truetask.io

What It Is

Truetask is a self-hosted back-office project management platform aimed at collaboration for production, IT, finance, HR, and similar teams outside an organization’s core business systems. It does not offer a hosted cloud service; instead, it runs on the customer’s own servers, emphasizing perpetual licensing, no per-seat pricing, data sovereignty, and support for air-gapped environments.

Core Capabilities

The product covers common project views such as Kanban, list/table, calendar, timeline, and Gantt. Task cards support Markdown, checklists, attachments, custom fields, tags, priorities, members, watchers, dependencies, and cross-board task views. For collaboration, it offers real-time WebSocket sync, comments, @mentions, a notification center, and browser push notifications. Enterprise-oriented features include AD/LDAP, OAuth 2.0/OIDC SSO, user groups, REST API, Webhooks, S3 backups, and, in the Enterprise edition, audit logs, compliance exports, AI summaries, BYO LLM, and MCP Server.

Pricing and Trial

Pricing is very straightforward: a 45-day full-featured free trial with no credit card required; Teams is a one-time $500, Pro is a one-time $1,500, and Enterprise is a one-time $5,000. All are perpetual licenses with unlimited users and include 1 year of updates. After the first year, renewal for updates and support is typically 25%-40% of the original price. A 30-day refund policy applies after purchase. For large teams or organizations with many infrequent users, the value proposition is clearly stronger than per-user subscription models.

Pros and Cons

The main advantages are that data stays on-premises, with zero telemetry and no external calls. It supports encryption at rest for the database, LDAPS, TLS, SHA-256 hash-chain audit logs, and SOC 2/ISO 27001 report exports, making it well suited to compliance-heavy and intranet scenarios. Deployment is also pragmatic, with support for Docker Compose, one-command installation, local installers, and air-gapped operation. The downsides are that customers must handle self-hosting and operations themselves, including backups, upgrades, and availability. Teams does not include email support; SSO, API, and Webhooks start from Pro; compliance auditing and S3 backups are available only in Enterprise.

Who It’s For and China Access

It is a good fit for VFX, gaming, and animation studios; R&D labs; manufacturing, healthcare, finance, legal, government, and defense contractor organizations; and teams planning to migrate from Jira, Asana, or Trello while avoiding ongoing per-seat fees. It is not ideal for small teams that want vendor-managed hosting, automatic upgrades, and minimal operational overhead. The available information does not mention access from mainland China, payment methods, or local nodes, so china_access can only be considered unknown. For use in China, the more realistic approach may be to purchase the license and deploy it on a local or intranet server, while also verifying whether payment, license downloads, and support communication work smoothly.