A Free Software / Open Source Basecamp?
Recently, I have been playing around with the rather excellent Basecamp. For a project management app, it provides a great mix of usability and features. I am even happy to pay a moderate fee to support a high-quality service that I don't have to worry about (though I admit I would prefer that it were Free Software).
Unfortunately, unless it gains some features, I can't use it for my major projects.
Anyone know of good Free Software/Open Source project that is similar? I have used Trac (which is excellent, but seems daunting for many users and needs further customization to be well-suited for PM) and many other Free/Open bug tracking systems.
Required Features (above and beyond Basecamp's current feature set)
- Data import and export (of all things, not just messages and comments)
Nice-to-have Features
- Revision history
- An API, so that I can automate boring tasks or things not provided by the GUI
So, lazyweb, whatcha got for me? :)
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Posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 4:31
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December 14th, 2005 at 6:53
PHP Collab is/was the closest, except it sucks.
There are lots of things I hate about Basecamp, but it meets the close enough test. AirSet.com has been interesting to play with.
I think we can clone this, and we've got Important Projects on the job…
December 21st, 2005 at 16:01
Hi, Zak!
I am indeed on this job - I plan to produce an inventory of existing web-based project management tools, work with users to determine what's missing, then document the requirements for an open source tool that does what we need it to do :)
I'll keep you in the loop as things progress - it'd be great to get your input.
Best,
Rob
February 1st, 2006 at 16:18
there doesn't seem to be too much headway over at Important Projects on this yet but in the meantime, it might be worth looking at dotProject.
I've written several hacks for it that allow for subscription of tasks (via RSS) and calendars (via ics), as well as a hack to allow for ldap authentication. They're not in any shape for public release but if anyone starts making headway on web 2.0-ifying dotProject, I'm happy to contribute the code we've written.
February 5th, 2006 at 16:41
Thanks Jim! I will check it out. Cheers! –zak
April 2nd, 2006 at 3:47
We've used dotproject for a while but it needs some serious standards work doing to it. The last release was April last year so I suspect it has lost momentum. We have a client who is interested in using it as they see basecamp as a) expensive for their scale of requirement and b) somewhat limiting. If our clients go for it we'd almost certainly make our mods available to the community and the dotproject team.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:15
I am using dotproject right now - their latest release is from June 2006. In various respects more useful than basecamp, although never as appealing or UI pretty.
November 30th, 2006 at 19:56
What about activecollab over at http://www.activecollab.com/ ?
Many consider it to be the "open source alternative to Basecamp".
Regards,
Jonathan
October 16th, 2007 at 7:38
Active Collab is no longer open source , nor free
October 21st, 2007 at 23:31
For those looking at activeCollab, please check out ProjectPier (http://www.projectpier.org) it is an open source project that will continue to be open source, unlike activeCollab.
October 28th, 2007 at 21:21
I’ve compiled quite a list of Basecamp Alternatives some of which are open-source at my Basecamp bitch site here:
http://www.whybasecampsux.org/#alternatives
Hope this helps those looking for project management solutions other than Basecamp.
March 23rd, 2008 at 13:30
trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) is a great open-source alternative!
March 31st, 2008 at 20:55
[...] example, some time ago I wrote a simple post about how I was looking for a Free Software/Open Source analog for Basecamp. A few years later, this is one of the most visited posts on my blog — I guess that many [...]