Project management, CRM, and agile in one self-hosted tool — reviewed honestly, including the critical question about whether it still exists.

TL;DR

What it is: MIT-licensed, TypeScript-based project management platform combining kanban boards, a Notion-like editor, a built-in Sales CRM module, and agile sprint tracking — all self-hosted [1].
Who it’s for: Small teams wanting to consolidate project management and sales CRM into a single self-hosted tool rather than paying for Asana plus HubSpot separately.
GitHub stars: 1,287 as of the data available.
Cost savings: Pricing data not available — the official website is inaccessible.
Critical red flag: AlternativeTo has marked Tillywork as discontinued with “Website is no longer available” [1]. The website scrape for this review failed entirely. Evaluate accordingly.
Key strength: Unusual all-in-one scope — project management, Sales CRM, and agile modules in a single MIT-licensed self-hosted app.
Key weakness: Unclear to absent maintenance. If the project is abandoned, you are inheriting a codebase, not joining a community.

What is Tillywork

Tillywork launched in mid-2024 as a TypeScript-based project management platform with broader scope than most tools in the category. Rather than being just a kanban board like Wekan or Kanboard, or just issue tracking like Plane, it tried to be the all-in-one workspace: project management, sales CRM, and agile sprint planning under a single self-hosted MIT-licensed roof [1].

The product description on AlternativeTo — the most complete public record available, since the official website no longer loads — positions it as: “Manage projects, streamline marketing and sales, and create your product roadmap in one app.” It organized into three distinct modules [1]:

Project Management: General task and project tracking with customizable views
Sales CRM: Customer relationship management and sales pipeline tracking, targeting “fast-moving marketing and sales teams”
Agile Projects: Sprint-based development workflow for product and engineering teams

A Notion-like rich text editor for task content was a distinguishing detail — the idea being that you could write structured, block-formatted content directly inside tasks rather than attaching separate documents [1].

The project was added to AlternativeTo on June 3, 2024, and written in TypeScript under the MIT license [1]. With 1,287 GitHub stars, it sits at the small end of the self-hosted project management space — Plane has tens of thousands of stars, Taiga and OpenProject have mature communities, and even niche tools like Wekan have 18,000+ stars.

The unavoidable caveat: As of this review, the official website (tilly.work) is unreachable, and AlternativeTo has flagged it discontinued [1]. The GitHub README returned no content in the data available for this review. This changes the evaluation materially. The rest of the article covers what the tool promised — and what that means given the current status.

Why People Chose It

Community data on Tillywork is minimal. It has 12 likes on AlternativeTo with 97 alternatives listed — people used it as a comparison point, but no strong community advocacy formed [1]. No user reviews exist on Trustpilot, G2, or Product Hunt based on available research. The AlternativeTo page has zero comments or reviews [1]. For a tool that launched in mid-2024, that silence is a signal.

The appeal was the all-in-one pitch. The self-hosted project management space in 2024 had clear specialists: Plane for issue tracking, Taiga for agile, Wekan for kanban, OpenProject for Gantt-heavy enterprise work. None had a built-in CRM. Tillywork’s bet was that small startup teams didn’t want to manage two separate self-hosted installs — one for product work, one for sales — and that the context-switch cost between those tools was real enough to pay with.

For a founder running a 5-person team doing both product development and outbound sales, the consolidated pitch makes sense on paper. You’re already juggling Asana or Trello alongside HubSpot or Pipedrive, and both carry ongoing per-seat costs. A single MIT-licensed self-hosted tool covering both workflows, on a VPS you control, changes the economics.

Whether Tillywork delivered that in practice is impossible to verify from available sources — the community simply didn’t generate the review record.

