Instead of Jira & Confluence: OpenProject and XWiki plan open source alternative

OpenProject and XWiki have announced that they will jointly provide an open source alternative for the Atlassian applications Jira and Confluence. The two open source projects have joined forces in a strategic partnership. This is an important step for companies away from Atlassian and towards digital sovereignty and independence, explains Niels Lindenthal, CEO of OpenProject. The two projects have already cooperated on the development of the free office suite openDesk, which will soon be used in the public health service.

Developers bring components together

Specifically, the plan is to develop an integrated application for project and knowledge management in organizations. The components for project planning, task management and issue tracking will be taken from OpenProject. XWiki, on the other hand, will provide the platform for knowledge management and collaborative documentation. The French team is providing its own migration tool for switching from Confluence. OpenProject does not yet offer such an application. Instead, there is a free Jira importer from the community.

Both applications have recently been updated. With the current version 17.5.0, XWiki received a revised user interface for configuring macros in the WYSIWYG editor. This allows macro parameters to be sorted and their groups and functions to be displayed more clearly. Users should also be able to better distinguish between optional and mandatory parameters. In addition, administrators can now set properties using environment variables or system properties from Java. The developers also promise better performance.

OpenProject 16.1 gets project phases

In version 16.1, the OpenProject developers have expanded the previous version of the project management tool to include project phases, which structure the life cycle of a project. They can be used to define decision points at which project managers decide whether to continue or terminate the project. Users can also assign corresponding work packages to the project phases. In addition, agendas and their results can be exported as PDFs and negative delays can be set up for overlapping tasks.

According to the company, there is already a roadmap for integrating the two projects. The software, associated support and hosting are to be available from both providers in future. However, a joint hosting offer is not yet planned. For the public sector, the developers have also announced procurement by openDesk via the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDIS). Both companies plan to present an initial version of the application in the fourth quarter of 2025.

(sfe)