Redmine vs Jira

Free and open source

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

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

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.

Everything, self-hosted

Free for up to 10 users with core features.

Established

OSS community · since 2006

Category standard

Atlassian · since 2002

• No licence cost at any user count.
• Full data control, which matters for defence, public sector and regulated work.
• Very stable and well understood.

• 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.

• Dated interface that new team members find unpleasant.
• Plugin quality varies and upgrades frequently break them.
• You own hosting, backups, security patching and upgrades.

• 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.

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

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