Best European Alternatives to Jira
Looking for a European alternative to Jira? Atlassian's Jira is widely used but it's a US-Australian company that stores data on American servers. European alternatives offer similar agile project management with data sovereignty.
European project management tools provide agile workflows, issue tracking, and team collaboration while keeping your data in Europe.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
-
1
European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
-
2
Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
-
3
Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
-
4
Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
Why Choose a European Alternative to Jira?
GDPR Protection
Your data stays in Europe, protected by the world's strongest privacy laws.
EU Data Centers
Data processed and stored exclusively within the European Union.
No US Surveillance
Free from CLOUD Act and other US data access laws.
Quality Alternatives
Comparable features with European quality and support.
Best European Alternatives to Jira
Privacy-focused alternatives from European companies, evaluated for features, privacy, and GDPR compliance.
OpenProject
Open-source project management with agile boards
Planio
A European alternative to Jira, Redmine hosting, GitHub Issues
Tenzu
French open-source agile PM, the Taiga successor
Everia
AI-native workspace: PM, QA & docs at a flat price
Key takeaways
- Jira Cloud can keep your data in Frankfurt or Dublin. That is residency, not jurisdiction, and Atlassian became a Delaware corporation in October 2022.
- Jira Server has been out of support since 15 February 2024, so self-hosting Jira now means Data Center.
- OpenProject is the closest replacement for what Jira Server was: your servers, your schedule, open source.
- Taiga is the answer for teams whose Jira is really a board with a backlog behind it.
- Nothing here replaces JQL or the Marketplace, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling something.
Why people leave Jira
Almost nobody leaves Jira because it cannot track issues. It tracks issues better than anything else here, and JQL is the only query language in this market that a team genuinely misses after switching.
They leave for one of two reasons. The first is that Atlassian Corporation redomiciled to Delaware in October 2022, and only its operating headquarters is still in Sydney. Jira Cloud does offer data residency on Standard, Premium and Enterprise at no extra cost, with EU (Frankfurt and Dublin), Germany and Switzerland among the regions, so your issues can sit in Europe. The CLOUD Act still reaches the provider holding them.
The second is that the self-hosted route closed. Jira Server stopped being supported on 15 February 2024, and what remains for running it yourself is Data Center, priced for large installations. Teams that ran Jira on their own server were not asked whether they wanted to move.
- Residency is not jurisdiction Choosing the Frankfurt region puts your issues on European soil and changes nothing about who can be compelled to produce them. Atlassian is a US corporation, so a valid US order reaches Atlassian whichever data centre the tickets live in. If your objection is a procurement rule about data location, residency answers it. If it is about which state can compel disclosure, only a different provider does.
- The server option was taken away Jira Server reached end of support on 15 February 2024. That was the version an internal IT team could run on its own hardware, patch on its own schedule and keep off the public internet. What is left is Cloud, or Data Center at a scale most teams are not. For an organisation that self-hosted deliberately rather than out of habit, that is a policy change imposed from outside.
- You are paying for the ninety per cent you do not use Jira is configurable to a degree that becomes its own job. Custom fields, screens, permission schemes and workflow conditions accumulate until someone owns them full time, and the Marketplace apps that make it bearable are billed per user on top of the licence. Teams that switch rarely say the replacement is more capable. They say the administration stopped.
- It assumes you build software Jira was designed around a developer issue and everything else was fitted to that shape afterwards. Marketing teams, manufacturing lines and PMOs end up describing their work as bugs with the labels changed. Several of the tools here start from a different assumption, and for non-engineering work that is not a downgrade.
What you have to replace, not just match
Before comparing anything, decide which Jira you are replacing, because Jira is three products wearing one name and no single European tool covers all three.
The first is the issue tracker: a queue of work items with states, assignees, custom fields and a query language over the top. The second is the portfolio layer, which in the Atlassian world means Jira Align rather than Jira itself. The third is everything the Marketplace added: time sheets, test management, roadmaps, diagrams.
