What open source project management actually means
Open source software publishes its source code and lets you read it, change it, and run it on your own terms. Applied to project management, it means the tool your company plans its work in is a thing you hold, not a service you rent. This page explains the idea, and where Orangescrum Community Edition fits into it.
- AGPL-3.0
- No seat limits
- Your database
- Public repository
What is open source?
Open source means the source code, the human readable instructions the software is built from, is published under a licence that grants you rights over it. Most open source software costs nothing, but that is a side effect rather than the definition. The definition is what you are allowed to do.
The whole source is published. Anyone can see exactly what the software does before trusting it with their work.
Adapt it to how your organisation actually works, rather than waiting for a vendor to agree it is worth building.
Pass copies on. Run it for a hundred people or ten thousand without asking anyone.
Publish what you improved so the next person starts from your work. Under AGPL v3 this is the deal, not an optional extra.
Closed software gives you none of these. You get a licence to use a binary, and everything about how it works, where it stores your data, and how long it will exist stays the vendor’s decision.
What is open source project management software?
It is project management software whose code is published, and which you install on servers you control instead of signing up to somebody else’s. The features look familiar: projects, tasks, boards, milestones, time tracking, reports. What changes is who holds the system.
A hosted tool keeps your plans, your estimates, your client names, and your team’s hours on infrastructure you cannot inspect, under terms that can be revised. A self hosted open source tool puts all of that in a database with your name on it. For most teams that is a preference. For some, a hospital, a bank, a defence supplier, a government department, it is the only arrangement their rules permit.
Projects, files, and time records sit in a database you administer. No third party holds them, and no contract change moves them.
An air gapped network is a normal deployment, not an enterprise upsell. That matters for defence, health, and regulated finance.
Security review does not stop at a vendor questionnaire. Your own people can read the code that handles your data.
Fork it, patch it, wire it into internal systems. You are not limited to the integrations someone else prioritised.
Adding people is a capacity question, not a budget negotiation. Contractors and part timers stop being line items.
If a company loses interest, the code is still published and still yours to run. That is the point of the licence.
What Orangescrum Community Edition is
Orangescrum Community Edition is our project management application, published in full under the GNU AGPL v3 and free to run for as many people as you like. The first public release, v0.1.0, went out on 11 August 2026. It is built on CakePHP 4 with PHP 8.2 and PostgreSQL 16, and it runs on Docker, on Linux, on Windows, on macOS, or on an AWS image.
It is the core of the product, not a trial of it. There is no seat cap, no expiry, and no paid tier hidden inside it. It is also not everything we make, and the honest way to explain that is a list rather than a paragraph.
In the Community Edition
- Projects, tasks, and subtasks
- List, Kanban, calendar, and overview views
- Custom task statuses you define and reorder
- Checklists on work items
- Milestones
- Time logging against tasks
- Comments and at mentions
- Labels and saved search filters
- Task reminders
- Roles and permissions
- Personal dashboards
- File attachments, with cloud storage links
- Two factor authentication
- Editable email templates
- A REST API
Not in it, and where to find it
- Scrum, sprints, and backlogs
- Gantt charts and dependencies
- Resource and workload management
- Timesheets and approvals
- Budget, cost, and invoicing
- Defect tracking
- Test case management
- Document management and wiki
- Risk management
- AI chat and the MCP server
- SSO, SAML, and LDAP
These live in the Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
Who should use it
Self hosting suits teams who would rather own a problem than outsource it. Concretely, that tends to be these four.
Engineering teams who self host by default
You already run your own Postgres and your own CI. One more service is not a burden, and you would rather read the code than a trust page.
Regulated and public sector teams
Where the data is not allowed to leave the building, and where an auditor will ask what the software does with it.
Universities and research groups
Large fluctuating headcount, a small budget, and a real need to keep records after the project ends.
Non profits and volunteer projects
Unlimited contributors at no licence cost, which is exactly the shape of volunteer work.
And who should not
Recommending this to the wrong team wastes their week, so here is the other half.
Self hosting means somebody patches the server and takes the backups. If that person does not exist, the Cloud edition is the honest answer.
Those are not in the open source edition. Read the list above before planning a migration around them.
Community support is a public issue tracker and a mailing list. There is no service level agreement behind it.
Our contribution to open source
Orangescrum is built on open source. CakePHP runs the application, PostgreSQL stores every row, PHP executes all of it, and none of those cost us a licence fee. Publishing our own source under a copyleft licence is how we pay part of that back.
The strongest of the common copyleft licences. It closes the network loophole, so anyone offering it as a service has to publish their changes too. We chose it knowing it binds us as well.
The repository holds the application itself, with its migrations and install tooling, not a cut down sample. It shares its lineage with the codebase our commercial editions grew from.
CakePHP, PostgreSQL, and PHP carry this product. Publishing our own source is the least we owe the projects we depend on every day.
Bugs and requests are filed, discussed, and closed in the open on GitHub, where anyone can read the history.
Report what breaks, ask for what is missing, or send a patch. Improving the install documentation counts, and so does telling us the instructions were wrong on your distribution.
Common questions
What does open source actually mean?
It means the source code is published under a licence that lets anyone read it, change it, and pass it on. It is not the same as free of charge, although open source software usually is. The important part is the rights you get: you can inspect what the software does, adapt it, and keep running it whatever the original authors decide to do next.
What is open source project management software?
Project management software whose source code is published, and which you install on your own servers rather than signing up to a hosted service. You get the same kinds of features, projects, tasks, boards, and time tracking, but the application and its database run on infrastructure you control.
Is Orangescrum Community Edition really free?
Yes. It is published under the GNU AGPL v3 licence at no cost, with no user limit and no paid tier inside it. You pay for your own server and for whoever maintains it, the same as any software you host yourself.
What is the AGPL v3, in practice?
It is a copyleft licence. You can use, change, and redistribute the software, and if you distribute it or run a modified version as a network service, you have to publish your changes under the same licence. For a team running it internally this rarely changes anything. For a company wanting to resell it as a hosted product, it matters a great deal.
How is the Community Edition different from the Cloud and Self-Hosted editions?
The Community Edition covers core project and task management. The commercial editions add the modules listed on this page as not included, such as Scrum, Gantt, timesheets, cost and invoicing, test management, document management, AI, and single sign on, along with support agreements.
Can I move from the Community Edition to a paid edition later?
Yes. There is a supported migration path from the Community Edition to both the Cloud and Self-Hosted editions, and your projects, tasks, time records, and history move with you. Get in touch and our team runs the migration with you rather than leaving you to script it. It is worth noting the reverse too: because you hold the database, you are not locked in either direction.
Who maintains it?
Orangescrum maintains the repository, and issues and pull requests are handled in public on GitHub. It is not a community fork of an abandoned product.
What support is there?
Community support: the public GitHub issue tracker and the Orangescrum Community Support Google Group. There is no service level agreement. If you need guaranteed response times, that comes with the commercial editions.
What do I need to run it?
PHP 8.2 or later, PostgreSQL 16, and Apache, with Nginx also supported. It is built on CakePHP 4. Docker is the quickest way to start, and the download page covers every supported deployment method.
Can it run with no internet connection?
Yes. It is a self contained application and a database, so an air gapped install is a normal deployment rather than a special case.
Will you keep publishing releases?
Releases are published on GitHub with notes for each version. Watch the repository or join the Google Group to hear when a new version ships.
How can I contribute?
Open an issue for a bug or a request, or send a pull request. Reading the code and reporting what does not work is genuinely useful, and so is improving the install documentation.
Ready to run it?
The download page has every deployment method, the requirements, the install guides, and the release itself.