At a glance — how these 3 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 53,605 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 10,124 · PHP | Mainstream | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 1 | Niche | Stale | Unknown risk No clear SPDX id — treat as all-rights-reserved until verified |
The alternatives
plane
🔥🔥🔥 Open-source Jira, Linear, Monday, and ClickUp alternative. Plane is a modern project management platform to manage tasks, sprints, docs, and triage.
makeplane/plane Updated 2026-06-30 leantime
Leantime is a goals focused project management system for non-project managers. Building with ADHD, Autism, and dyslexia in mind.
leantime/leantime Updated 2026-06-21 focalboard
focalboard/focalboard Updated 2025-02-24 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
ClickUp deliberately bundles tasks, docs, time, and goals — so the OSS move isn't a swap, it's an unbundling you have to design on purpose.
ClickUp’s whole pitch is that it absorbs other tools: tasks like Asana, docs like Notion, time tracking like Toggl, goals on top. That bundling is exactly what makes the open-source path tricky, and it’s the thing I’d want a reader to internalize before they go shopping. There is no single OSS tool that reproduces ClickUp’s breadth. So the decision in front of you isn’t “which ClickUp clone do I pick” — it’s “which pieces of ClickUp do we actually use, and which separate tools cover each one.” You’re unbundling on purpose.
That’s why I read the candidate list as covering different slices rather than competing head-to-head.
Plane (52.2k stars, TypeScript, AGPL-3.0) is the obvious anchor for the task and sprint half. It’s actively maintained — pushed the day I’m writing this — and explicitly positions against Jira, Linear, and ClickUp for tasks, sprints, and triage. What it does not hand you is ClickUp’s unified Docs, time tracking, and goal tracking in one surface. So Plane is the pick if your team mostly lived in ClickUp’s task views, and you’re willing to pair it with a dedicated wiki (Outline, BookStack) for docs.
Leantime (10k stars, PHP, AGPL-3.0) is a different bet. It’s goals-focused and built with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia in mind — a stated design intent, not a feature checklist. If what your team valued in ClickUp was the goals-and-outcomes framing more than raw sprint mechanics, Leantime is worth a serious look, and it’s the kind of thing teams overlook because it doesn’t market itself as a ClickUp replacement.
One entry to be candid about: focalboard. It used to be the natural kanban/board recommendation here, but Mattermost discontinued the standalone project — the repo is effectively archived and shows no recent activity. I wouldn’t start a new deployment on it today, and I’m flagging that rather than listing it as a live option.
The migration detail I’d stress: ClickUp automations have no export format. Tasks come out as CSV per List, docs as HTML or PDF, but every trigger/action pair you’ve built has to be written down by hand before you leave. That manual inventory, not the data export, is where the real time goes.
Comparison notes
Plane is the primary OSS alternative for task and sprint management, but it does not replicate ClickUp's built-in Docs, time tracking, or goal tracking in a unified interface. AppFlowy is an OSS Notion-adjacent tool for docs and databases but lacks ClickUp's task management depth. The main challenge in migrating from ClickUp is that no single OSS tool covers ClickUp's intentional breadth — you'll likely need to combine tools (e.g., Plane + Outline for docs). ClickUp's automations and 100+ integrations are significantly ahead of OSS alternatives.
Migration tips
- Export ClickUp tasks as CSV from each Space/List — subtasks, custom fields, and attachments export separately
- ClickUp Docs export as HTML or PDF; import into your target wiki tool (Outline, BookStack) with manual cleanup
- Document your ClickUp automations (trigger/action pairs) before migration — no export format exists
- Recreate custom field schemas in your target tool before importing task data to preserve structured data
- Notify integrations (Slack, GitHub, Zapier) that use ClickUp webhooks to update to the new platform
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing ClickUp isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 3 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → plane. 53,605★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
License & commercial-use notes
With a ClickUp replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 3 projects here fall into:
- Network copyleft (plane, leantime) — AGPL / SSPL — the copyleft trigger extends to offering the software over a network, so a hosted deployment of a modified version can oblige you to publish your changes. Read the exact terms before building a paid hosted product on these.
- Unverified license (focalboard) — GitHub returned no clear SPDX id. Treat as all-rights-reserved until you read the project's LICENSE file directly — do not assume commercial use is permitted.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 3 projects
Of the 3 projects listed, 2 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
How do these 3 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
2 of 3 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from ClickUp's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 2 of 3 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
- Spotted an error? Email [email protected] with the page URL (subject prefix
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