Plane

Plane is a rapidly growing open-source project management platform that has positioned itself as a serious alternative to Jira, Linear, and Asana. Founded in 2022, Plane has quickly gained traction in the developer community, amassing over 30,000 GitHub stars and attracting teams frustrated with the complexity of Jira and the closed nature of Linear. While the company is headquartered in India, its open-source nature and self-hosting capability make it an excellent choice for European organizations that want full control over their project management data. By deploying Plane on EU-based infrastructure, teams can ensure complete GDPR compliance while enjoying a modern, intuitive project management experience.

Issue Tracking and Workflow Management

At its core, Plane provides a powerful issue tracking system that supports the full lifecycle of software development and project management. Issues can be created with rich descriptions using a built-in editor that supports Markdown, checklists, code blocks, and file attachments. Each issue can be assigned to team members, tagged with labels, set with priorities, and linked to other issues for dependency tracking. The workflow system supports custom states, allowing teams to define their own progression stages beyond the typical "To Do, In Progress, Done" model.

The issue detail view is thoughtfully designed, providing a clean interface that surfaces relevant information without the overwhelming clutter that characterizes Jira's issue screens. Activity logs track all changes, comments provide threaded discussions, and sub-issues allow complex tasks to be broken into manageable pieces. For teams transitioning from Jira, Plane offers a familiar feature set with a dramatically simpler user experience, reducing the cognitive overhead that often slows down agile teams.

Multiple View Types: Kanban, List, Spreadsheet, and Gantt

Plane offers multiple ways to visualize and interact with project data. The Kanban board view provides the familiar card-based interface popular in agile methodologies, with drag-and-drop functionality for moving issues between states. The list view offers a compact, scannable format ideal for quickly reviewing many issues at once. The spreadsheet view provides a table-based interface reminiscent of Excel or Notion databases, allowing bulk editing and sorting across multiple fields simultaneously.

The Gantt chart view is particularly valuable for teams that need to plan and visualize project timelines. Issues and their dependencies are displayed on a timeline, making it easy to identify bottlenecks, track progress, and communicate schedules to stakeholders. This multi-view approach means that different team members can work with the same underlying data in whatever format suits their role and workflow, a flexibility that simpler tools like Linear do not offer.

Cycles and Sprints

Plane's Cycles feature serves as the equivalent of sprints in Scrum methodology. Teams can create time-boxed cycles, assign issues to them, and track progress through burn-down charts and completion metrics. Active, upcoming, and completed cycles are clearly organized, giving teams visibility into their iteration history and velocity trends over time. The cycle analytics provide insights into how many issues were completed versus carried over, helping teams improve their estimation accuracy.

Unlike Jira's often convoluted sprint management, Plane's Cycles implementation is straightforward and intuitive. Creating a new cycle, adding issues to it, and monitoring progress can all be accomplished with minimal clicks. The system is flexible enough to accommodate Scrum teams running fixed-length sprints as well as teams using more fluid iteration approaches. Transfer incomplete work between cycles is handled gracefully, avoiding the confusion that can arise in Jira when incomplete sprint items need to be moved.

Modules for Large-Scale Organization

Modules in Plane provide a way to organize related issues that span multiple cycles or represent larger features and initiatives. Think of modules as epic-level containers that group related work regardless of which sprint it falls into. A module might represent a major feature release, a quarterly goal, or a cross-cutting initiative like a platform migration. Each module has its own progress tracking, showing completion percentage and the distribution of issues across different states.

This module system addresses a common pain point in project management: the need to track both tactical sprint-level work and strategic initiative-level progress simultaneously. Product managers can use modules to communicate high-level progress to stakeholders, while developers stay focused on their sprint-level tasks. The relationship between modules and cycles creates a natural hierarchy that keeps everyone aligned without requiring complex portfolio management add-ons.

Pages: Built-in Documentation

Plane includes a Pages feature that provides a built-in wiki and documentation system directly within the project management tool. Pages support rich text editing with headers, lists, tables, code blocks, and embedded media. They can be organized hierarchically and linked to issues, creating a direct connection between documentation and the work being done. This integration eliminates the need for a separate documentation tool and ensures that project context stays close to the work it describes.

For teams that currently maintain documentation in Notion, Confluence, or Google Docs alongside their project management in Jira or Linear, Plane's Pages feature offers a compelling consolidation opportunity. Having requirements, specifications, meeting notes, and architectural decisions in the same tool as the issues that implement them reduces context switching and makes it easier for new team members to understand the reasoning behind project decisions.

Self-Hosting and Data Sovereignty

Plane's open-source nature means that organizations can deploy it on their own infrastructure, giving them complete control over where their data resides and how it is processed. For European organizations subject to GDPR and other data sovereignty requirements, self-hosting Plane on EU-based cloud providers like Hetzner, OVH, or Scaleway ensures that project data never leaves European jurisdiction. The self-hosted deployment uses Docker, making it relatively straightforward to set up and maintain even for teams without dedicated DevOps resources.

Self-hosting also provides security benefits beyond data location. Organizations can implement their own security policies, integrate with existing authentication systems like LDAP or SAML, and conduct their own security audits of the codebase. For companies in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or defense where data handling requirements are particularly strict, self-hosted Plane provides a level of control that SaaS-only tools like Linear and Asana simply cannot match.

Cloud Offering and Pricing

For teams that prefer a managed solution, Plane offers a cloud-hosted version with a generous free tier. The free plan supports unlimited members and projects, making it accessible for startups and small teams. The Pro plan at seven dollars per user per month adds advanced features including custom analytics, priority support, and increased storage. Enterprise pricing is available for organizations requiring SSO, audit logs, and dedicated infrastructure.

This pricing structure is significantly more competitive than Jira (which starts at approximately 8.15 dollars per user per month for the Standard plan and 16 dollars for Premium) and Linear (which charges 8 dollars per user per month). Combined with the free self-hosted option, Plane offers the most flexible and cost-effective pricing in the project management space, particularly for cost-conscious European startups and scale-ups.

Integrations and API

Plane provides integrations with popular development tools including GitHub, GitLab, and Slack. The GitHub and GitLab integrations allow automatic linking between pull requests and issues, updating issue states when code is merged. The Slack integration enables notifications and basic issue management directly from Slack channels. Plane also offers a REST API for custom integrations, allowing teams to connect it with their existing toolchain and automate workflows.

While Plane's integration ecosystem is less extensive than Jira's massive marketplace of add-ons, it covers the core integrations that most software development teams need. The API is well-documented and actively developed, with the community contributing additional integrations through the open-source ecosystem. For teams with specific integration needs, the open-source codebase makes it possible to build custom integrations without depending on the vendor's development roadmap.

Who Should Use Plane

Plane is ideal for software development teams and organizations that want a modern, clean project management experience without vendor lock-in. Teams frustrated with Jira's complexity will appreciate Plane's intuitive interface and streamlined workflows. European organizations that require data sovereignty can self-host on EU infrastructure for full GDPR compliance. Startups and small teams benefit from the generous free tier and competitive pricing. Open source advocates will value the ability to inspect, modify, and contribute to the codebase. Any team looking for a project management tool that combines the power of Jira with the simplicity of Linear, while offering the freedom of open source, should evaluate Plane seriously.