An Alternative for MS Project

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Earlier today I put out a question twitter, what is a good open source alternative to MS Project? I am asking because I am about to create another WBS for a project and I think its more professional to have a Gantt chart and a clear delination of where milestones are, than if shown in a spreadsheet.

Additionally, I am a supporter and advocate of many open source tools vs. their costly competitors in the Enterprise. I mean there is nothing wrong with the big guys. Some of their products are amazing and there is no replacement. For instance, I usually use Google Docs or Open Office for writing proposals. But when it gets proprietary and complex, nothing can replace MS Word.

So with that, I share with you my preliminary list of responses for my question on an Alternative for MS Project.

I do not endorse any of these products yet, as I will be trying them over the weekend, but I will share my opinions once I have. Additionally, if you have any suggestions that are not on this list please share. And if yours is one of the suggestions on the list, please explain why you suggested the product, since you have more than 140 characters to do so.

  • http://natelee.org NateLee

    Nice knew look for your site Andrea! My recommendations (http://www.osalt.com/project) were based on osalt, who’s opinion I value very much. Cheers!

  • http://andrearbaker.com Andrea Baker

    Thanks Nate, I have a developer working now on a brand specific banner for me. But for now I just needed a cleaner look for the site that displayed the content in a more meaningful way. Expect by the time Blog Potomac rolls around a new banner will be displayed.

  • http://www.thinkovation.com/blog Gary

    Hi Andrea,

    Dot project is one oss pm tool that I’ve played with recently, it’s a little clunky but my devs liked it because it’s written in PHP – and is therefore easy to integrate with our CRM (SugarCRM) and web app platforms (all in PHP).

  • http://www.wrike.com/ Daria

    Andrea,
    Check out Wrike. It’s integrated with email and had a Gantt chart with drag-and-drop support, to say nothing about ability to create multiple project views. Let us know your opinion.

  • http://CaseySoftware.com/blog Keith Casey

    I’m a former core contributor to dotProject and one of the founders to the public fork of web2project – http://web2project.net/ In the 16 months or so since we split, there has been major work on the User Interface, but even more work on the performance and security of the overall system. One of the biggest installations that I consult on has 100+ projects each with 400+ tasks and the reporting requirements are amazing.

    If you want simple todo list management, Basecamp is a great option… but if you need to have Gantt charts, track time, and have robust permissions, web2project is the way to go.

  • http://www.pacifictimesheet.com jamil

    http://www.pacifictimesheet.com is another option. Easy to use and very neat/clean user interface.

  • http://www.managepro.com T Welch

    Have you looked at ManagePro? They are not open source, but do offer lots of features and is easy to use.

  • http://www.rationalplan.com Lucian Ioan

    RationalPlan is a good alternative to MS Project. It is not open source but it has an affordable price:
    http://www.theprojectalternative.com/