Every European project-management tool reviewed
Munich area, Germany
Founded 2015
Free tier / from about €6.50/user/month
Free tier
Best for: Teams seeking intuitive, compliant project management on European hosting
MeisterTask is the tool in this category that people volunteer to use, and in project management that is most of the battle. The Kanban interface is genuinely well designed rather than merely functional, with automations that handle stage transitions and notifications, time tracking, and extensive third-party integrations. MindMeister integration connects mind mapping to task creation, so a planning session turns into a board without retyping — a small thing that removes a real step from how teams actually start projects.
MeisterTask is built by MeisterLabs GmbH near Munich and hosts on servers in Frankfurt, which keeps European customers' data in EU jurisdiction with intra-EEA processing.
It holds ISO 27001 certification — requiring documented security practice and regular external audit — alongside GDPR and CCPA compliance, with data subject export and deletion built in. The free tier covers unlimited projects with up to three project members; the Pro plan at around €6.50 per month adds unlimited integrations, automations and timeline views, and Business adds groups, permissions and compliance reports.
What MeisterTask does well
- Interface teams adopt without being pushed
- ISO 27001 certified, plus GDPR and CCPA compliance
- Hosted in Frankfurt, intra-EEA processing
- Automations and time tracking on the Pro plan
- MindMeister integration turns planning sessions into boards
Where MeisterTask falls short
- Free tier caps at three project members
- Timeline views require a paid plan
- No self-hosting option
- Lighter than OpenProject on classical project planning
Standout feature. ISO 27001 with Frankfurt hosting: MeisterTask is the only tool in this category that pairs an externally audited security certification with a named German data centre.
Bochum, Germany
Founded 2017
Free for up to 10 users / from about €7.99/user/month
Free tier
Best for: German-speaking organisations with strict data residency requirements
Factro is the most literal reading of "Made in Germany" in this category. The software is developed in Germany by a German team, hosted exclusively on German servers in certified German data centres, and supported by German-speaking staff — end to end, with no US cloud infrastructure underneath the European branding. For organisations subject to industry regulation or public-sector rules that mandate German or EU data storage, that specificity is the requirement rather than a preference.
Factro is operated by Schuchert Managementberatung GmbH & Co. KG and covers both sides of project planning: Gantt charts, Kanban boards and a Work Breakdown Structure, which is the classical planning artefact most board-first tools leave out entirely.
The free tier is the most generous hosted offer here at up to ten users, which is a real team rather than an evaluation, and paid plans start around €7.99 per user per month. The scope is deliberately German-speaking, so interface, support and documentation are strongest in German.
What Factro does well
- Developed, hosted and supported entirely in Germany
- Free for up to ten users, a genuinely usable team size
- Work Breakdown Structure alongside Gantt and Kanban
- Certified German data centres for regulated and public-sector buyers
- German-language support and documentation
Where Factro falls short
- Oriented to German-speaking organisations; weaker elsewhere
- No self-hosting option
- Smaller integration ecosystem than international tools
- Interface functional rather than designed
Standout feature. End-to-end German delivery: Factro is developed, hosted and supported in Germany with nothing running on foreign cloud infrastructure, which is the claim most European tools cannot actually make.
Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria
Standard and Enterprise plans priced per user/month, no published rate card; annual billing saves over 20%; free trial with full feature access
Free trial with full feature access on real data
Best for: Enterprises and PMOs running project and portfolio management across several teams
Businessmap — renamed from Kanbanize — is a Bulgarian project and portfolio management platform: portfolio boards that connect strategy, OKRs and KPIs to the work behind them, workflow automation rules, and the kind of governance features (SSO add-ons, dedicated cloud instances, unlimited API calls on Enterprise) that show up once a rollout has to cover more than one department, with Kanban, Scrum and stage-gate boards for the teams themselves.
Businessmap Ltd. is based in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, and its terms of use state plainly that Bulgarian law governs the contract.
The one point worth weighing before buying: Businessmap's published privacy policy and pricing FAQ still describe a US data centre as the default, with the move to its EU data centre in Ireland made on request.
The company says EU hosting is not only available on request and that those pages are out of date; until they say so publicly, confirm the region in your contract.
That is a step behind tools in this category that host in the EU by default, though the contracting company itself remains squarely Bulgarian and EU-established. Pricing follows a "no tiers" model — Standard and Enterprise per user per month — without a published rate card, and annual billing saves over 20% versus monthly.
