Redmine vs YouTrack
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 sourceFrom $4.5 per user/month (annual billing; $5.40 monthly, falling with volume)
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.
Among the cheapest per-user trackers, and the self-hosted licence is affordable. Helpdesk projects are licensed separately — free for 3 agents, then about $5.50 per agent/month annually.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free for up to 10 users, cloud or self-hosted.
Open source
GPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2006
Established
JetBrains · since 2008
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.
- The command and query syntax makes bulk triage dramatically faster than clicking.
- Self-hosting is genuinely supported and reasonably priced.
- Free for ten users including on-premises.
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.
- Smaller integration ecosystem than Jira.
- The interface is dense and takes time to learn.
- Less common, so new hires need onboarding.
Best for
Organisations that must self-host and cannot spend on licences.
Teams that triage a lot of issues and want self-hosting without enterprise pricing.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.