OpenProject and Taiga answer the first, and OpenProject reaches furthest into the second on its own. Nobody here answers the third, and the honest version of this page says so: if your Jira runs on six paid Marketplace apps, moving is a project rather than a migration.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | OpenProject | Berlin, Germany | Free Community Edition / Cloud from about €5.95/user/month | EU (Germany) |
| #2 | Taiga | Madrid, Spain | Free self-hosted / cloud from about €5/user/month | EU (Spain) |
| #3 | Zenkit | Karlsruhe, Germany | Free plan / from about €9/user/month | EU (Germany) |
| #4 | Planio | Berlin, Germany | Free for 2 users / $25 per month for 5, $59 for 10, $125 for 20 | EU (Germany) |
| #5 | Tenzu | France | Free self-hosted / cloud on a pay-what-you-want model | EU (France) |
| #6 | Everia | Sweden | Flat company price from about €35/month for the whole team | EU (Sweden) |
| #7 | factro | Bochum, Germany | Free for up to 10 users / from about €7.99/user/month | EU (Germany) |
How each alternative compares to Jira
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (EU) or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Jira is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Teams that self-hosted Jira on purpose and lost that option in February 2024
OpenProject is AGPL-licensed software from OpenProject GmbH in Berlin, and the Community Edition is free to run on your own infrastructure. That is the specific gap Jira left when Server went out of support: your servers, your patch schedule, your network, and no seat count telling you that self-hosting is for organisations of a certain size.
It is also broader than Jira in a direction Jira never went. Work packages, Gantt charts, baselines, budgets, time and cost tracking and phase planning are native rather than Marketplace apps, which makes it a better fit for an organisation running projects with a budget attached and not only sprints with a backlog attached.
What you give up is density. There is no JQL, the board experience is more workmanlike than Jira's, and the ecosystem is a fraction of the size. If your Jira is a finely tuned instrument, this will feel blunt for the first month.
What OpenProject does better than Jira
- You can run it on your own hardware, which Jira Server allowed and Jira no longer does below Data Center scale
- AGPL-licensed, so the code can be read and audited rather than trusted
- German operating company and German hosting, or your own servers, with no US parent anywhere in the chain
- Gantt charts, budgets, baselines and cost tracking are built in rather than bought per user from a marketplace
- The free Community Edition has no seat limit, so cost scales with your hardware rather than your headcount
Where OpenProject is a step down from Jira
- No equivalent of JQL for querying across projects
- The app ecosystem is small next to the Atlassian Marketplace
- Agile boards are less polished than Jira's, which is the part daily users notice first
- Someone has to own the installation, the upgrades and the backups
Standout against Jira. It is the only tool here that still sells what Atlassian stopped selling: a full project management server you run yourself, supported, under a licence that lets you read the code.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Spain). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Europe (cloud) or self-hosted anywhere.
- Source code. Open source, where Jira is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Scrum and Kanban teams that never wanted the administration Jira came with
Taiga is built by Kaleidos Ventures SL in Madrid, licensed under MPL 2.0, free to self-host and free on the hosted plan for open-source projects and non-profits. It does Scrum and Kanban, with backlogs, sprints, epics, issues and a wiki, and then it stops, which is the point.
The comparison with Jira is a comparison of philosophies. Jira can be configured into almost any process, and the cost of that is that someone has to configure it. Taiga has opinions, and a team that shares them has a working setup on the first afternoon rather than after a consulting engagement.
For a team that outgrows it, that same opinionatedness becomes the limit. There is no portfolio layer, reporting is basic next to Jira dashboards, and there is nothing resembling Jira Service Management beside it.
What Taiga does better than Jira
- Open source under MPL 2.0, so the code can be inspected and the deployment is yours
- Spanish company with EU hosting, or self-hosted wherever you choose
- Free to self-host, and free on the hosted plan for open-source projects and non-profits
- A working Scrum or Kanban setup out of the box, with no schemes or workflow conditions to own
- Nothing to administer, which is the single most common reason teams leave Jira
Where Taiga is a step down from Jira
- Deliberately narrower: no portfolio view, no budgets, no classical project planning
- Reporting is thin compared with Jira dashboards and saved filters
- No service desk product beside it, so support tickets live somewhere else
- A much smaller company and a much smaller ecosystem than Atlassian
Standout against Jira. It is the only tool here whose answer to Jira's complexity is to refuse to have any. For teams whose Jira is mostly unused fields, that is the feature rather than the gap.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (EU).
- Source code. Closed source, as Jira is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Departments doing work that is not a software backlog
Zenkit is made by Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH in Karlsruhe and hosted in Germany. Its organising idea is that the same underlying data should be viewable as a Kanban board, a table, a calendar, a mind map or a hierarchy, and that you switch views rather than switch tools when the work changes shape.
That matters against Jira specifically, because Jira starts from an issue and fits everything else to that shape. A marketing calendar, an editorial pipeline or a maintenance schedule can be expressed in Jira, and the result reads like a bug tracker with the labels changed.