What Businessmap does well
- Portfolio and project management with Kanban, Scrum and stage-gate boards, built for multi-team scale
- Bulgarian company, Bulgarian governing law
- Data centres in both the EU (Ireland) and the US
- Annual billing saves over 20%
- Free trial with full feature access on real data
Where Businessmap falls short
- Published privacy policy still names the US as the default region; the company says EU hosting is not only on request
- No published price list
- No certification of its own stated in the privacy policy
- Built for enterprise portfolio management, heavier than small teams need
Standout feature. Portfolio boards that tie OKRs and KPIs to the initiatives and tasks behind them, with progress updated from the work itself rather than from manual reports.
Madrid, Spain
Founded 2014
Free self-hosted / cloud from about €5/user/month
Free self-hosted, free for open source and non-profits
Best for: Agile development teams wanting an open-source tool that is pleasant to use
Taiga is the rare open-source project tool that someone clearly designed. Scrum boards, sprints, backlogs and epics, Kanban with work-in-progress limits, issue and bug tracking and a built-in wiki — all in an interface that does not look like an internal admin panel, which is why Taiga wins evaluations against Jira on developer preference rather than on feature count.
Taiga is built by Kaleidos Ventures SL in Madrid and released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, with the codebase on GitHub and Docker-based self-hosting that is well documented.
Self-hosting is free with no user limits and no feature restrictions; the European-hosted cloud starts around €5 per user per month with no artificial tiering, and is free for open-source projects and non-profits. The limits are scope rather than quality: Taiga is agile-only, so waterfall teams needing Gantt charts should look at OpenProject, and SSO and audit logs are available in the cloud version only.
What Taiga does well
- Open source under MPL 2.0 with no user or feature limits when self-hosted
- Genuinely well-designed interface, unusual in open-source PM
- Full Scrum and Kanban with sprints, backlogs, epics and issues
- Free cloud hosting for open-source projects and non-profits
- Spanish company, European cloud hosting, self-host anywhere
Where Taiga falls short
- Agile only — no meaningful Gantt view for waterfall delivery
- SSO and audit logs are cloud-only, not in the self-hosted edition
- Self-hosting needs someone to run and upgrade it
- Built for software and creative work rather than construction or manufacturing
Standout feature. Free cloud for open source and non-profits: Taiga is the only tool here that gives away its hosted product entirely to the organisations least able to pay for one.
France
Founded 2024
Free self-hosted / cloud on a pay-what-you-want model
Free
Best for: Agile teams that want strong governance guarantees with their software
Tenzu is the answer to a question the rest of this category does not ask: who owns the company, and what happens when someone offers to buy it.
Tenzu is built by BIRU, a French SCOP — a worker cooperative — and released under AGPLv3, a stronger copyleft than Taiga's MPL 2.0. Ownership sits with the people building it rather than with investors who can exit, which for a public body, a cooperative or an organisation that has been burned by an acquisition is a more durable guarantee than any licence term.
Tenzu is the official successor to Taiga and covers agile essentials: Kanban boards, real-time collaboration, workspaces, SSO through OIDC and LDAP, granular permissions, a REST API, attachments and comments.
Self-hosting is free with the data wherever you put it; the European cloud runs on a pay-what-you-want contribution model rather than a price list. The honest caveat is maturity — Tenzu is young and deliberately lightweight, so deep enterprise features, broad integrations and reporting such as burndown charts and Gantt views are thinner or still on the roadmap.
What Tenzu does well
- Built by a French worker cooperative, so ownership cannot be bought out
- AGPLv3, the strongest copyleft in this category
- Official successor to Taiga with SSO via OIDC and LDAP
- Cloud on a pay-what-you-want contribution model
- Self-hostable anywhere, with granular permissions and a REST API
Where Tenzu falls short
- Young project; several capabilities are still on the roadmap
- Deliberately lightweight — no burndown charts or Gantt views
- Small integration ecosystem
- Not an all-in-one work platform
Standout feature. Worker-cooperative ownership: Tenzu is the only tool in this category whose governance structure makes an acquisition-driven change of direction structurally impossible.
Berlin, Germany
Founded 2012
Free Community Edition / Cloud from about €5.95/user/month
Free Community Edition
Best for: Teams needing classical and agile project management with data sovereignty
OpenProject is the only tool in this category that does classical and agile in one system, and that is why it turns up where it does.
