Open-source project management, honestly reviewed. Built for teams escaping expensive PM software, not for people who want another Kanban board.

TL;DR

What it is: Open-source (AGPL-3.0) project management platform covering planning, Gantt, resource tracking, financials, risk management, and agile — in a single web app [1][4].
Who it’s for: Project managers and PMOs running structured, multi-person projects with real governance needs: dependencies, budgets, risks, timesheets. Not for teams who just want Kanban cards and a chat box [3].
Cost savings: monday.com runs $9+/user/month; Jira’s paid tiers start at $8.15/user. ProjeQtOr self-hosted costs $0 in license fees and runs on a basic VPS [1][3].
Key strength: 15+ years old, genuinely stable, and covers ground that most modern PM SaaS tools charge enterprise prices for — Gantt, WBS, RIDA risk tracking, baselines, timesheets, budget vs. actuals, all in one place [1][2][4].
Key weakness: The interface is built around formal PM concepts and looks it. Teams coming from linear or Notion will find it heavy. Onboarding takes time, and the modern collaboration layer (real-time co-authoring, embedded chat) simply isn’t there [3].

What is ProjeQtOr

ProjeQtOr — the name stands for “Quality Based Project Organizer” — is a web-based project management application developed in France, with 15+ years of production history behind it. The website describes it plainly: “Powerful - Accessible - Innovative.” That’s a fair summary, in that order of emphasis.

The tool covers the full project management lifecycle from a traditional PM perspective: task hierarchies (WBS-style), Gantt charts with critical path, resource capacity planning, risk and issue registers (they call it RIDA — Risks, Issues, Decisions, Actions), time tracking, budget vs. actuals, and milestone tracking. It also has Agile modules — Kanban boards, user stories, sprint backlog, planning poker — so you can run either waterfall or agile depending on the team [1][3].

The license is AGPL-3.0. That means you can self-host and use it for free, but if you build a product on top of it and distribute it, you must open your own source too. For a team self-hosting internally, AGPL is fine in practice. For a SaaS vendor who wants to embed it in a product they sell, the licensing requires more attention than MIT would.

The project is built and maintained by ProjeQtOr SAS, a French company. There’s no public GitHub repository in the standard sense — distribution is through their own forge and download pages. This is worth noting if you were planning to evaluate the contributor community via GitHub stars or pull request activity [merged profile].

An opensource.com roundup [4] of open-source Microsoft Project alternatives specifically calls out ProjeQtOr as one of two web applications for project teams (alongside Redmine), as opposed to single-user desktop tools like ProjectLibre or GanttProject. That framing is accurate — this is a multi-user, collaborative PM platform, not a personal scheduling tool.

Why people choose it

The Capterra reviews [1] are revealing because there are only 19 of them, which means every one carries more signal than a typical 5,000-review SaaS product. The aggregate is 4.7/5. The people writing reviews aren’t light users — they mention 2+ years of use, switching from Jira, and managing project offices.

The two most useful quotes from Capterra:

Jean-François, an Australian IT consultant: “Got everything a Project manager needs. It’s free with no limitations. The planning engine is incredible.” His one-line caveat: “Not too easy to use it the right way.” He specifically recommends getting help from the forum or a specialist to extract full value [1].

Petr, an IT Manager at a Czech software company who switched from Jira: “It’s stable, safe, it has many functionalities we need. Price of course — we will donate it.” His criticism: “Little bit longer to learn how to use it” [1].

The pattern is consistent: reviewers are experienced project managers who value completeness and stability over visual polish. They’re not complaining that it looks like 2008 enterprise software — they’re complaining that it takes time to configure, and they’re suggesting you lean on the community to do it right.

Versus monday.com and Asana. These tools are built for visibility and adoption — clean boards, low friction, everything surfaced at the task level. ProjeQtOr is built for control — WBS, dependencies, baselines, variance tracking. If your primary need is “show the team what’s due this week,” monday.com wins on ease. If your need is “track actual vs. planned hours and flag budget overruns on five concurrent projects,” ProjeQtOr covers that without requiring enterprise licensing [1][3].

