Redmine vs GitHub Issues & Projects
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
Free and open source
Open sourceFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free software. You pay for hosting, upgrades and the plugin maintenance that comes with them.
Effectively free — you are already paying for GitHub, and Issues adds nothing.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.
Open source
GPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2006
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009
Strengths
- No licence cost at any user count.
- Full data control, which matters for defence, public sector and regulated work.
- Very stable and well understood.
- Zero additional cost and zero additional integration to maintain.
- Automatic linking between commits, pull requests and issues.
- Issue forms enforce the reproduction detail that makes bugs actionable.
Limitations
- Dated interface that new team members find unpleasant.
- Plugin quality varies and upgrades frequently break them.
- You own hosting, backups, security patching and upgrades.
- No native severity/priority model — you build it from labels.
- Reporting is weak; there is no real analytics layer.
- Poor fit for non-technical reporters who do not have GitHub accounts.
Best for
Organisations that must self-host and cannot spend on licences.
Engineering-led teams already on GitHub who want one fewer tool.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.