What does "open source" actually save you in this category?
Not necessarily money. Taiga under MPL 2.0, Tenzu under AGPLv3 and OpenProject's Community Edition are all free to download and run with no user limit, but running them means a server, upgrades, backups, monitoring and someone whose job it is when authentication breaks on a Friday. For a team of ten, that person's time costs more than €5 per user per month.
What open source buys is exit. A self-hosted deployment cannot be repriced, discontinued or acquired out from under you, and the data is already on infrastructure you control. For a public body, a cooperative or a company with sovereignty requirements in the contract, that is the whole argument and the licence fee is beside the point.
The middle path is what most teams actually take: the vendor's cloud on European infrastructure, with the open licence as insurance. Taiga cloud starts around €5 per user per month, OpenProject around €5.95. If the vendor changes direction, the escape route exists — and until then someone else runs the servers.
One caveat worth knowing before choosing: Taiga puts SSO and audit logs in the cloud version only, so a self-hosted installation is not automatically the more capable one.
Agile boards or Gantt charts — which does your team actually need?
They answer different questions. A Kanban or Scrum board answers "what is being worked on right now and what is stuck". A Gantt chart answers "if this slips two weeks, what else moves". Software teams almost always need the first; construction, manufacturing, professional services and anything with a contractual delivery date need the second.
Taiga and Tenzu are agile-only by design: Scrum boards, sprints, backlogs and epics, with no meaningful Gantt view. MeisterTask and Factro are board-first with timeline views on top — Factro adds a Work Breakdown Structure, which is the classical planning artefact most Kanban tools omit entirely. Zenkit takes the flexible-database route, letting the same data appear as Kanban, list, table, calendar or mind map.
OpenProject is the only tool in this category that genuinely does both. Work packages, Gantt charts, budgets and baselines sit alongside agile boards in the same project, which is why it appears in organisations that run a software team and a construction programme under one methodology office.
Buying an agile tool for a waterfall programme is the most common mismatch here, and it is usually discovered a quarter in, when someone asks for a critical path and the tool has no concept of one.
Why does hosting location matter for a task board?
Because a project management tool is rarely only tasks. It holds client names, contract values, salary-adjacent effort data, meeting notes, uploaded documents and a running record of who did what and how long it took. That is commercially sensitive information and personal data about employees at the same time.
Every tool in this category hosts in Europe, and several are specific about it. MeisterTask hosts in Frankfurt and holds ISO 27001. Factro hosts exclusively on German servers with German development and German-speaking support, which is the level of specificity German public-sector and regulated buyers actually ask for. OpenProject and Zenkit both host in Germany, Everia in the EU under a single DPA.
The contrast is with a US-established provider, where the transfer runs on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and requires verifying that the specific entity is certified and keeping that verification current. With an EU-established processor, the processing is intra-EEA and that obligation does not arise.
For self-hosted Taiga, Tenzu or OpenProject, the question disappears entirely: the data is wherever you put it, and there is no processor to assess.
How does per-seat pricing distort which tool you choose?
Per-seat pricing makes occasional users expensive, and the predictable response is to not give them accounts. The client who should see the timeline, the finance person who needs the budget, the contractor on a six-week engagement — all get left outside the tool and served with exported screenshots, which is exactly the failure the tool was bought to prevent.
Everia inverts this with a flat company price from about €35 per month for the whole team rather than per seat. That changes the calculus: everyone who touches the work gets access, because the marginal user costs nothing.
The open-source options reach the same outcome from the other direction. Self-hosted Taiga, Tenzu and OpenProject have no user limit at all, so the cost of adding a viewer is a row in a database. Tenzu's cloud goes further with a pay-what-you-want contribution model.
Free tiers are the other place to look before committing. Factro is free for up to ten users, which covers a real team rather than a trial. MeisterTask's free tier caps at three project members, and Zenkit's free plan limits items and storage rather than seats.
Where do project management rollouts usually fail?
The first failure is modelling the org chart instead of the work. Teams that create a project per department end up with tasks that belong to nobody and dependencies that cross boundaries invisibly. Model the deliverable, and let people appear in more than one place.
The second failure is too many fields. Every mandatory custom field is a tax on the person filing the task, and the reliable outcome is short, useless entries. Start with a title, an owner and a due date, and add a field only after someone has asked the question it answers twice.
The third failure is running the real conversation somewhere else. If decisions happen in chat and the board records only outcomes, the board is a report rather than a workspace, and it goes stale the first busy week. Zenkit bundles Zenchat and Everia builds documentation into the workspace precisely to close that gap.
The fourth failure is choosing for the loudest requirement. A single request for Gantt charts pushes teams onto heavyweight tools they then use as a to-do list. Buy for the daily work, and handle the exception with an export.
