Plane vs Vikunja

The one question that decides this

The real split is whether you want a Linear-shaped project management system or an owned task manager that can stretch toward project work. Plane describes itself as an “Open-source Jira, Linear, Monday, and ClickUp alternative” for “tasks, sprints, docs, and triage,” which is a pretty explicit swing at the modern software-team planning stack. Vikunja’s own pitch is smaller and sharper: “The task manager you actually own” and “The open-source, self-hostable to-do app.” Both can sit in the “replace Linear” conversation, but they are not trying to win the same fight.

What each one is actually trying to be

Plane: open-source Linear/Jira for teams that want the whole project cockpit

Plane is optimizing for breadth. Its GitHub description says: “🔥🔥🔥 Open-source Jira, Linear, Monday, and ClickUp alternative. Plane is a modern project management platform to manage tasks, sprints, docs, and triage.” That is not subtle positioning. It wants to be the place where software work is planned, organized, discussed, and pushed through a workflow.

That matters if you are replacing Linear specifically. Linear is not just a to-do list with a nice coat of paint; it is issue tracking, cycles, product-engineering rhythm, triage, and team visibility. Plane is clearly trying to live in that category. The risk, as always with tools that name-drop Jira, Monday, ClickUp, and Linear in one breath, is surface area. More ambition usually means more knobs, more setup decisions, and more places for product polish to matter.

Plane also has an official cloud option at $8/month, according to the provided data, so this is not only a “clone the repo and good luck” project. That is useful for teams that want an escape hatch from SaaS lock-in without turning their infra person into the unpaid mayor of Task Town. The AGPL-3.0 license is also worth noticing: this is open source with teeth, not “source available until the business model gets nervous.”

Vikunja: owned task management without pretending every checklist is a roadmap

Vikunja is much more restrained in what it says it is. The GitHub description is: “The task manager you actually own.” The tagline is: “The open-source, self-hostable to-do app.” That is refreshingly direct. No AI vapor, no “work operating system,” no “reimagining collaboration for high-agency teams.” Just tasks, ownership, and self-hosting.

That smaller target can be a feature, not a limitation. If your “project management” problem is mostly that Todoist, Trello, or Linear became yet another subscription attached to your team’s nervous system, Vikunja makes sense. It appears in the supplied replacement list for both todoist and linear, which is exactly the middle ground it occupies here: more serious than a grocery list, less grandiose than a full software-delivery command center.

For a small team, a homelab-heavy organization, or a person who wants tasks they actually control, Vikunja’s posture is appealing. The danger is expecting it to be Linear with a different logo. Based on the provided positioning, that is not the promise. It is a self-hostable to-do app, not a pitch deck about replacing every planning ritual your company has accumulated since 2019.

Head-to-head: the metrics

Plane is the larger GitHub project by a mile: makeplane/plane has 55,456 stars, 5,208 forks, 985 open issues, an AGPL-3.0 license, TypeScript as the primary language, and a last push date of 2026-08-04. Vikunja’s go-vikunja/vikunja has 4,974 stars, 588 forks, 217 open issues, an AGPL-3.0 license, Go as the primary language, and the same last push date of 2026-08-04.

Those numbers say a few useful things. Plane has far more GitHub attention and far more forks, which usually means more visibility, more drive-by testing, and more people at least curious enough to star it. Vikunja is smaller, but not obscure; nearly five thousand stars is real traction for a self-hostable task app. Both projects showing a last push date of 2026-08-04 is the simplest freshness signal here: neither looks abandoned from the supplied data.

The license comparison is clean: both are AGPL-3.0. If your company has strong feelings about copyleft network software, that matters. If you are self-hosting internally, it may be fine; if you are building commercial services around either project, talk to someone who reads licenses for a living instead of trusting a vibes-based blog paragraph.

What the metrics do not tell us is whether the product will feel good to use every day. Stars do not measure roadmap discipline. Forks do not measure upgrade pain. Open issues do not cleanly measure quality either, because a large project with active users can accumulate issues precisely because people are using it hard. Plane’s 985 open issues may indicate scale, complexity, backlog pressure, or all three. Vikunja’s 217 open issues is smaller, but that does not automatically mean it is calmer in production.

Self-hosting

Plane supports self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 2 on a 1-5 scale. That is the right shape for a Linear alternative: you can run it yourself, but there is also a hosted option if your team wants the product without owning every operational chore. The official SaaS price in the supplied data is $8/month, which makes it easy to compare against the “we want open source, but we also want sleep” version of the decision.

Vikunja also supports self-host and official-cloud, with the same deploy difficulty of 2 on a 1-5 scale. Its official SaaS price is listed as $4/month. That lower hosted price fits the product’s smaller promise: a self-hostable to-do app you can own, with a cloud option if you decide your weekend should not be consumed by yet another container stack.

Community signals

The Hacker News data for Plane is technically present, but it is not useful for judging the software. The supplied top HN story is “Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth,” with 2,256 points and 704 comments. That is about actual planets, not Plane the project management app. Great for astronomy, terrible for procurement.

The supplied Reddit top post for Plane has the same problem. It is titled “A crashed Pan Am passenger plane from 1952 has been identified today by Discovery Channel in the Atlantic Ocean,” posted in r/Damnthatsinteresting with 60,381 upvotes and 860 comments. Again: wrong plane. This is why raw social scraping without entity disambiguation produces slop with confidence.

Vikunja’s Hacker News signal is cleaner. The top HN story is “Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app,” with 322 points and 90 comments, posted by fgrsnau on 2023-01-21. The supplied data also says Vikunja had 1 HN mention in the last 90 days. That does not prove a thriving community, but it does show the project has had at least some relevant attention in the places self-hosting people tend to haunt.

The Reddit data for Vikunja is not a useful product signal from what is provided. The top post is “Looking for feedback on my homelab/network diagram” in r/homelab, with 189 upvotes and 42 comments. That may be adjacent to the self-hosting crowd, but the supplied title does not establish that the discussion is about Vikunja itself. So it should not be treated as evidence that Reddit loves, hates, or has even noticed the app.

What we'd do

Choose Plane if you are replacing Linear for a software team and need something closer to issue tracking, sprints, docs, and triage in one place. Choose Vikunja if your real need is owned task management, lighter project tracking, and a self-hostable to-do system that is not pretending to be the operating system for your entire company. Plane is the more obvious Linear alternative; Vikunja is the better pick when “Linear replacement” really means “please stop charging us for a shared task list.”