Work packages, Gantt charts, baselines, budgets, time tracking and a wiki sit alongside agile boards in the same project, so a methodology office running a software team and a construction programme does not need two tools and two vocabularies. Siemens, Audi and government agencies run it, which is a reasonable proxy for whether it holds up under procurement scrutiny.
OpenProject GmbH is based in Berlin and offers three deployments: a free open-source Community Edition covering work packages, Gantt charts, boards, time tracking and the wiki; Enterprise Cloud hosted in Germany from around €5.95 per user per month billed annually; and Enterprise on-premises.
Security is built for enterprise procurement: LDAP and SAML single sign-on, enforceable two-factor authentication, and role-based access control at project, module and work package level. The cost is a real learning curve — OpenProject is feature-rich and looks it, and a team wanting a minimalist board will find it overwhelming.
What OpenProject does well
- Classical and agile project management in one system
- Free Community Edition with Gantt charts and time tracking included
- LDAP/SAML SSO, enforced 2FA and fine-grained role-based access
- Self-hosted, German cloud or on-premises — all three supported
- Used by Siemens, Audi and government agencies
Where OpenProject falls short
- Steeper learning curve than Trello or Asana
- Interface functional rather than polished
- Mobile apps trail the web application
- Baseline comparisons and advanced workflows need the Enterprise edition
Standout feature. Gantt charts in the free edition: OpenProject is the only tool here that gives away critical-path planning rather than putting it behind the paid tier.
Karlsruhe, Germany
Founded 2016
Free plan / from about €9/user/month
Free plan
Best for: Teams whose data structure keeps changing as the work does
Zenkit starts from the data rather than from the board, which is why it replaces Notion and Airtable rather than Trello.
The same collection of items can be viewed as a Kanban board, a list, a table, a calendar or a mind map, and switching view does not mean rebuilding anything — the structure is a database and the board is one way to look at it. For a team whose process is still forming, that flexibility avoids the usual outcome of outgrowing a rigid tool within two quarters.
Zenkit is built by Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH in Karlsruhe and hosted in Germany, so processing is intra-EEA.
It is a suite rather than a single product: Zenkit Projects for work tracking, Hypernotes for knowledge management and documentation, and Zenchat for team communication — which keeps the conversation next to the work instead of in a separate tool where decisions go to die. The free plan covers personal use with limits on items and storage, Plus is around €9 per user per month, and Business adds SSO, admin controls and advanced permissions.
What Zenkit does well
- Kanban, list, table, calendar and mind map over the same data
- Hypernotes and Zenchat keep documentation and conversation in the suite
- German company, German hosting, intra-EEA processing
- Flexible enough to survive a changing process
- Free plan for personal use and evaluation
Where Zenkit falls short
- At around €9/user/month, the most expensive per-seat option here
- Not open source and no self-hosting
- Flexibility means more setup before it is useful
- SSO and admin controls only on the Business plan
Standout feature. One dataset, five views: Zenkit is the only tool in this category where changing how the team wants to see the work does not mean rebuilding the project.
Sweden
Founded 2024
Flat company price from about €35/month for the whole team
Free trial, no card required
Best for: European engineering and product teams tired of stitching four tools together
Everia collapses four subscriptions into one workspace, and prices it in a way nothing else here does.
Project management, QA and test-case management, documentation and AI live in a single product, which replaces the common European engineering stack of ClickUp or Jira plus TestRail plus Confluence. Built-in test management is the unusual part: QA normally lives in a separate tool with its own integration to maintain, and keeping test cases next to the work items they verify removes that seam entirely.
Everia is built in Sweden and hosted in the EU under a single DPA, which for a team that currently signs one agreement per vendor is a real reduction in compliance surface.
The pricing inverts the category: a flat company price from about €35 per month for the whole team rather than per seat, so the marginal cost of giving an occasional collaborator access is nothing — and the usual failure of leaving stakeholders outside the tool does not arise. A free trial runs without a card. As a young product it is thinner on integrations and ecosystem than the established tools it replaces.
