab has a vast feature set to allow the mapping of the entire software delivery lifecycle. It offers many specific features targeted at software developers, such as DevOps Reports. Both agile and traditional project management methodologies are supported by GitLab as it also includes timelines, task management and workflows. However, time tracking or budget and costs are features missing in GitLab’s offer.
Overall, one can say that GitLab has a more technical user interface due to the fact that the main target group is software engineers. It might not be as intuitive as other open source project management software in 2025.
Exciting: If you are not entirely convinced by the GitLab offering in terms of project management, but like its feature set, you can use OpenProject with its GitLab integration.
See a comparison between GitLab and OpenProject to compare both open source project management tools.
GitLab is available in the cloud and on-premises. The self-installed version provides full data control. GitLab’s cloud version, the GitLab.com core infrastructure, is primarily hosted in Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) US-East1 region.
The location where your data is stored is important as it determines which regulations and data privacy measures apply (in the EU e.g. the providers have to adhere to GDPR). Feel free to read up more about cloud security.
While there is a free version available (with limited storage, users and features), the paid versions start from $19 per user per month. To test the paid version, GitLab offers a 30 days free trial.
Tuleap is an open source project management software for agile project management, licensed under GNU GPL.
Tuleap comprises all agile project management features like task board, backlog, Kanban boards, burnup and burndown charts, dashboard. It allows you to execute software development, test management, project tracking and agile planning in specific.
If you are an agile or software development team, Tuleap’s clear focus on the agile methodology might work very well for you. For a broader project management approach, you might miss traditional project management features like a Gantt chart or a Wiki, and options to track time, budget and costs. Working in Tuleap, its interface seems very intuitive.
See a comparison between Tuleap and OpenProject to compare both open source project management tools.
Tuleap is available in the cloud and on-premises. The premium cloud version gives you a hosting choice among providers in France, Switzerland, USA, UK, Korea. There is no information on the basic cloud hosting.
There is no free version of Tuleap available. The cheapest option is the basic cloud version that starts from 6€ per user per month. However, Tuleap offers a free trial if you contact them.
Taiga is an open source project management software whose beginnings date back to a Kaleidos hackathon in 2013. It is licensed under MPL 2.0.
Taiga’s vision was to create an intuitive and visually appealing agile project management tool for developers and designers. Accordingly, Taiga offers a comprehensive feature set for agile project management. It includes Kanban boards, backlog, estimation tool, issue tracking, dashboard and more.
Consequently, classic project management features are not part of Taiga, limiting its use cases to agile methodologies only. Taiga has a very intuitive interface, which makes it easy for users to start working with the software.
See a comparison between Taiga and OpenProject to compare both open source project management tools.
Taiga is available in the cloud and on-premises. The cloud version is hosted in the EU by AWS, which means it complies with GDPR in this regard.
There is a free cloud and free on-premises version available. The paid Taiga cloud edition comes with premium support and is at $70 per month (unlimited users).
Part of the top 5 open source project management software 2025 is also Orangescrum. It offers a cloud, on-premises version and open source enterprise edition. The open source edition is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Orangescrum offers classic as well as agile project management features. Resource management, schedule management (Gantt charts), budget and cost management, issue tracking, time tracking, workflow management as well as backlogs are available.
The on-premises and cloud version include even more features (burndown chart, project overview, task labels, custom task types, recurring tasks, invoicing etc.). Those are premium features and are part of paid plans.
Orangescrum’s interface looks very intuitive. See a comparison between Orangescrum and OpenProject to compare both open source project management tools.
Orangescrum is available in the cloud and self-hosted. The cloud version is hosted with AWS (location not mentioned).
Orangescrum’s privacy policy states that they are taking many steps across the entire company to ensure they will be ready for the GDPR.
The Orangescrum open source edition can be downloaded for free. You can add paid support plans to it, from $299 per month. You can try Orangescrum for 15 days for free.
There is a free Orangescrum cloud edition for 3 users and limited storage, paid plans are starting from $8 per user per month. The on-premises version with premium features and support is charged as a once-off (from $4,425), with potential support subscriptions for following years.
Choosing the best project management software that fits your organization depends on a variety of criteria, including the features and use cases you want, the size of your team, and hosting preferences. All listed top 5 open source project management software have their advantages.
If you are looking for an open source project management software in 2025, we recommend to have a look at OpenProject, GitLab, Tuleap, Taiga, and Orangescrum.
To give you a quick summary:
Regarding the pricing of all top 5 open source project management software, we recommend you visit the individual websites to input your team size and other requirements to find out the detailed pricing as there are many variables that may change the pricing.
You can also take a look at a more detailed comparisons of OpenProject to other alternatives.
