I tried a bunch of selfhosted alternatives to Trello a few months back and never registered OpenProject as an option.

I mainly used this list https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#tas...

I did focus on "Task management/To-do lists", while OpenProject is listed under the "Project Management" section. This is likely why I missed it as I've been looking for something clean and simple (not JIRA) that is more akin to the earlier versions of Trello (rather than the feature bloated whale it has now become).

Looking at it now and to be honest it doesn't quite look like what I'm looking for when looking for a Trello alternative, I just want cards on a board I can move around (with a bit of metadata)

> I just want cards on a board I can move around (with a bit of metadata)

Yeah you won't find that in OpenProject. I mean, they do have kanban boards, but they're in an enterprise version that I'm assuming you're not interested at.

I use and like https://nullboard.io/preview nullboard which runs in the browser. Because it uses local data, you need to save it or the data is lost when you close the browser window.

> I just want cards on a board I can move around (with a bit of metadata)

If I may, what did you finally settle on?

Still on Trello for now.

Tempted to try building something from scratch since I can always see myself using such a system.

Have you tried Taiga? https://resources.taiga.io/features/5minkanban/ and it's open source (AGPL3)

Not OP but I settled on Deck which is a NextCloud plugin, good enough for me and my wife.

Another thing on that list that is easy to pass over is gitlab. The community edition is slowly but steadily adding more project management features, one of which is the "issue boards" - a kanban style issue view [0].

I feel like people may overlook gitlab when evaluating this sort of product because they think of it as "just" a git hosting solution, or because they assume that PM type features might all be paywalled. I'm sure real power users will find it lacking, but for simple workflows it does the job very well, and it ticks so many boxes in one solution.

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html

On the licensing page of Open Project 'agile boards' is one of the paid features, so I don't see how it is relevant in this case.

Screenshots look good and it is nice to see that they have figured out a good business model for open source software.

But I don't like to see that 2FA is available only in the paid version still in 2021. Security should be at the core of these kinds of systems.

And I hope that maintaining it is much easier than other Ruby projects that I have encountered in the past. For example, I used to run Redmine project management system, and maintaining it up to date was painful due to fragmentation and differences between Ruby versions. Hopefully Docker and better migration scripts have solved those problems nowadays. Still, even with containerization available, when it comes to self hosted solutions I definitely prefer ones that get compiled to nice binaries. Go, Rust, C, etc.

Focalboard team here, thanks for the comment!

We weren't aware of Open Project previously, and we're glad to hear about it.

I think you're right, Focalboard is a lot earlier than Open Project, and it doesn't have as many features.

Focalboard was starting during the Mattermost 2020 Hacktoberfest last year: https://mattermost.com/blog/hacktoberfest-2020-recap/

It's in the early stages of development, only v0.6 right now: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/CHANGELOG...

That said, we're working on it constantly and excited about its future.

Of the features Open Project has now, are there one or two top priorities you'd suggest we consider adding to Focalboard?

We'd love to hear any feedback, feature suggestions or bug reports: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/wiki/Share-your-fee...!

Thanks for replying Focalboard team!

I would say, if 2FA is not already available, 2FA! This is the biggest bumper when I have to choose Open project.

Also, Appimage or Flatpak would be great for easier installation for Linux users. Please don't publish ONLY to snapstore if you're planning. Snap might be good for the Mattermost, but the users dread it and each snap adds boot time to the user's machine which is why I stopped using it. Please add a flatpak or appimage if you plan to add it as snap in snapstore! :)

What's the problem with fragmentation? I guess you're thinking of wasted effort, split mindshare amongst users.

But for me, fragmentation is one of the key benefits of open source. Let thousands of alternatives bloom!

Absolutely. I have grown to dislike this often repeated "don't reinvent the wheel" stance. After some thought you realise 100% of mastering any art is based on imitating and rebuilding existing achievements, because that gives us the basis for aiming even higher with our own ideas.

When we blindly copy our own "Hello World" program into a text file nobody bats an eye. When a group of musicians play a metal song on classical instruments it's called a cover. But when someone builds their own database to have some fun and get better in-depth understanding of the tech you will always find someone whining about the not-invented-here-syndrome.

Effort isn't wasted just because it didn't change the world.

Also confusion and decision paralysis for new users, as well as limiting new features to only a subset of users unless someone takes the time to re-implement them. And lots of FOSS projects end up as abandonware, and consolidation can increase the share of users whose software is actively maintained. Split mindshare is also a big deal for applications with strong network effects, though probably not for something like this.

So, reductio ad absurdum, we shouldn't have bothered with Ruby when we already had Python. Or Linux since we had Unix. Or React since we had Angular.

I agree that launching similar products has its own downsides, but the upside is that competition acts like evolution - it strengthens the best products, and destroys the weak ones.

It looks like a forked non-free version of redmine but with less flexibility https://www.redmine.org/

I’ve been using redmine for project management for a decade. It is reliably excellent.

Last time I used it, it was generally a good experience, albeit slow sometimes when moving/editing stuff around but amount of features it offers even on free plan in my opinion compensates that. Also API is rather easy to use. I'm also surprised it doesn't get so much exposure, alongside https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

Big fan and active user of OpenProject here, I recommend it.

Agreed OpenProject is impressive. I used it for myself for a time. Then switched back to OrgMode. But if I come to manage a team with several projects I would clearly use that.

It’s quite heavy and slow.

I wish someone would make a modern project management system that was not working against the user all the time.

I use Jira heavily in different projects and I am baffled at how slow it is. Such a popular product but the user experience due to frontend slowness is terrible.

Can you go into detail on "modern"?

The problem with project management systems is that you have four important levers:

* configurability (enforcing rules, custom workflows, triggers)

* usability of the UI (speed, simplicity)

* multi-user (including consistency between users)

* scale (number of projects, users, tickets)

You can't have all those at the same time. If you want it to be very configurable, you have to choose whether to prioritise scale (Jira), or usability (Trello, Asana), or drop the multi-user (Excel, Google Sheets).

In my opinion, the problem with most project management systems is the problem with project management management itself - trying to do too many complicated things at the same time. It's pretty easy to manage even a fairly large programme of well-scoped projects on just about any software.

By 'modern' I was thinking about system with most of the features that Jira and others have, but with fast backend and fast javascript UI.

I don't think that speed is dependent on simplicity. One could make an advanced system with all the features that is still optimized for speed. There are other programs that check all the boxed, just not one for project management. I guess everyone is used to it. :)

We developed Taiga (taiga.io) with that in mind. It's meant for cross-domain teams but a lot of people use it for their own personal projects. At the moment, 50% of new Taiga users come from Trello or Jira (in that order). Check it out https://resources.taiga.io/getting-started/

Seconded. For reference, have multiple websites with 10K to 100K visitors monthly on a DO droplet, with a wiki and a dynamic blog working just fine.

Trying this project out made it quite slow and not practical, would need a beefier machine / setup. I decided not to invest time in testing it further, but it may work for others.

Hey, curious. What exactly do you use from Open Project?

Would love to hear a better definition of "heavy". :)

I tried it as a self hosted alternative to Trello for Kanban. It’s got a ton of features compared to Trello and updating things and moving cards is quite slow.

Thanks for sharing @rayiner. I haven't looked at it.

When has the fragmentation argument ever prevailed, in the history of technology? New flavors of practically everything, down to bare metal, release daily. The world may agree on communication protocols, but even that is nearly impossible to do together.