What Everia does well
- Project management, QA, documentation and AI in one workspace
- Flat company pricing from about €35/month, not per seat
- Test-case management built in rather than integrated
- Swedish, EU-hosted, one DPA instead of four
- Free trial with no card required
Where Everia falls short
- Young product with a smaller integration ecosystem
- Not open source and no self-hosting
- Less deep than the specialist tools it consolidates
- AI features are central to the product rather than optional
Standout feature. Flat company pricing: Everia is the only tool in this category where adding the tenth or the fiftieth collaborator costs nothing, which is what actually keeps stakeholders inside the tool.
Berlin, Germany
Founded 2009
Free for 2 users / $25 per month for 5, $59 for 10, $125 for 20
Free Bronze plan for two users
Best for: Teams that want issues, code and a help desk in one place, on hardware in one country
Planio is hosted Redmine with the rough edges taken off, built by Planio GmbH in Berlin. That heritage is the point: Redmine is the open-source issue tracker a lot of engineering teams ran themselves for a decade, and Planio runs it for you with Git and Subversion repositories, a help desk, a wiki and file storage attached.
It has the tightest jurisdiction story in this category. The company is German, the data centre sits in the Vogtland region and carries ISO/IEC 27001:2013, the backups go to Frankfurt, and the infrastructure is Hetzner rather than a hyperscaler. Company, servers and provider are in the same country, which almost nothing else here can claim without an asterisk.
Pricing is by active users rather than per seat: free for two, $25 a month for five, $59 for ten, $125 for twenty. That shape suits a small team and gets expensive per head at scale, which is the opposite of how most of this category prices.
What Planio does well
- German company, German data centre and a German hosting provider, with nothing subcontracted to a US hyperscaler
- Git and Subversion repositories included rather than integrated from elsewhere
- A help desk and a wiki in the same product as the issue tracker
- Free plan for two active users, and imports from an existing Redmine installation
- Redmine underneath, so the data model is documented and the export is not a black box
Where Planio falls short
- Redmine shows through: the interface is functional rather than modern
- Priced by active users in bands, so a team of eleven pays the twenty-user tier
- No mobile app to speak of
- Agile boards are lighter than in tools built around them
Standout feature. The whole stack sits in one country. German company, German data centre, German hosting provider, which turns a jurisdiction question into a one-line answer instead of a diagram.
Hamburg, Germany
Founded 2019
From €5/user/month billed annually (€8 monthly), Standard €12, Professional €22
Free trial, no card required
Best for: Agencies that need to see who is booked and for how long
awork is built by awork GmbH in Hamburg for the way agencies actually run: projects with phases, time tracked against them, and a workload view that shows who is over-committed before the week starts rather than after.
It is the best-looking tool in this category and the one non-technical teams take to fastest, which matters more than feature lists when the people using it are designers and account managers rather than engineers.
The hosting deserves a precise description. awork states that its infrastructure runs on ISO 27001 certified Microsoft servers in Germany. The servers are German and so is the company; the infrastructure provider is not. For most buyers that is fine, and for anyone whose procurement rules reach the subprocessor it is the thing to check first.
What awork does well
- Workload planning across people, which most tools in this category leave to a spreadsheet
- Time tracking built in rather than bought as an add-on
- German company with servers in Germany, and ISO 27001 certification
- From EUR 5 per user per month on annual billing, below most of this category
- Built for agency work: phases, budgets and client projects rather than sprints
Where awork falls short
- Runs on Microsoft infrastructure, so a US provider sits under a German company
- No free plan, only a trial
- Not built for software delivery: no sprints, no backlog in the agile sense
- A smaller integration catalogue than the American tools it replaces
Standout feature. The workload view. It answers who is booked and how hard before you commit to a deadline, which is the question agencies get wrong most expensively.
Cork, Ireland
Founded 2007
Free up to 5 users / $9.99/user/month (Basics) / $24.99 (Accelerate), billed yearly
Free plan for five users, 14-day trial on paid plans
Best for: Client services teams that bill for the work they track
Teamwork Crew Limited has been in Cork since 2007, which makes it one of the oldest companies in this directory and by some margin the most established European alternative to Asana and monday.com.
What separates it is that the commercial side is part of the product. Billable time, retainers, budgets and invoicing sit next to the tasks, so an agency does not have to reconcile a project tool against an accounting package at the end of every month. It also holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2, a stronger audit position than almost anything else here.
The caveat is the infrastructure. Teamwork states that its servers are with Amazon Web Services and hosted within both the US and the EU. An Irish company is outside the CLOUD Act; AWS is not, so the answer to where your data can be compelled from depends on which part of the chain you are asking about.
