head to head
Jira vs Vikunja
Vikunja is the open source alternative to Jira — issue tracker and project management for software teams. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Vikunja is a viable free replacement for Jira. Vikunja is open source under AGPL-3.0, written in Go, with 5,438 GitHub stars, 694 forks and 235 open issues; it was last pushed 7 hours ago. Jira costs from $8, while self-hosting Vikunja carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 5 other open source Jira alternatives are tracked here, led by Plane at 59,546 stars. Vikunja ranks #5 of 6 tracked open source Jira alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Plane (59,546 stars), Gitea (58,048 stars), Huly (27,700 stars), Wekan (21,089 stars), Taiga (850 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Vikunja and 3 reasons to stay on Jira.
choose Vikunja if
- Your Jira bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Jira if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Jira integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Vikunja (open source) | Jira | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $8.15-$16/user/month |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — go-vikunja/vikunja | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 5.4K · ⑂ 694 | — |
| Built with | Go | — |
Why people look for a Jira alternative
About Vikunja
Vikunja is a self hosted task and project management application that carries the tagline "The task manager you actually own." It lives in the Go and Vue.js ecosystem: the backend is written in Go, the frontend uses Vue.js, and the project ships a documented OpenAPI interface with Swagger docs published against the hosted demo instance. The repository sits on GitHub under the go vikunja organization, is licensed AGPL 3.0 or later across most of the codebase with the contents of desktop/ under GPL 3.0 or later, and is published as the Docker image vikunja/vikunja with the current release marked as v2.6.0.
read the full Vikunja overview →
Other open source alternatives to Jira
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Vikunja a good replacement for Jira?
Vikunja is an open source alternative to Jira (Issue tracker and project management for software teams). It is written in Go and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with 5,438 GitHub stars.
Is Vikunja free compared to Jira?
Yes. Vikunja is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Jira is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Jira to Vikunja?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Vikunja's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.