Features

Based on the AlternativeTo feature list and product description — the primary documented source [1]:

Core project management:

Kanban board view
Subtasks
@mentions and team collaboration
Dashboard
Dark mode
Multiple views with per-view customization (“Create multiple views, customize each view for the data you need”)
Notion-style rich text block editor for task descriptions (“Plan your projects with ease, leaving no stone unturned”)

Sales CRM module:

Sales pipeline management
Customer relationship tracking
Sales metrics dashboard
Explicitly marketed toward marketing and sales teams [1]

Agile Projects module:

Sprint-based workflow
Product development lifecycle management
Targeted at “Product and tech teams”

Self-hosting fundamentals:

MIT license — no commercial agreement for self-hosting, forking, or embedding
TypeScript codebase — Node.js ecosystem, accessible to a large pool of developers

What the data doesn’t cover:

Third-party integrations (GitHub, Slack, Jira, webhooks)
API availability and documentation
Data import from Asana, Trello, or other tools
Authentication options (SSO, LDAP, OAuth providers)
File attachments and storage handling
Notification and email settings

The feature surface documented publicly is thin compared to what Plane, Taiga, or OpenProject have written up across years of community contributions. Whether this reflects early-stage documentation or an incomplete product is unclear without the live codebase.

Pricing: SaaS vs Self-Hosted Math

Pricing data is not available. The official website is inaccessible and no archived pricing was recovered during research. This section cannot be filled with real numbers.

What can be stated with confidence:

The MIT license means the self-hosted version carries no software licensing cost [1].
Infrastructure cost — a VPS, Docker, and storage — would apply as with any self-hosted tool: realistically $5–20/month on Hetzner, Contabo, or equivalent depending on team size.
Whether a managed cloud offering existed at any price point is unknown.

For context on what you’d save if the tool were operational and maintained: Asana Business runs approximately $24.99/user/month billed annually. HubSpot Sales Hub Starter is $15/user/month. A 5-person team using both to cover project management and CRM pays roughly $200+/month. A single self-hosted tool covering both domains, on a $10/month VPS, is a meaningful gap. That math is real — but it only applies if the tool you’re running is receiving maintenance and security patches.

Deployment Reality Check

No deployment documentation was recoverable for this review. The website is down and the GitHub README returned no data. What follows is inference based on the stack.

Likely requirements for a TypeScript PM tool of this type:

Docker or manual Node.js deployment
PostgreSQL or similar relational database (standard for tools in this category)
Redis for session/queue management
A reverse proxy (Caddy or nginx) for HTTPS
An SMTP provider for user notifications and invites

The real question isn’t setup complexity — it’s whether setup makes sense at all.

If Tillywork is genuinely discontinued:

No security patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities
No bug fixes for issues you encounter
Documentation, if it existed, won’t be updated
The 1,287-star community is small, meaning StackOverflow-style community support is thin

Before deploying: go to the GitHub repository directly and check the last commit date, the issue tracker response rate, and whether there have been releases in the past six months. If the repository shows a long streak of unanswered issues and no recent commits, you are not deploying a product — you are forking a snapshot.

For a non-technical founder, the bar here is higher than for a developer. A developer can patch bugs and read the source. A non-technical operator depends entirely on upstream maintenance, and a discontinued project offers none.

Pros and Cons

Pros

MIT license, no strings attached. Self-host, fork, modify, embed in your own product — no commercial agreement required [1]. This is real, not marketing.
Genuine all-in-one scope. Project management plus Sales CRM plus Agile in a single self-hosted install is rare in open-source tooling. Most tools pick one domain [1].
Notion-like editing. Rich block-based task descriptions are a legitimate UX improvement over plain-text notes in tasks [1].
TypeScript codebase. Well-understood stack with a large contributor pool if the project were to be maintained or forked.
No per-seat cost on self-hosted. Unlimited users on your own infrastructure with MIT terms [1].

Cons

Likely discontinued. The official website is unreachable and AlternativeTo has flagged it as discontinued [1]. This overrides most other evaluation criteria.
No community signal. Zero reviews on any platform found during research. No coverage in selfh.st’s self-hosted newsletter, which tracks the space closely [5]. Zero comments on AlternativeTo [1]. A product launched in 2024 with no user feedback anywhere is either very niche or very quiet for a reason.
Tiny GitHub footprint. 1,287 stars is 1/20th of Plane’s community. Fewer eyes on the codebase means more bugs in the wild and less community help when you hit them.
No integration data available. Whether Tillywork connects to GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Zapier, or any third-party service is not documented in available sources [1].
No import path documented. Moving your existing data from Asana, Trello, Jira, or a spreadsheet requires a clear migration tool. None is documented.
Unknown API surface. Programmatic access, webhooks, and external integrations require API documentation. None was found.
No roadmap or changelog accessible. Whether the three modules reached feature parity with stated goals — or stalled mid-development — is unknown.

