Etapero vs OpenProject

What OpenProject is

OpenProject is open-source project management software under the GNU GPL v3. The free Community edition runs on your own server; the paid Enterprise edition runs on premises or in the vendor’s cloud. It has work packages, a Gantt chart, boards, time tracking, a wiki and meetings.

Some features are paid add-ons. In the free edition, baseline comparison is limited to changes since yesterday; other periods and dates are an Enterprise add-on. Portfolio management is a Premium-level add-on.

OpenProject’s strengths

• An open licence. The code is available to study and extend.
• Your own infrastructure. Installation in Docker with PostgreSQL and LDAP sign-in — what companies that cannot use the cloud need.
• A Gantt chart with dependencies. “Precedes — follows” relations with automatic date shifts are in the free edition too.
• A wide set of modules. Work packages, boards, time tracking and a wiki in one system.

What users say

The most detailed account of an adoption in Russia is “OpenProject in practice” on Habr, a Russian tech community (2024). An IT company was moving to a project model and wanted a year-long Gantt chart for the whole company. Excel stopped coping, MS Project and BigPicture licences were hard to get, and cloud trackers would not do — they needed their own server. They deployed it in Docker with PostgreSQL; the author describes staff going through “anger, bargaining, then acceptance”, and after a few months it took root. They liked the shared Gantt chart, dependencies with automatic shifts, and milestones. They disliked the lack of settings inheritance between projects, an unintuitive interface, and the portfolio being paid only.

Commenters add that there is no resource management, large numbers of tasks are handled heavily, and the free edition shows menu items for paid features.

Similar themes recur on Hacker News. In a 2020 thread the lack of a resource module is called a “huge gap”, while the built-in Gantt chart and dependencies are a plus. The author of the kronis.dev blog described in 2022 how a Docker image update broke his installation after the bundled database changed, concluding that all-in-one builds are fragile — while OpenProject remains his main tool.

On Reddit’s self-hosting community (2023) a user tried OpenProject, Leantime, Taiga, Kanboard and Plane and chose OpenProject as the most mature: tasks, Kanban, Gantt, a wiki, an API and webhooks. In the OpenProject community people complain about Enterprise banners in the free edition and work through Docker updates — for example, how a pinned image tag stops a new version from arriving.

Stories of adoption and moving

The largest story is Rosatom. As the Greenatom team tells it on Habr, the corporation was leaving Jira and Confluence, a tender among Russian systems produced no winner, and in the end they built their own system, Atom.Project — according to the article, on a fork of OpenProject; comments on it add other details about its base. They moved more than 2,000 projects and 50,000 active tasks, with some projects reaching 150–200 thousand tasks. They had to write allocation of people across projects, cross-system search and time tracking themselves; Ruby on Rails developers were short, and both systems ran side by side for about a year.

A small team on Hacker News and Reddit in 2025 described moving off Jira to save money and keep control of its data: OpenProject’s free edition turned out “usable”, though the interface is not the best, and the official migration tool did not work, so they wrote their own migration script.

How Etapero differs

Both systems install on your own server in Docker with PostgreSQL, so the main difference is in focus and in what comes at no extra cost. In Etapero, baselines, the critical path, the production calendar and the portfolio with goals, risks and problems are part of the system rather than paid add-ons.

OpenProject is strong as a team workspace: work packages, boards, time tracking, a wiki. Etapero does not try to replace the tracker — it builds the plan on top of Jira when teams already work there, and only reads issues, writing nothing back. That removes the question that needed a long migration in the stories above: how to move thousands of tasks out of Jira into a new system.

Etapero’s work breakdown is edited like a spreadsheet — an answer to the complaint about unintuitive interfaces made about many systems. And if you need an open licence, a large community and tasks with a wiki in one place, OpenProject is a sensible choice.