I've been surveying and testing various project management software over the last few weeks. I'm quite familiar with project management and the landscape of open-source tools that support this in general, as I've been dabbling in this for decades. I just stumbled upon ProjeQtOr a couple days about, and yesterday actually installed it in a production-like customized docker system for a trial run.
Let me just say right now:
I CAN NOT OVERSTATE HOW GOOD THIS SOFTWARE IS.
There is a lot of good open source software out there that falls vaguely into "project management". I'm not running a business here, just personal projects, small open source projects, and some occasional non-profit work. But almost everything (not just open source software) has huge limitations and frankly sometimes no matter how good they are seem to have a huge lack of vision or understanding of even basic PM principles and needs. Some woes include:
- "Bug/ticket/activity/task trackers" that don't even have dependencies, let alone hierarchy.
- "Scheduling" software that can make Gantt charts but can't actually do any scheduling or use baselines.
- "Agile" PM/board tools that think a WBS hierarchy must be exactly 3 levels (epic, user story, task).
- "Project management" software that doesn't even have the concept of requirements.
- "Integrated/team/hub managers" that think that an unstructured shared wiki solves 90% of PM problems.
- "ERP" software that mostly can do the job, but only if you build out what you want as a custom application.
- "Freemium" tools that claim to be open source, but when you actually look into it, just have a "core" that doesn't really do what you want and so might as well just be a commercial tool.
Every few years I do a survey of all of these kinds of things, but somehow I've completely missed the existance of ProjeQtOr until now. I have to say, this software is AMAZING. How did I miss this?! I've just barely installed it and started playing with it, but immediately what I see is:
- ProjeQtOr appears to be the first piece of software I've used that actually understands what project management actually entails.
- It makes it easy to create realistic WBS and has a robust model of dates (requested vs validated vs planned vs real).
- As an issue tracker it can handle both hierarchiy and dependencies, as well as arbitrary metalinks.
- As a scheduler, it implements the most common industry standard algorithms, and so far seems as robust (or more) than even some famous commerical alternatives.
- As a day-to-day task tracking tool, it's easily usable with "agile" methods like Scrum and Kanban (IMO, better than half the tools that are specifically made for Scrum and Kanban) without breaking the standard PM model which is needed for serious planning of highly complex projects.
- It appears to handle requirement tracking and linking requirements to activities and deliverables in a straightforward manner.
- The whole program seems to have a data model that encourages tried-and-true PM best practices without forcing everything to be done a certain way.
- I love that the tool is actually open source and isn't a weird freemium model (as far as I can tell, anyway!). As a long advocate of and creator of open source software, this makes me want to use, promote, and contribute to it.
Anyway, that's all the gushing for now. I'm sure like any software as I start using it I'll discover plenty of bugs, quirks, and limiitations. But this is first time in years I've found a tool where I am this blown away with the features and quality. I don't know how I've missed this existence of this project until now, but if all goes well, I will be rolling ProjeQtOr out as my tool of choice for myself and hopefully for my open source projects and other non-profit work as well.
Support us on Capterra
