If your team evaluates project management software, Redmine comes up quickly. Development teams at software companies, government agencies, and engineering firms worldwide use it to manage projects, track issues, and coordinate work. In fact, it remains one of the most widely deployed open-source project management platforms available today.
However, “free, open-source project management software” is a description, not an explanation. Project managers evaluating Redmine want to understand what it actually does in practice what problems it solves, where it falls short, and whether it fits their team’s way of working.
This guide answers those questions plainly.
The short answer: Redmine is free, open-source project management software built around structured issue tracking. Teams use it to create projects, break work into issues, assign them to team members, track status, log time, and manage versions. It runs on your own server under the GNU GPL licence. Redmine does not do Kanban boards, Gantt charts with dependencies, or custom dashboards natively those capabilities come from plugins.
Redmine was first released in 2006 by Jean-Philippe Lang. It runs on Ruby on Rails and uses a relational database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite) to store project data. Since its release, its maintainers have kept it actively updated, and it now ranks among the most widely deployed open-source project management platforms in the world.
The core of Redmine is the issue. Everything else projects, trackers, statuses, priorities, categories, versions, time logs exists to describe, organise, and report on issues. If your team’s work can be expressed as a set of tasks with statuses and assignees, Redmine can manage it.
Redmine’s strengths are consistent and have stayed that way across nearly two decades of active use.
Redmine’s issue tracker is its strongest feature. Each issue carries a type (tracker), a status, a priority, an assignee, a due date, estimated time, and custom fields. Teams can also relate issues to each other blocks, duplicates, relates to, precedes. Each issue holds a full comment and history log, and Redmine records every change automatically.
For development teams managing requirements, bugs, features, and tasks, this structure gives teams exactly what they need. Consequently, issues do not disappear or change without a full audit trail.
Redmine supports an unlimited number of projects. Each project carries its own issue tracker, wiki, repository integration, news feed, and forum. Furthermore, team members can participate in multiple projects simultaneously with different roles developer on one project, reporter on another.
Role-based access control is granular. Project administrators define what each role can see and do: create issues, edit issues, manage versions, assign to others, delete, export. As a result, organisations managing several client projects or internal products simultaneously gain clear governance without added complexity.
Every issue in Redmine accepts time entries directly. Developers log hours by activity type development, testing, support against the relevant issue. Redmine then aggregates this data into time reports filterable by project, user, activity, version, and date range.
As a result, teams billing by project or managing budgets against estimated time gain accurate project-level visibility without a separate tool.
Every Redmine project includes a built-in wiki. Teams use it to document requirements, architecture decisions, onboarding processes, and meeting notes stored in the same place as the issues they relate to. Additionally, the wiki is searchable and versioned, so teams can track how documentation evolves over time.
Redmine integrates with Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and other version control systems. When commits reference issue numbers in their message, those commits automatically appear in the issue history. As a result, teams can trace which code changes relate to which issues without ever leaving Redmine.
However, Redmine’s default installation has clear gaps that development teams encounter quickly.
No Kanban board. Redmine shows issues in list views with filters there is no visual board, no drag-and-drop status update, and no WIP limit. Consequently, teams that want a Kanban workflow must add a board plugin or run a parallel tool.
No Gantt chart with dependencies. Redmine includes a basic Gantt view that shows issues as bars on a timeline. However, it is read-only and carries no dependency links between issues. You cannot drag to reschedule. For release planning that involves task dependencies and milestone tracking, therefore, the native Gantt falls short.
No custom dashboards. Every user sees a “My page” view with a fixed set of widgets assigned issues, reported issues, a calendar. In practice, there is no project health dashboard, no cross-project summary, and no configurable KPI view.
No sprint containers. Redmine has no native sprint or iteration concept. Teams running Scrum typically use Redmine versions as sprint proxies, which works, but this approach lacks sprint burndown tracking, backlog prioritisation, and story point management.
