head to head
Jira vs Wekan
Wekan is the open source alternative to Jira — issue tracker and project management for software teams. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Wekan is a viable free replacement for Jira. Wekan is open source under MIT, written in JavaScript, with 21,089 GitHub stars, 3,000 forks and 165 open issues; it was last pushed 9 hours ago. Jira costs from $8, while self-hosting Wekan 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. Wekan ranks #4 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), Vikunja (5,438 stars), Taiga (850 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Wekan and 3 reasons to stay on Jira.
choose Wekan 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
| Wekan (open source) | Jira | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $8.15-$16/user/month |
| License | MIT | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — wekan/wekan | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 21K · ⑂ 3.0K | — |
| Built with | JavaScript | — |
Why people look for a Jira alternative
About Wekan
Wekan is an open source collaborative kanban board application written in JavaScript and built with Meteor. It is licensed under the MIT license and is positioned as a free and open source alternative to Jira and Monday.com. The project lives in the self hosted business software and project management ecosystem.
read the full Wekan overview →
Other open source alternatives to Jira
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Wekan a good replacement for Jira?
Wekan is an open source alternative to Jira (Issue tracker and project management for software teams). It is written in JavaScript and licensed under MIT, with 21,089 GitHub stars.
Is Wekan free compared to Jira?
Yes. Wekan 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 Wekan?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Wekan's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.