What Teamwork.com does well
- Billable time, retainers and invoicing in the same product as the project
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2, the strongest audit position in this category
- Irish company, so the contracting party is inside the EU
- Free plan for up to five users, and $9.99 per user per month after that
- Eighteen years of product behind it, which shows in how little breaks
Where Teamwork.com falls short
- Runs on AWS across both US and EU regions, so a US provider is in the chain
- The interface carries a lot of history and can feel dense
- Priced per user, so it scales up faster than the flat-fee tools here
- Aimed at client work, so an internal product team uses maybe half of it
Standout feature. It is the only tool here where an invoice is a first-class object, which is what an agency needs and what every board-shaped competitor asks it to fake with custom fields.
Lübeck, Germany
Founded 2018
Free self-hosted / €4 per month personal, €5/user/month for an organisation
Free forever when self-hosted
Best for: Anyone who would rather own the server than trust one
Vikunja is AGPLv3 task management you can run on a Raspberry Pi, a VPS or your own hardware, for nothing. There is a hosted version in the EU at EUR 4 a month personal or EUR 5 per user for an organisation, and the self-hosted edition has no seat limit at all.
It is deliberately small: lists, kanban, gantt, a calendar, labels, filters and a documented API. No portfolio layer, no reporting suite, no goals. For a team that wants a shared to-do system it does the job and then gets out of the way.
The thing to know before choosing it is the company, or rather the absence of one. The imprint names Konrad Langenberg Software in Luebeck, a sole proprietorship rather than a GmbH. The AGPL licence means the project survives regardless, but a procurement department asking about vendor continuity deserves that answer up front.
What Vikunja does well
- AGPLv3, so the code can be read and the deployment is entirely yours
- Free self-hosted with no seat limit, which nothing else here matches at this simplicity
- A hosted EU option from EUR 4 a month for people who do not want a server
- A documented API, so it fits into whatever you already run
- German jurisdiction on the hosted version, or none at all when self-hosted
Where Vikunja falls short
- A one-person business rather than a company, which is a continuity question worth asking
- No portfolio view, no reporting to speak of, no goals
- Self-hosting means somebody owns the upgrades and the backups
- A small ecosystem and no enterprise support contract
Standout feature. It is the only tool in this category you can run with no provider at all, at any team size, without paying anyone. That removes the trust question rather than relocating it.
Paris, France
Founded 2010
Wimi Communauté €3/user/month, Drive €9, Projets €12, Suite €15 (SME tiers); Enterprise tiers from 50 users; 14-day free trial
14-day free trial, no credit card required
Best for: French teams wanting a sovereign, all-in-one Microsoft 365 alternative
Wimi is the French answer to the question a growing number of European IT departments now ask before buying anything: does this run entirely outside US jurisdiction?
Wimi holds SecNumCloud SaaS 3.2 — the highest security qualification issued by the French state, built on more than 360 audited control points — runs on its own data centres in France, and stacks ISO/IEC 27001:2022, HDS for health data and eIDAS on top.
The product itself is a full collaboration suite rather than a single-purpose board: Drive, tasks, chat, video and company-wide "communities" in one workspace, positioned against Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as much as against a project tool.
Cloud Solutions SAS has published Wimi from Paris since 2010, and prices by module rather than an all-or-nothing suite fee: Communauté at €3 per user per month for the social layer, Drive at €9, Projets at €12 and the full Suite at €15, with enterprise tiers requiring 50 users and up.
That à la carte pricing is unusual in this category, and it means a team can buy only the task management it needs without paying for video conferencing it will not use. The trade-off is that Wimi is built for a company standardising on one suite rather than a team that only wants a project board.
What Wimi does well
- SecNumCloud SaaS 3.2, the highest French state security qualification
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022, HDS and eIDAS on top
- Own French data centres, outside US Cloud Act reach by design
- Modular pricing from €3 per user per month
- Drive, tasks, chat and video in one workspace
Where Wimi falls short
- Priced and positioned as a full office suite, not a lean board
- Enterprise tiers require a 50-user minimum
- Covers more ground than a team wanting only tasks needs
- Smaller international footprint than the US-founded tools it replaces
Standout feature. SecNumCloud certification: Wimi is the only tool in this category audited against the French state's own 360-point cloud security standard.
