Plane is a free, self-hostable project management tool with 56,000 GitHub stars that markets itself directly against Jira, Linear, and Monday, and it prices ambitiously against all three.
A twenty-person product team running its sprint board on Linear's Business tier pays $16 per seat per month, which works out to $3,840 a year before anyone touches an integration. The same team on Jira's Premium plan pays $14.54 per seat per month, about $3,490 a year. On monday.com's Standard tier, it's $12 a seat, another $2,880. Plane, an open-source project management tool that just crossed 56,000 stars on GitHub, wants all three of those line items gone. Self-host it and the software costs nothing but the server it runs on. Take Plane's own hosted Pro tier instead and it's $6 a seat, roughly a third of what Linear charges for a comparable set of features.
Plane doesn't pretend to be neutral about who it's coming for. Its GitHub page describes it flatly as an "Open-source Jira, Linear, Monday, and ClickUp alternative," and the repository backs that up with more than a weekend project's worth of substance: 56.4k stars, 5.4k forks, 180 contributors, and commits landing as recently as this week. It ships under the AGPL-3.0 license, which permits commercial use but requires that anyone who modifies the code and runs it as a hosted service for others releases those changes back, a meaningfully different deal than the MIT license most trending repos carry.
The latest tagged release, v1.4.1, shipped August 7 with a workspace member reactivation command for self-hosted admins, error boundaries so a broken work item layout degrades to a retry button instead of crashing the page, and a stack of security fixes: an upgraded cryptography library closing a PKCS#7 oracle, a React Router bump patching an open redirect and cross-site scripting issue, and fixes across several other dependencies. Sixty-three tagged releases in total isn't a side project's cadence, it's a team shipping on a schedule.
The feature list covers the same ground that makes Jira, Linear, and Monday worth paying for. Work items with sub-properties, Cycles for sprint tracking with burndown charts, Modules for breaking large projects into pieces, custom saved Views, and Pages, which pairs a rich text editor with AI-assisted conversion of notes into actionable work items. Docker and Kubernetes are the two documented self-hosting paths, alongside a Plane Cloud option for teams that would rather not run their own infrastructure at all.
For an ops director or IT lead comparing tools, the calculation isn't just Plane's list price against Linear's or Jira's. It's what happens once a team outgrows the free tier of whatever it's already using. Plane's own pricing page runs a savings calculator claiming a ten-person team switching from Jira and Confluence to Plane's Pro tier cuts its combined bill by more than 70 percent. Even discounting vendor math by half, self-hosting removes the per-seat line item entirely for a team willing to run the infrastructure itself.
That matters most for teams paying for Jira, Linear, or Monday simply to get sprint tracking, not because they need SAML, LDAP, or an audit log. Plane's free self-hosted tier caps at 12 users and covers cycles, modules, views, and pages, which is the entire toolkit most ten-to-fifteen-person teams actually touch day to day.
None of this is free in the way the marketing implies. Self-hosting means someone on the team owns Docker upgrades, database backups, and security patching, work that a Linear subscription quietly buys a team out of. The AGPL license is also a real constraint for agencies or platforms that want to build on top of Plane and resell it, since it requires releasing source for any hosted, modified version. And several of the features that make Jira and Linear worth their enterprise price tags, SSO beyond Google, LDAP, granular access control, sit behind Plane's own Business and Enterprise Grid tiers too. At real scale, this stops being a free lunch and starts being a cheaper one.
The project management category has spent a decade selling complexity as a feature. Plane's bet, backed by 56,000 stars and a release every few weeks, is that most teams were only ever using about six dollars worth of it.