Versus Jira. Jira is the default in software teams, especially after the Atlassian takeover made it the obvious corporate choice. One of the Capterra reviewers specifically switched from Jira to ProjeQtOr and didn’t look back. Jira is strong for software development workflows (epics, sprints, issue tracking). ProjeQtOr is stronger for the project management layer on top of engineering — delivery milestones, project financials, RIDA tracking, client relationship management [1][3].

Versus Redmine. Both are PHP/web-based open-source PM tools with long histories. The opensource.com article [4] covers both in the same roundup: Redmine leans agile and has a mature plugin ecosystem but lacks a proper Gantt editor in core. ProjeQtOr has Gantt built in, broader financial controls, and a more opinionated PM structure.

On data sovereignty. ProjeQtOr’s own marketing leans into this heavily: “Developed in France and independent. Self-hosted | French SaaS. Your data, your choice, your control.” For European companies with GDPR sensitivity or organizations that can’t put project data on US infrastructure (government contractors, healthcare), a self-hosted French tool is a real differentiator — not just a talking point [website][2].

Features

Based on the website, FitGap analysis, and third-party reviews:

Planning and scheduling:

Gantt chart with dependencies, critical path, and critical resources [website][4]
WBS (hierarchical task structure) [3][4]
Project portfolio view across multiple projects [website]
Project baselines for tracking variance [website]
Dynamic work plan [website]

Agile:

Kanban boards [website]
User stories, epics, product backlog, sprint backlog [website]
Sprint planning and planning poker [website]

Resource and work management:

Time tracking via timesheets [website]
Capacity planning across teams and projects [website]
Absence management [website]
Skills tracking [website]
To-do lists and ticket management [website]

Governance (the differentiator):

RIDA tracking: Risks, Issues, Decisions, Actions [website][3]
Requirements and test case management [website]
Multi-level consolidation [website]
Meetings and deliverable tracking [website]
Project baselines [website]

Financial management:

Budget vs. actuals tracking [website][3]
Expense and income management [website]
Work unit catalog and work orders [website]
Customer relationship tracking [website]

Automation and integration:

Configurable workflows [website][3]
Alert rules on events [website]
Import/Export [website]
Indicator/reporting engine [website]
API [website]

Administration:

Role-based permissions [3]
Configurable parameters for screens, statuses, validation rules [3]
Multi-language (17+ languages including Chinese, Czech, Dutch) [1]

What’s notably absent or thin: real-time collaboration (no embedded chat, no live document co-authoring), a modern integration marketplace, and a polished mobile experience [3]. If your team runs on Slack threads and Google Docs comments, ProjeQtOr won’t feel native to that workflow.

Pricing: SaaS vs self-hosted math

ProjeQtOr self-hosted (open source):

Software license: €0 (AGPL-3.0)
VPS to run it: €5–15/month
Support: community forum (free, no SLA) [2]

ProjeQtOr managed hosting (their SaaS):

1–20 users: €132/month [3]
21–50 users: €264/month [3]
51–100 users: pricing on request [2]
Minimum subscription: 3 months [2]
Includes: dedicated database, daily backups, SSL, 99.9% uptime SLA [2]

ProjeQtOr professional support (on top of self-hosted):

1–20 users: €180/month [3]
21–50 users: €360/month [3]

Competitors for context:

monday.com: $9/user/month (Basic), scales to $19+/user for automation and reporting
Jira: $8.15/user/month (Standard), $16/user/month (Premium)
Asana: $10.99/user/month (Starter), $24.99/user/month (Advanced)

Concrete math for a 15-person team:

On monday.com Standard (~$12/user/month): 15 × $12 = $180/month, or $2,160/year.