Florence, Italy
On-premise Free/Basic/Advanced/Enterprise tiers billed per enabled user (projects unlimited), or Twproject Cloud; no prices published, quote on request
Free trial via hosted demo (self-hosted or cloud)
Best for: Teams wanting to own the server and keep Gantt-based planning
Twproject is an Italian project and resource manager, first released in 2001, that a team installs on its own hardware and pays for by enabled user rather than by subscription.
Licences are counted by the people who can log in; the number of projects is unlimited on every tier, which matters for a consultancy or an engineering department running dozens of small jobs rather than one large one. Gantt charts, resource allocation and time tracking sit at the centre of the product, closer to classical project management than to a Kanban board.
Twproject S.r.l. is based in Florence, and the company publishes tier names — Free, Basic, Advanced, Enterprise — without publishing the amounts attached to them; a prospective buyer has to run the hosted demo or request a quote to see a number, on-premise or through Twproject Cloud.
That opacity is the main mark against it in a category where several vendors put a full price list on the page.
What it buys in return is the self-hosting option nearly two decades of on-premise customers have kept it alive for: the data never has to leave a server the buyer controls, and there is a 30-day refund window if it does not fit.
What Twproject does well
- Self-hosted on your own infrastructure, no vendor lock-in on the data
- Unlimited projects on every tier
- Gantt, resource allocation and time tracking built for classical PM
- Free trial via a hosted demo
- 30-day refund policy
Where Twproject falls short
- No published prices for any tier, cloud or on-premise
- Interface reflects its 2001 origins more than a modern SaaS tool
- No open-source licence despite the self-hosted option
- Weaker international support than the larger tools here
Standout feature. Unlimited projects on every tier, including Free: Twproject prices by user, never by how many jobs you are running at once.
Tartu, Estonia
Free for up to 10 resources with unlimited free users; paid PRO plans priced by resource count, no published rate card; custom packages for 1,500+ resources
14-day free trial, no credit card required
Best for: Teams scheduling people and equipment across many projects at once
Ganttic answers a different question than the boards and sprints most of this category is built around: not "what should I work on today" but "who and what is available next month." It is a resource-scheduling tool built around a drag-and-drop Gantt view of people, equipment and rooms across every project at once, which is the view a construction firm, an agency staffing consultants, or an engineering department juggling shared lab equipment actually needs and rarely gets from a task board.
Ganttic OÜ is based in Tartu, Estonia, hosts on AWS in Frankfurt and states plainly that it is GDPR compliant as an Estonian company.
Pricing is resource-based rather than per-seat: users are free and unlimited, and the cost scales with how many people, machines or rooms are being scheduled, with a free tier covering up to ten resources and no published rate card beyond that. The 14-day trial needs no card. What it does not do is task management in the Kanban or backlog sense — Ganttic complements a board tool rather than replacing one.
What Ganttic does well
- Resource-based pricing with unlimited free users
- AWS hosting in Frankfurt, GDPR compliant Estonian company
- Drag-and-drop Gantt view across every project at once
- Free tier for up to 10 resources
- 14-day trial, no credit card
Where Ganttic falls short
- No task boards or sprints — resource scheduling only
- No published price list beyond the free tier
- Best suited to teams scheduling people or equipment, not software sprints
- No certification of its own beyond its AWS host's
Standout feature. Resources, not tasks: Ganttic is the only tool in this category priced and built around who and what is booked, rather than what is on a board.
Katowice, Poland
Free for 2 users / Team $6 per user/month / Enterprise $11 per user/month, billed monthly or annually; Kanban Tool On-Site from 10 users, annual billing only
14-day free trial, no credit card required
Best for: Small teams wanting a simple Kanban board with time tracking
Kanban Tool does one thing this category otherwise buries under bigger platforms: a plain, work-in-progress-limited Kanban board with time tracking and reporting attached, and not much else to configure. Kanban Tool sp. z o.o. runs it from Katowice, Poland, under Polish law, with a free plan for two users and two boards, a Team plan at $6 per user per month, and Enterprise at $11 adding time tracking, reporting and process automation.
The one honest caveat is hosting: Kanban Tool's own privacy policy states that customer data is stored across infrastructure in both the United States and the EEA — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Akamai/Linode among the providers — with EEA customer data kept in-region as a general practice rather than a stated default.
