project-open.com

What It Is

]project-open[ is an open-source project and service management platform provided by Project Open Business Solutions S.L. Positioned as an integrated application for service-oriented industries, it covers Enterprise Project Management (EPM), Project Management Office (PMO), IT Service Management (ITSM), and Professional Services Automation (PSA). It offers a freely downloadable and self-hosted Community Edition, as well as commercial Professional and Enterprise editions and SaaS packages.

Core Capabilities

For project management, the system can track project plans, progress, budgets, costs, risks, milestones, and resource consumption. It also supports cross-project dependencies, project initiation approvals, project portfolio management, and resource capacity management. In PMO scenarios, it emphasizes a single repository, permission-based sharing, and automatically generated management reports. The ITSM component aligns with ITIL V3, COBIT, and PRINCE, and includes modules for Helpdesk, incidents, changes, configuration, releases, SLAs, and more. PSA is aimed at consulting and professional services firms, supporting timesheets, expenses, travel, absences, contract-based billing, multi-currency operations, and reporting analytics.

Integrations, Permissions, and Deployment

Its integration capabilities are fairly strong. The documentation lists Nagios, OTRS, Bugzilla, Mantis, RT, LDAP/AD, PAM, OCS Inventory, GanttProject, openProj, MS Project, SAP FI, Navision, Datev, ODBC, XML-RPC, SOAP/WSDL, and more. For permissions, it supports sharing project information based on access rights, controlling whether users can read, modify, or manage projects, and using workflows to handle ticket, expense, and absence approvals. Deployment options include self-hosted installation on Windows, Linux, and VMware/VBox, as well as SaaS packages that require no installation or backups and can be available within 24 hours.

Pricing and Service

The Community Edition is free and open source. Professional costs €12 per employee/month, while Enterprise costs €24 per employee/month. Commercial editions require a minimum of 20 licenses and include 2 and 6 support requests per year, respectively. The commercial editions provide closed-source extensions such as advanced reporting, LDAP, OTP, auditing, SAP FI integration, and more. They also promise lifecycle support, a migration path, and no lock-in.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are broad functional coverage, open-source controllability, self-hosting support, and deep integrations. It is suitable for PMOs, IT departments, IT service providers, consulting firms, and service-based businesses that need time-based billing. Downsides include product information and packaging that feel somewhat traditional, potentially high implementation complexity, advanced capabilities concentrated in the commercial editions, and a 20-license minimum that is not very friendly to small teams. SaaS pricing, compliance certifications, and cloud region information are also insufficiently detailed.

Access from China

The source material does not provide information on network access from China, payment methods, or localized services, so access status is unknown. Chinese teams needing similar capabilities may compare Redmine, OpenProject, Jira Service Management, ServiceNow, Odoo, 禅道, or Teambition, with particular attention to access stability, Chinese-language support, and local payment options.