On ProjeQtOr managed hosting (1–20 users): €132/month — comparable to monday.com, but you get a far deeper feature set (financials, RIDA, baselines) that would require monday.com’s Enterprise tier.

Self-hosted on a €6 Hetzner VPS: €6/month, €72/year. You handle setup and updates, or you pay ProjeQtOr for a support subscription if you need SLA-backed help.

The honest caveat: the self-hosted path assumes someone on your team can handle a Linux server and PHP/MySQL deployment. If that person doesn’t exist, the €132/month SaaS option is the actual starting point — and at that price it competes differently.

Deployment reality check

ProjeQtOr runs on PHP + MySQL/MariaDB. Installation is a traditional LAMP-stack deployment: unzip the package into a web directory, configure a database, set file permissions, run the install wizard. There’s no official Docker image from the vendor in their primary documentation, though community Docker setups exist.

What you need:

A Linux VPS with at least 2GB RAM
PHP (8.x), Apache or nginx, MySQL or MariaDB
A domain with HTTPS (Certbot/Let’s Encrypt handles this)
SMTP server or relay for email notifications

What can go sideways:

FitGap [3] notes that “integration options depend on available connectors, APIs, and the chosen deployment approach, which can require technical effort to connect to CRM, finance, or HR systems.” There’s no Zapier-style native connector list — integrations happen through the API.
The UI is built around formal project management data models. First-time setup requires configuring resource types, work categories, status workflows, and access profiles before it feels useful. Jean-François on Capterra [1] explicitly says: get help from the forum or a specialist to set it up right.
No SSO documentation is prominently featured in self-hosted community docs. For teams requiring Active Directory integration, verify this before committing.
Test case functionality is cited as underdeveloped [1] — if you’re doing formal QA within the tool, this module needs improvement.

Realistic time estimate for a technical person: 2–4 hours to a working instance. For a non-technical founder who has never touched PHP or nginx: budget a full day or outsource the deploy entirely.

Pros and cons

Pros

Genuinely free core. AGPL-3.0, no license fees, no usage limits, no feature gating in the open-source version [1][3]. A Capterra reviewer literally says “no limitations” on the free version.
15+ years of production stability. Not a startup’s MVP — this has been running real projects since around 2010. The Capterra reviewer who switched from Jira calls it “stable, safe” [1][website].
Comprehensive PM feature set. Gantt, WBS, RIDA, baselines, financial tracking, timesheets, capacity planning — all in one tool without paying per-module [website][3][4].
Built for governance. RIDA tracking, change management, project baselines, and compliance with ISO/CMMI/ITIL standards are first-class features, not afterthoughts [1][website].
Multi-language (17+ languages). Strong European and international community. French company with serious GDPR posture [1][website].
Self-hosted data sovereignty. Your data stays on your server, in your country, under your control — not routed through a US SaaS vendor [2][website].
Active community forum. Reviewers explicitly credit the forum for getting up to speed, and the vendor is responsive [1][2].
Modular activation. You can start with simple task/kanban and progressively enable more complex modules as team maturity grows [website].

Cons

Steep learning curve. Two independent Capterra reviewers both flag it. The interface is structured around project management concepts — if your team isn’t PM-literate, adoption will be hard [1][3].
No modern collaboration layer. No embedded chat, no real-time co-authoring, no whiteboard. You will need Slack, Teams, or Notion alongside it for team communication [3].
Limited integration marketplace. Compared to Jira or monday.com, prebuilt connectors to CRM, finance, and HR systems are thin. Custom integrations require API work [3].
No Docker from vendor. LAMP-stack deployment is more friction than a docker-compose up workflow. Community Docker setups exist but aren’t first-party [3].
No GitHub/public repo. There’s no public contribution history to evaluate community health. Stars, fork count, and contributor trajectory aren’t visible [merged profile].
Test case module is weak. Specifically flagged by a Capterra reviewer — if software QA tracking matters to you, investigate before committing [1].
AGPL license complexity for vendors. MIT lets you build a product on top freely. AGPL means any SaaS product you build on ProjeQtOr must also be open-sourced. Fine for internal use, requires legal review for commercial products [3].
SaaS managed hosting isn’t cheap. €132/month for a 20-person team is reasonable for what it covers, but you’re not getting a bargain versus Jira if you’re paying for SaaS hosting + support [2][3].