No in-app notifications. Redmine sends email notifications for issue changes, but there is no in-app notification feed. As a result, developers who are not monitoring email miss updates until they return to the issue manually.
Teams across a wide range of industries and use cases run Redmine. The most common examples are:
Software development teams — tracking features, bugs, and releases across product or service code. Redmine fits naturally into development workflows because its issue structure maps directly to software work: requirements become issues, bugs become issues, and pull request reviews become issues.
IT and operations teams — managing internal IT requests, infrastructure changes, and support tickets. Redmine’s role-based access and project structure helps IT departments manage multiple systems simultaneously without overlap.
Engineering and manufacturing teams — tracking engineering change orders, compliance tasks, and project milestones. Redmine’s custom fields and flexible tracker configuration let non-software teams adapt it to their specific workflows.
Agencies and consultancies — managing client projects with time tracking and milestone visibility. The per-project structure and time reporting make Redmine particularly useful for agencies that need to track work and time separately per client.
The most common question project managers ask after understanding Redmine is how it compares to Jira, Azure DevOps, or ClickUp.
In short, Redmine trades commercial features for control and cost. It does not have the polish or built-in integrations of a $15-per-user-per-month SaaS product. It also requires a server, plugin management, and occasional maintenance. In return, however, your team owns the data, pays nothing per user, and can extend Redmine’s functionality without vendor permission.
For teams that need structured issue tracking, time reporting, and multi-project governance without per-user SaaS costs, Redmine is a strong fit. For teams that need deep integrations with Slack, Salesforce, and cloud CI/CD pipelines out of the box and have the budget for per-user SaaS pricing a commercial alternative may be faster to get running.
Ultimately, the decision comes down to control and cost versus convenience and integrations.
Redmineflux is Redmine with a full plugin suite pre-integrated and configured and optionally hosted.
Specifically, the Redmineflux plugin suite adds the capabilities Redmine does not have natively: a Kanban and Scrum board, a Gantt chart with dependencies, custom dashboards, timesheet approval workflows, workload visibility, knowledge base management, test case management, and more.
Teams that prefer to self-host can buy Redmineflux plugins as individual licences. Teams that want infrastructure handled can choose Redmineflux Managed Cloud, which provides a fully hosted Redmine environment with all plugins pre-installed.
As a result, teams get a Redmine installation ready to use from day one without plugin compatibility research, server configuration, or manual updates.
Yes. Redmine itself is free and open-source, released under the GNU GPL. There is no per-user fee and no licence cost for the core software. Running Redmine does require a server and technical setup. For extended functionality, teams can separately purchase plugins such as the Redmineflux suite.
Yes. Redmine receives regular updates from its maintainers. Currently, version 5.x and 6.x are the supported releases. The project also carries an active community and a consistent release history since 2006. Enterprise teams should therefore check plugin compatibility before upgrading Redmine versions.
Redmine is self-hosted by default you install it on a server you control. However, cloud-based options exist, including Redmineflux Managed Cloud, where the Redmineflux team manages the infrastructure and provides a fully hosted environment with all plugins pre-installed.
Redmine scales to hundreds of users on appropriately sized infrastructure. Notably, licensing is not per-user you pay nothing per seat regardless of team size. Performance at scale therefore depends on server resources, not the software licence.
Yes. Teams can adapt Redmine’s trackers, custom fields, and workflow configuration to any structured project management use case IT operations, engineering projects, content production, and compliance tracking. In practice, the issue structure is flexible enough to represent most types of structured work.
Overall, Redmine is one of the most proven open-source tools in project management. It handles structured issue tracking reliably, scales across multiple projects and teams, and gives organisations full control over their data. Its limitations no visual boards, no Gantt with dependencies, no custom dashboards are well-understood, and the Redmineflux plugin suite addresses all of them directly.
If your team is evaluating Redmine as a foundation, the question is not whether Redmine works. It does. Instead, the question is whether the default installation covers your workflow or whether a configured, extended version is the right starting point.
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