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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 60,522 · TypeScript AGPL-3.0 | Flagship | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 21,111 · JavaScript MIT | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 11,766 · PHP AGPL-3.0 | Mainstream | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
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 2026-10-07 wekan
FLOSS kanban, built with Meteor. Official Public Support at GitHub issues only. Official Private Pre-Paid Support at https://wekan.fi/commercial-support/ only. Translation PRs to imports/i18n/data/en.i18n.json, other translations at https://app.transifex.com/wekan/wekan . No telemetry.
wekan/wekan Updated 2026-10-08 leantime
Leantime is a goals focused project management system for non-project managers. Building with ADHD, Autism, and dyslexia in mind.
Leantime/leantime Updated 2026-10-07 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited · star counts quoted in the text (≈) are as of that date; the cards above are refreshed daily
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 (≈58.9k★, TypeScript, AGPL-3.0) is the obvious anchor for the task and sprint half. It’s actively maintained — see the last-push date on its card — 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 for docs (see the Confluence comparison for candidates).
Leantime (≈11.5k★, 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.
Wekan (≈21.1k★, JavaScript, MIT) is the board card here. Its own description is “the Open Source kanban, built with Meteor”, and that is the slice it covers: if the ClickUp views your team actually used were the board views, Wekan is the direct replacement for that surface and nothing more. One thing its GitHub description says up front that you should read before adopting it: the GitHub issues and PRs are for developers only, with support offered through the maintainer’s commercial channel. It is also one of the cards on the Trello comparison. MIT is the most permissive licence in this group.
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 manually 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. 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 for tasks plus a separate wiki 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 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 project with the most GitHub stars in this list → plane. 60,522★ — the most of the 3 projects here. Stars measure attention, not quality or maintenance; check the last-push date and the Editor's take before reading more into it.
- You ship commercial software and need to ship modified code without releasing source → wekan. MIT licensed — modify and embed without copyleft obligations.
- You want the project with the most recent push activity → wekan. Last push 2026-10-08 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
When replacing ClickUp, 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:
- Permissive (wekan) — MIT / Apache / BSD / ISC — modify and embed inside a commercial product with no copyleft obligation. The safest bucket for shipping in a proprietary codebase.
- 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.
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, 3 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?
3 of 3 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest closed issues — those two signals are the fastest public check we know of.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last push) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis (the intro, comparison notes and migration tips) is Claude-drafted from ClickUp's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata — in Claude Code sessions or scheduled routines run under the operator's account. Samples are spot-checked against the upstream repositories; entries are not individually reviewed unless they carry a signature. See what Claude drafts and what the operator writes.
- Editor's take is signed by Yusuke Morinaga. It was drafted in a Claude Code session the operator ran, then read and confirmed by Yusuke Morinaga before publication, and carries the date it was last revised. It is written from each project's README, LICENSE, release history and issue tracker — not from running the project in production; where that distinction matters, the take says so.
- Maintenance signal: 3 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.
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