For a software team the trade runs the other way. There is no query language, developer tool integration is shallow next to Atlassian's, and the governance features an engineering organisation relies on are lighter.
What Zenkit does better than Jira
- German company and German hosting, so company, servers and law sit in one EU jurisdiction
- The same data as a board, table, calendar, mind map or hierarchy, without moving it between tools
- A free plan exists, where Jira's free tier stops at ten users
- Suited to non-engineering work without forcing it into an issue-tracker shape
- Part of a suite, so notes and databases sit beside the projects rather than in a second subscription
Where Zenkit is a step down from Jira
- Not an engineering issue tracker, and not pretending to be one
- No query language, and no saved cross-project filters of the kind Jira teams build their day around
- Developer tool integration is shallow compared with the Atlassian ecosystem
- Lighter on permissions and governance than an engineering organisation usually requires
Standout against Jira. It is the one on this page that does not assume your work is software. For a department that inherited Jira from the engineering team, that assumption was the problem.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany, in an ISO 27001 data centre in the Vogtland region with backups in Frankfurt.
- Source code. Closed source, as Jira is.
- Independently checked. ISO/IEC 27001:2013 data centre.
Best for: Teams that want issues and repositories in one place, hosted rather than self-run
Planio is hosted Redmine, run by Planio GmbH in Berlin. Redmine is the issue tracker that many teams ran alongside or instead of Jira Server for a decade, and Planio takes over the running of it while keeping the shape: issues with custom fields, versions, a roadmap, time tracking, and Git or Subversion repositories in the same product.
Against Jira the appeal is that it closes the gap Server left without asking you to become an administrator. The data centre is in the Vogtland region with ISO/IEC 27001:2013, backups go to Frankfurt, and the infrastructure is Hetzner, so the company, the servers and the hosting provider are all German. OpenProject gives you the same independence if you run it yourself; Planio gives it to you if you would rather not.
What you give up is modernity. The interface is Redmine underneath and looks it, the mobile experience is thin, and pricing goes by bands of active users rather than per seat, so a team of eleven pays the twenty-user rate.
What Planio does better than Jira
- Git and Subversion repositories in the same product, where Jira needs Bitbucket or GitHub beside it
- A German company on German hardware from a German provider, with no US party anywhere in the chain
- A help desk and a wiki included rather than bought from a marketplace
- Free for two active users, where Jira's free tier ends at ten and has no repositories
- Redmine underneath, so the schema is documented and an export is readable rather than a proprietary dump
Where Planio is a step down from Jira
- The interface is dated next to Jira and everyone notices in week one
- No JQL, and filters are weaker than saved Jira searches
- Priced in user bands, so headcount just over a threshold is expensive
- Almost no mobile app
Standout against Jira. It is the only entry here that hands you issues, code repositories and a help desk from one German supplier, which is the combination Atlassian sells as three products.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Europe (cloud) or self-hosted anywhere.
- Source code. Open source, where Jira is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Agile teams that want governance guarantees along with the software
Tenzu comes from BIRU, a French worker cooperative, and is AGPLv3 licensed with a free self-hosted edition and a pay-what-you-want cloud. It does scrum and kanban with the concepts intact: backlog, sprints, stories, and a workflow that does not need configuring before the first standup.
The interesting part against Jira is not the feature list but the ownership. A SCOP is owned by the people who work in it and cannot be sold out from under its users the way a venture-backed tool can. Anyone who watched Jira Server end in February 2024 knows why that matters: the product did not fail, the owner made a decision.
It is also the youngest thing on this page, founded in 2024. That is the risk to weigh, and the AGPL licence is the hedge: if BIRU stops, the code does not.
What Tenzu does better than Jira
- Owned by a worker cooperative, so there is no investor who can retire the product the way Jira Server was retired
- AGPLv3 with a free self-hosted edition and no seat limit
- French company with European hosting, or your own servers
- Scrum and kanban work out of the box, with none of the scheme configuration Jira accumulates
Where Tenzu is a step down from Jira
- Founded in 2024, so it has the shortest track record of anything here
- Far narrower than Jira: no service desk, no portfolio, no marketplace
- Reporting beyond the sprint is thin
- A small community, so answers are harder to find than for Jira
Standout against Jira. The ownership structure is the feature. A cooperative cannot be acquired and wound down, which is the exact thing that happened to the self-hosted Jira these teams were running.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Sweden). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU-hosted.
- Source code. Closed source, as Jira is.