For a buyer who wants EU-only hosting guaranteed rather than generally applied, that is a step behind Ganttic or Wimi in this same category. Kanban Tool On-Site, a self-hosted edition for ten or more users billed annually, removes the question entirely for anyone who needs to.
What Kanban Tool does well
- Genuinely simple Kanban board with WIP limits
- Time tracking and reporting from $6 per user per month
- Free plan for two users and two boards
- Kanban Tool On-Site for self-hosting at 10+ users
- Polish company, Polish governing law
Where Kanban Tool falls short
- Hosting spans both the US and the EEA, not EU-only by default
- No certification of its own published
- Priced in dollars rather than euros
- Feature set thinner than platform-scale tools in this category
Standout feature. Kanban Tool On-Site is the escape hatch: the same board and time tracking, run on infrastructure you control, once the shared-cloud hosting question matters.
Nantes, France
Founded 2017
Free / Business €9.99 per month / Enterprise €19.99 per month, billed monthly or annually (20% off annual); volume discounts from 5 licences
Free plan available indefinitely, no credit card required
Best for: French SMEs wanting Gantt and workload views without enterprise overhead
Beesbusy is a French SAS out of Nantes, founded in 2017, built around two views most Kanban-first tools leave out: a Gantt-style "When" view for scheduling and a "Who" view showing team workload at a glance.
The free plan covers unlimited projects, task lists and collaborators with no credit card required, which is generous for a genuinely free tier in this category, and the paid Business and Enterprise plans add the Gantt and workload views, calendar and Trello import, and — at the top — time tracking with occupancy-rate calculations.
Pricing is published in full: Business at €9.99 per month, Enterprise at €19.99, both with a 20% discount for annual billing and steep volume discounts above five licences. The detail worth knowing before buying is where the data sits: Beesbusy's own legal notice names Infomaniak, a Swiss hosting company based in Geneva, as its infrastructure provider — Swiss rather than French, but squarely outside US jurisdiction either way, and a specific named host rather than an unnamed "EU region."
What Beesbusy does well
- Full price list published, including volume discounts
- Generous free plan: unlimited projects and collaborators
- Gantt ("When") and workload ("Who") views in one product
- Hosted by Infomaniak in Geneva, Switzerland — a named host
- French company, founded 2017
Where Beesbusy falls short
- No certification of its own published
- Time tracking with occupancy rates only on the Enterprise plan
- Smaller feature set than the platform-scale tools here
- Aimed at SMEs rather than large or regulated organisations
Standout feature. A named Swiss host in the legal notice: Beesbusy is one of the few tools here that states exactly whose servers the data sits on.
Tübingen, Germany
Founded 2012
Priced by number of resources scheduled, unlimited free users; custom quote by resource count (contact sales); 30-day free trial
30-day free trial, no credit card required
Best for: Organisations managing a portfolio of projects, not single boards
Meisterplan is not a task board; it is a lean portfolio and resource-management tool for the layer above one, where the question is not "what is this project doing today" but "do we have the people to run all twelve projects we have committed to." itdesign GmbH, founded in Tübingen in 1999, created Meisterplan in 2012 to answer exactly that, and the certifications reflect an enterprise buyer: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 27018:2019 for cloud personal data, a TISAX assessment for automotive-industry customers, and Germany's own "Software Made in Germany" seal.
Pricing follows the same logic as the product: users are free and unlimited, and the licence cost is driven entirely by how many schedulable resources — people — are in the system, with custom quotes above 1,000 resources and a 30-day free trial to test the fit.
That resource-based model rewards an organisation that wants everyone able to log in and see the portfolio, and it means Meisterplan sits alongside a task tool rather than replacing one: teams still need OpenProject, Taiga or a board product underneath it for day-to-day work.
What Meisterplan does well
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 27018:2019 and TISAX certified
- "Software Made in Germany" seal
- Unlimited free users, priced by resource count only
- 30-day free trial
- Built for portfolio and capacity planning, not single-project boards
Where Meisterplan falls short
- Not a task board — needs a separate PM tool underneath it
- No published price list; quote required
- No stated hosting region beyond the German company itself
- Aimed at portfolio-level buyers, overkill for a single small team
Standout feature. Priced by resource, not by user: Meisterplan is the only tool in this category where the free seat and the licence cost are entirely separate questions.
