Leantime
Leantime is an open‑source project and product management platform that blends lean, agile, and design‑thinking to take teams from ideation through planning and execution. It offers multiple task views, roadmap timelines, and structured ideation boards in a single tool.
It’s aimed at small to mid‑sized engineering and product teams, startups, agencies, and nonprofits that want flexible planning without vendor lock‑in. You can self‑host under AGPL or use the hosted SaaS. The workflow emphasizes practical planning patterns, timeboxing, and clear personal focus.
Use Cases
- Product/engineering teams managing the full lifecycle: capture ideas, validate hypotheses, plan milestones, and execute sprints.
- Agencies and NGOs coordinating multiple client or grant projects with shared timelines and cross‑project visibility.
- Teams that need both Kanban for execution and Gantt/milestones for roadmaps and stakeholder reporting.
- Organizations requiring data control or compliance via self‑hosting (Docker) while keeping the option to move to cloud later.
- Individuals or teams who benefit from timeboxing and a personal dashboard that aligns tasks with calendar commitments (iCal import).
- Lightweight portfolio/program oversight where a bird’s‑eye view of timelines and dependencies is necessary.
Strengths
- Multiple project views: Kanban, List, Table, and Gantt to plan, track, and switch between strategy and execution quickly.
- Ideation and blueprinting: structured boards for purpose, audience, hypotheses, and research to validate before building.
- Milestones and timelines: roadmap planning with progress visualization for deadlines and cross‑project visibility.
- Personal productivity: timeboxing, unified personal dashboard, and iCal import to schedule around meetings.
- Task prioritization: interest/priority ratings to balance urgency with team motivation.
- Program and multi‑project views: portfolio‑level planning for dependencies and high‑level timelines.
- Extensible via plugins: add whiteboards, Pomodoro, custom fields, strategy tools, and more without bloating the core.
- Deployment choice: AGPL self‑hosting or hosted SaaS for quick start; avoids lock‑in while offering convenience.
- Enterprise‑friendly auth: SSO/OIDC support plus email notifications for updates.
- Custom fields and notes: adapt task data to your process and centralize lightweight documentation.
- Import/export and iCal: data portability and schedule alignment.
- Cost‑effective: affordable hosted plans with a free tier; viable for small teams.
- Active development and support: commercial support options and ongoing releases.
Limitations
- Self‑hosting overhead: you manage servers, backups, and upgrades; smaller teams may prefer SaaS.
- Integration breadth: fewer native third‑party integrations than larger incumbents (Asana, Jira, ClickUp); may require custom connectors.
- Ecosystem size: smaller community and plugin catalog means fewer off‑the‑shelf templates and extensions.
- Enterprise features: some business‑grade capabilities and support live behind paid tiers.
- Docs/mobile variability: verify documentation coverage and test mobile workflows for your use case.
Final Thoughts
Leantime is a practical choice if you want an affordable, open‑source PM tool that covers ideation to delivery with multiple views and optional self‑hosting. It won’t match the integration depth or enterprise breadth of the largest platforms, but it delivers solid planning and execution features with extensibility where it counts.
Evaluation checklist: run a pilot project; test Kanban and Gantt in parallel; validate SSO/OIDC and role needs; try timeboxing with iCal; list required integrations and confirm plugin coverage; review backup/restore if self‑hosting; and confirm data export paths before adoption. Start with SaaS for speed, then consider self‑hosting if compliance, control, or cost predictability becomes a priority.