- Independently checked. GDPR, single DPA.
Best for: Teams whose Jira bill grows every time someone needs read access
Everia is a European engineering and product tool with a flat company price rather than a per-seat one. Adding the tenth collaborator, or the fiftieth, costs nothing, which changes who gets invited into the tool.
That matters more against Jira than it first appears. Jira is priced per user, so the stakeholders who only want to look, sales, support, a client, quietly stay outside and get their updates in a meeting instead. A flat price removes the reason to keep people out.
Against Jira it is narrower: no JQL, no marketplace, no service desk product beside it. It is aimed at teams that build software and want tracking plus documents in one place rather than a configurable platform.
What Everia does better than Jira
- Flat company pricing, so read-only stakeholders cost nothing where Jira charges per seat
- European company and hosting, with no US parent
- Tracking and documents in one product, where Jira needs Confluence beside it
- Nothing to configure before the first sprint
Where Everia is a step down from Jira
- No query language and no saved cross-project filters
- No marketplace, so a niche integration is your own problem
- No service desk alongside it
- A much smaller company than Atlassian, with the support expectations that implies
Standout against Jira. It is the only tool here where the price does not move when you invite someone, which quietly fixes the reason half your organisation never opens Jira.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (exclusively).
- Source code. Closed source, as Jira is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Departments that inherited Jira and do not write code
factro is built by Schuchert Managementberatung in Bochum and hosted exclusively in Germany. It is classical project management, with a work breakdown structure, Gantt charts and responsibilities, rather than an issue tracker with a board on top.
It belongs on this page because a large share of Jira accounts are not engineering. Marketing, operations and facilities end up in Jira because the company bought it once, and they describe their work as issues with the labels changed. factro starts from a project tree instead, which is how those teams already think.
For a software team it is the wrong tool on this page, and OpenProject, Planio or Tenzu above it are the answer instead.
What factro does better than Jira
- A work breakdown structure and a project tree, which Jira approximates with epics and labels
- Hosted exclusively in Germany by a German company, with no region to request
- Free for up to ten users, where Jira's free tier stops at ten but drops the reporting
- Built for people who do not write software, which describes most reluctant Jira users
Where factro is a step down from Jira
- Not an issue tracker: no sprints, no backlog, no developer tool integration
- Strongest in German-speaking markets, with a smaller English community
- A modest integration catalogue
- No self-hosting option
Standout against Jira. It is the only tool here that does not assume your work is software, which is the assumption that made Jira miserable for the department that never chose it.
What actually breaks when you switch
The configuration is what makes a Jira migration hard, not the data. Issues export to CSV and every tool here imports CSV, so tickets, states, assignees and dates arrive intact. Custom field schemes, workflow conditions, permission schemes and automation rules do not, and they are usually five years of accumulated decisions rather than settings.
Marketplace apps are the second trap. Test management, time sheets, advanced roadmaps and the integration to your finance system are separate products, and nothing here replaces them one for one. Make the list before you commit, because that list decides whether this is a migration or a rebuild.
The third is quieter. Everyone you hire already knows Jira, and nobody arrives knowing OpenProject. That training cost is real, it lands on the same team doing the migration, and it almost never appears in the comparison spreadsheet.
If Jira can host my data in Frankfurt, why leave at all?
Because the two questions your legal team asks are different questions. "Where is the data stored" is answered by residency, and Atlassian answers it well: EU (Frankfurt and Dublin), Germany and Switzerland are selectable on Standard and above, at no extra cost.
"Who can be compelled to produce the data" is answered by corporate law, not geography. Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, which places it under the CLOUD Act, and that obligation follows the company rather than the server. A German provider holding the same tickets has no such obligation.
If your requirement came from a procurement checklist about storage location, stay on Jira and turn residency on. If it came from a risk assessment about foreign disclosure orders, residency does not address it and no configuration will.
What do I actually lose by moving off Jira?
JQL, first and most. Writing a query across projects, saving it, and hanging a dashboard off it is the feature returning users miss, and none of the tools here has a real equivalent.
The Marketplace, second. Test management, time sheets, advanced roadmaps and the integration to whatever your company already runs are apps someone else built. On a European alternative those are either native, absent, or your problem.
Third, the fact that everyone you hire already knows it. Jira is the default, and defaults have a training cost of zero. Budget for the ramp-up, because it is real and it is rarely counted.
Which of these can I actually self-host?
