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testcritic

Jira vs Redmine

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

From $8 per user/month (Standard, indicative)

Free tier

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Standard lists around $7.91 per user/month on monthly billing, falling with annual billing and as the user count crosses Atlassian's tier thresholds. The base price is reasonable; the cost comes from Marketplace apps, which frequently exceed the Jira licence itself, and every licensed user is billed whether or not they log in.

Free software. You pay for hosting, upgrades and the plugin maintenance that comes with them.

Free tier

Free for up to 10 users with core features.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

GPL-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
RubyCodeless

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Atlassian · since 2002

Established

OSS community · since 2006

Strengths

  • Configurable enough to model almost any process, including regulated workflows.
  • The largest integration ecosystem in the category by a wide margin.
  • Universal familiarity — new hires already know it.
  • No licence cost at any user count.
  • Full data control, which matters for defence, public sector and regulated work.
  • Very stable and well understood.

Limitations

  • Configurability reliably degrades into slow, over-customised instances nobody wants to own.
  • Performance on large instances is a recurring complaint.
  • Marketplace app costs compound quickly.
  • Dated interface that new team members find unpleasant.
  • Plugin quality varies and upgrades frequently break them.
  • You own hosting, backups, security patching and upgrades.

Best for

Organisations that need process flexibility and integration breadth above all else.

Organisations that must self-host and cannot spend on licences.

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.