Redmine, Great Open Source Alternative for Project Management

Published Categorized as Project Management Tools Tagged , , ,

Redmine is a flexible project management web application. It is open source under the terms of GNU General Public License v2. Being written using the Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.

There is a lot going for it. Firstly open source, which for some might be appealing as other options will set you back a hefty amount. Simple, quick to install and set up if you are a little tech savy, I would say avoid if you aren’t. Documentation is available in a multitude of languages, and you would have access to support through their dedicated forums. I might add it has a rather active community behind it so that might come in handy in some ways.

Redmine is being supported by volunteers so there might be some issues with support or troubleshooting but from what I have gathered they are very dedicated and hardworking. You can get a feel of development speed and general information on this page.

Redmine Core Features

Some of the features worth mentioning are:

  • Multiple projects support
  • Flexible role based access control
  • Flexible issue tracking system
  • Gantt chart and calendar
  • News, documents & files management
  • Feeds & email notifications
  • Per project wiki
  • Per project forums
  • Time tracking
  • Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users
  • SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
  • Issue creation via email
  • Multiple LDAP authentication support
  • User self-registration support
  • Multi language support
  • Multiple databases support

Extended Resources

You can find a more complete list of features for this project management tool here:

  1. Redmine features.
  2. Documentation is also available on their website.

Other resources:

Online Demo

A shared online demo can be found at http://demo.redmine.org/. It’s been setup to give registered users the ability to create their own projects. This means once you register, you can create your own project on there and try out the project administration features.

Alternatively, you can get your own demo environment at http://m.redmine.org with full administrator privileges after filling a simple form.

Please do have a look at Redmine if you are interested and let us know what you think of it.

By Alex Puscasu

I am a Project Management practitioner with more than 5 years experience in hardware and software implementation projects. Also a bit of a geek and a great WordPress enthusiast. I hope you enjoy the content, and I encourage you to share your knowledge with the world.