OpenProject and Taiga, both properly. OpenProject is AGPL-licensed with a free Community Edition and a paid cloud run from Germany; Taiga is MPL 2.0 with free self-hosting and a European cloud. In both cases the code is yours to read and the deployment is yours to control, which is what Jira Server used to be.
Zenkit is cloud only, hosted in Germany. For a team whose objection is jurisdiction rather than control, that is usually enough.
Self-hosting is not free, and the honest arithmetic counts an administrator. If nobody wants that job, a European-hosted cloud beats a server nobody patches.
Is any of these a like-for-like Jira replacement for a software team?
OpenProject comes closest, and it is still not like for like. It does work packages, versions, Gantt, time and cost tracking and a Git integration, in a way an engineering team recognises. What it does not do is the density of Jira: the query language, the permission schemes, the years of workflow customisation you have accumulated.
Taiga is the better fit for a team that runs plain Scrum or Kanban and never wanted the rest. It is deliberately smaller, and for teams whose Jira is mostly a board with a backlog behind it, smaller is the feature.
If your Jira is heavily customised, expect to rebuild rather than migrate. That is a real cost and it belongs in the decision.
Which one to pick
If you are leaving because the CLOUD Act reaches Atlassian wherever your data sits, OpenProject answers that most completely: European company, European or self-hosted infrastructure, and code you can read. Taiga answers the same question with less product around it.
If you are leaving because Jira Server went out of support and you wanted to keep running your own, OpenProject is effectively the only answer on this page, and it is a good one.
If the team suffering under Jira does not write software, Zenkit is the honest recommendation over either of the engineering tools here, including the one ranked above it.
And if you depend on JQL, the Marketplace and Jira Service Management together, none of this is a replacement. Turn on data residency, accept what it does and does not fix, and revisit when one of those three stops mattering.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends which part of Jira you are replacing. OpenProject if you want back what Jira Server was, on your own servers. Taiga if your Jira is really just a board and a backlog. Zenkit if the team suffering under it does not build software. There is no single answer, because Jira is not one product.
Yes, in the sense that matters for compliance: Atlassian offers a data processing agreement, holds the usual certifications, and lets you pin storage to EU regions on Standard and above. What it cannot do is stop being a US corporation. Since October 2022 Atlassian Corporation has been incorporated in Delaware, so the CLOUD Act applies to it regardless of where the data sits.
Not the way most teams did. Jira Server left support on 15 February 2024 and receives no further updates or security patches. Self-hosting now means Jira Data Center, which is priced and licensed for large deployments. For a fifty-person company that ran Jira Server on one VM, that route is effectively closed.
No, but it means converting it. Jira exports to CSV and every tool here imports CSV, so issues, statuses, assignees and dates survive. What does not survive cleanly is anything Jira-shaped: custom field configurations, workflow conditions, permission schemes, and links created by Marketplace apps. Plan to rebuild the configuration and migrate the data, not both at once.
Three things. JQL, which no alternative here matches for cross-project querying. The Marketplace, which supplies test management, time sheets and integrations that would otherwise be custom work. And Jira Service Management alongside it, so support tickets and engineering work sit in one system. If you depend on all three, the honest advice is to solve the jurisdiction question a different way.
Usually, and sometimes entirely. OpenProject and Taiga have free self-hosted editions where the cost is an administrator rather than a licence, and their clouds start around €5 to €6 per user per month. Zenkit has a free plan and paid tiers from about €9 per user per month. The saving that matters is rarely the licence, though: it is the Marketplace apps you stop renewing.
Better than Jira does, mostly. Zenkit is built around the idea that the same data should be viewable as a board, a table, a calendar or a mind map, which suits work that is not a backlog. OpenProject carries classical project management, with Gantt charts, budgets and phases, that Jira never handled comfortably. Taiga is the one exception: it is agile software delivery and nothing else.
Different, not automatically safer. Open source means you can read what the software does and run it where you like, which removes the need to trust a vendor. It does not mean the code has been audited, and a self-hosted server that nobody patches is worse than a managed cloud that gets patched on a Tuesday. The guarantee is control, and control is only worth what you do with it.
The data is a day. The configuration is the project. A small team on a near-default Jira can be running elsewhere inside a week, including the CSV import and a new board. An organisation with custom workflows, half a dozen Marketplace apps and five years of automation rules should plan in months and treat it as a redesign, because most of what is being migrated is decisions rather than tickets.
Who worked on this review
Explore More European Alternatives
Discover privacy-focused European alternatives to other popular US tech services.