Who should use this / who shouldn’t

Use ProjeQtOr if:

You’re a PMO, project manager, or operations team running structured multi-project environments with real governance needs — dependencies, baselines, RIDA tracking, financial variance.
You’re currently paying for microsoft Project, Jira Premium, or monday.com Enterprise and the complexity of ProjeQtOr’s setup is worth avoiding a $1,000+/month SaaS bill.
Your team is in Europe and data sovereignty or GDPR compliance is a real requirement, not just a checkbox.
You have a technical person who can handle a PHP/MySQL deployment — or you’re willing to pay €132/month for managed hosting.
You want a tool that will still work in 10 years without a vendor raising prices or sunsetting a plan.

Skip it (use Jira or Linear) if:

You’re a software development team whose PM workflow is primarily sprint planning, issue tracking, and CI/CD integration. ProjeQtOr’s strength isn’t developer tooling.

Skip it (use Asana or monday.com) if:

Your team’s main need is visual task management, and “project management” means organizing who’s doing what this week. The overhead of ProjeQtOr’s data model is not worth it for simple team coordination.

Skip it (use ProjectLibre or GanttProject) if:

You need a single-user desktop Gantt tool for planning one project. ProjeQtOr is a multi-user web application — it’s overbuilt for solo use [4].

Think carefully if:

You want to build a commercial product on top of ProjeQtOr. AGPL means your product must also be open-sourced, which closes some business models.

Alternatives worth considering

Redmine — older, Ruby on Rails, agile-focused, strong plugin ecosystem. Lacks a native Gantt editor in core. More developer-community oriented than ProjeQtOr [4].
OpenProject — the closest open-source competitor with a similar feature scope (Gantt, WBS, time tracking, cost reporting). GPL-licensed with commercial edition. Better Docker support and more modern UI [4].
Jira — the default for software teams. Better developer integrations, app marketplace, CI/CD hooks. More expensive at scale, fully closed-source.
monday.com — cleaner onboarding, better for non-PM teams. Missing formal governance features (baselines, RIDA) without custom builds. $9+/user/month.
ProjectLibre — free, open-source desktop Microsoft Project alternative. Single user only. Good for one project manager, no collaboration [4].
GanttProject — free, desktop, single-user. Same caveat as ProjectLibre [4].
)project-open[ — also mentioned in the opensource.com roundup [4] for managing entire organizations. More enterprise-oriented, higher complexity.

For a non-technical founder choosing between these: if you have a PM who knows what a WBS is and needs real project controls, ProjeQtOr is worth the setup. If you’re trying to get your team to stop using a shared Google Sheet, monday.com will get you there faster.

Bottom line

ProjeQtOr is the tool that serious project managers choose when they’re tired of paying enterprise SaaS prices for features that a 15-year-old open-source project already has. The feature set is genuine — Gantt, WBS, RIDA, baselines, financial tracking, capacity planning, agile boards — and the stability record is real. You don’t get a polished 2024 UI, a Slack integration that works out of the box, or a zero-friction onboarding. You get a proven project management engine that costs nothing to license, runs on your own infrastructure, and will still be running in ten years. If your team has a real PM discipline and someone who can handle a LAMP-stack deploy, the math is obvious. If you’re looking for a visual board your non-PM team will actually use without training, ProjeQtOr is not the right answer.

If the deployment is the blocker, that’s exactly what upready.dev deploys for clients — one-time setup, you own the infrastructure, no recurring SaaS bill.