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Redmine

Redmine is a free, open-source issue-tracking and project-management web app built on Ruby on Rails, maintained by an open community of contributors. It sits around #21 among collaboration tools at roughly 2.5% usage share, favored by budget-conscious teams and organizations that require self-hosting. Teams choose it because it delivers Jira-style features — issue tracking, Gantt charts, time tracking, wikis — without a per-seat SaaS bill.

Quick facts
Type: Open-source issue tracker & project management (self-hosted)
Made by: Open-source community (built on Ruby on Rails)
Cost: Free / open-source (self-hosted; paid hosting available from third parties)
Best for: Budget-conscious teams of any size that can self-host, especially regulated/on-prem orgs
Primary use case: Self-hosted issue tracking with Gantt charts, wikis, and time tracking at no license cost
Jump to: ExampleGetting startedBest for

Example

Redmine ships a built-in REST API (enable it under Administration → Settings → API). This curl call creates a new issue in a project directly from the command line.

# create a new issue via the Redmine REST API
curl -X POST https://redmine.example.com/issues.json \
  -H "X-Redmine-API-Key: $REDMINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "issue": {
      "project_id": 3,
      "subject": "Fix login redirect loop",
      "tracker_id": 1,
      "priority_id": 4,
      "description": "Users are stuck in a redirect loop after SSO login."
    }
  }'

Getting started

Spin up a Redmine instance instantly with the official Docker image, or install it manually on a Linux server with Ruby, Rails, and a database (MySQL/PostgreSQL).

# Docker: run Redmine with a bundled SQLite database
docker run -d --name redmine -p 3000:3000 redmine

# then open in a browser
http://localhost:3000  # default login: admin / admin
Best for: Teams and organizations that need full control over hosting/data (regulated industries, government, budget-limited nonprofits) and are willing to trade managed convenience for zero license cost.