Plane.so Pricing is Hostile: Here Are the Self-Hosted Alternatives Worth Your Time

Saw a thread over on r/selfhosted recently titled “Anyone found a good plane.so alternative? Their pricing in insanely hostile.”

I feel this in my bones.

Plane is a gorgeous Jira alternative. It’s slick, it’s fast, and honestly, their UI puts most enterprise legacy trash to shame. But the second you outgrow the free tier and look at their cloud plans, the sticker shock hits you like a freight train. They want $9 per user per month for basic features like file attachments beyond 5GB and automations. If you have a team of ten, you’re suddenly bleeding $100 a month for what is essentially a frontend for a database.

So, people boot up Docker.

Plane offers a self-hosted Community Edition. It’s not entirely a trap, but it’s close. The CE version deliberately nerfs key features like GitHub/GitLab integrations, cycle insights, and advanced viewer controls. You’re basically running a dev-preview. The other day, an update rolled out and the docker-mailhog dependency broke my entire compose stack for half a day. I spent three hours fighting broken Postgres permissions on my Hetzner box before a random Github issue told me to just wipe the mounted volumes and start fresh.

It shouldn’t be this annoying. If you’re tired of getting squeezed by SaaS pricing or fighting deliberately degraded community editions, here is what actually works.

Focalboard: The Boring, Stable Workhorse #

If you just want a Trello or basic Jira replacement without the hassle, Focalboard is my go-to. Mattermost bought it, opensourced it, and largely left it alone.

I run the standalone server version of Focalboard on a $4.50/month Hetzner CX21 instance. It takes literally five minutes to spin up. The Docker image is remarkably lean—sitting at around 150MB of RAM usage even when my team of five is actively dragging cards around.

The UI isn’t going to win any design awards. It looks like a spreadsheet from 2015. But it just runs. I haven’t touched it for an update in eight months and it hasn’t crashed once.

OpenProject: Overkill, But Powerful #

OpenProject is the GNU Emacs of project management. You can do literally anything with it, but you might spend an hour figuring out how.

A guy in the Reddit thread mentioned moving to OpenProject after the latest Plane CE restrictions. I get why. OpenProject does not hold basic features hostage. You get Gantt charts, time tracking, bug tracking, and wikis all baked in for zero dollars.

The catch? It eats RAM like absolute candy. I tried running it on an older 4GB DigitalOcean droplet a few months ago and it crashed during a massive CSV import of 2,000 tickets. You need at least 8GB of RAM to comfortably host this and Postgres on the same box. I haven’t tested this on ARM, but people have built custom docker-compose setups for it, so your mileage may vary.

This is overkill for most people just managing a side project. But if you run an actual small business and need insane granularity, it beats paying Plane’s enterprise tier.

Taiga: The Middle Ground #

Taiga is the tool I actually recommend to ex-Plane users. It occupies the perfect middle ground.

It looks halfway decent. It has proper Kanban, Scrum, and issue tracking modules. It handles attachments without threatening to hold your data hostage. Setup is a bit more involved than Focalboard because you need to configure a dozen microservices via RabbitMQ, but if you follow their official docker-compose repo, it spins up fine.

The community is genuinely split on Taiga’s long-term future. The core dev team is small, and updates are slow. But version 6.7 (from late 2023) runs stable as a rock today. I have it idling on a Hetzner shared instance with 2 vCPU and 4GB RAM, and it barely breaks a sweat.

Stop Paying for UI #

The biggest trap in self-hosting right now is falling for sleek SaaS aesthetics and assuming their free tiers will save you. Plane.so is gorgeous. If you have an infinite budget for their cloud, just pay it.

If you don’t, stop fighting their Docker stack. Roll back to a stable commit of Focalboard, provision a cheap VPS, and reclaim your sanity.