Who Should Use This / Who Shouldn’t

Consider Tillywork only if:

You’ve verified the GitHub repository directly and confirmed recent commits, active issue responses, and current releases
You’re a TypeScript developer prepared to fork and maintain the codebase yourself if upstream goes dark
Your team is small, technically capable, and can absorb maintenance work
You want an MIT-licensed all-in-one PM + CRM base you can build on, not a polished product you hand to non-developers

Skip it and pick a maintained alternative if:

You need security patches and bug fixes over the next 12–24 months without maintaining the codebase yourself
Your team is non-technical and depends on documentation and community Q&A
You’re making a long-term infrastructure bet and project longevity matters
You need integrations with developer tools (GitHub, Jira, CI/CD pipelines) — no evidence these exist
You want user reviews, forum threads, or real-world deployment cases to assess reliability before committing

The straightforward answer for most non-technical founders: the project status concern is disqualifying until you verify current GitHub activity. Choose something with a demonstrated maintenance track record and real user community.

Alternatives Worth Considering

If Tillywork’s all-in-one pitch appealed, these alternatives are actively maintained:

For project management + agile:

Plane — Clean UI, issue tracking, sprints, roadmaps, cycle management. Self-hosted version available, though some features are gated behind paid tiers [4]. Large community, active development.
Taiga.io — Kanban and Scrum boards, GPL-3.0 license, mature codebase. Good for engineering teams running formal agile [2].
OpenProject — Most feature-complete open-source PM tool. Gantt, time tracking, agile, budget management. GPL-3.0. Used at larger organizations [2].
Wekan — Pure kanban, MIT license, minimal setup. Well-maintained and widely deployed [3].

For CRM (self-hosted):

Twenty — Open-source CRM modeled on Salesforce/HubSpot simplicity, MIT license, active development. Purpose-built for small sales teams.

For notes + project management in one:

AppFlowy — Notion-like block editor with database views, MIT license, active community. Doesn’t include CRM out of the box but the database views can approximate pipeline tracking.

The honest gap: no single well-maintained open-source tool covers exactly what Tillywork promised — PM plus CRM plus agile in one self-hosted install. You’re either accepting two tools (Plane for project work, Twenty for CRM) or you’re betting on a niche tool with uncertain maintenance. Tillywork was the right idea with insufficient follow-through to become a safe long-term bet.

Bottom Line

Tillywork had an interesting proposition: MIT-licensed, all-in-one project management plus sales CRM plus agile sprints in a single self-hosted TypeScript app. For small teams paying separately for task management and CRM SaaS, the consolidation argument is real. The problem is that the official website is down and the project is listed as discontinued — exactly the scenario that makes self-hosted infrastructure a liability rather than an asset for non-technical founders [1]. If you are evaluating project management tools today, invest your time in Plane, OpenProject, or Taiga — projects with large communities, active maintenance, and documented deployments. If you are a developer interested in Tillywork’s architecture as a starting point for a fork, check the GitHub repository directly, read the last six months of commits and issues, and make an informed call. Inheriting a good codebase can be a fine foundation; inheriting a half-finished one is a different proposition entirely.

Sources

AlternativeTo — Tillywork: Manage projects, streamline marketing and sales. https://alternativeto.net/software/tillywork/about/
AlternativeTo — The Best Open Source Asana Alternatives: Top Project Management Tools. https://alternativeto.net/software/asana/?license=opensource
AlternativeTo — The Best Open Source Trello Alternatives: Top 25+ Project Management Tools. https://alternativeto.net/software/trello/?license=opensource
AlternativeTo — Plane: Open source project and issue tracking with integrations. https://alternativeto.net/software/plane/about/
Ethan Sholly, selfh.st — This Week in Self-Hosted (10 January 2025). https://selfh.st/weekly/2025-01-10/