A low-cost, low-barrier project management tool
December 12, 2018
A low-cost, low-barrier project management tool
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Redmine
I have used Redmine in a number of organizations as well as with a number of open-source projects. Redmine is a top-tier project management tool allowing users to track issues and plan releases. I've used Redmine within developer organizations, support organizations, and as a general purpose project management tool. Redmine is a free, open-source tool that can be rapidly deployed and requires little day-to-day support to keep it running.
- Issue Tracker - Redmine allows in-depth issue tracking complete with workflows and customization.
- Release Tracker - Redmine allows releases to be tracked by milestones, collecting relevant issues in each milestone.
- Agile Management - With a few free or low-cost add-ons, Redmine becomes a great tool for Agile project management
- Redmine's interface design needs a bit of upgrading. It's nowhere near a modern, polished interface. Unfortunately, this severely limits user acceptance and willingness to use the application.
- Workflow management is primitive, at best. When compared to the workflow management support that a tool such as JIRA has, Redmine's workflow management is very out of date.
- The "free" bit definitely has a nice impact on ROI. Granted, there are other factors, but not shelling out a ton of cash at the outset is definitely a plus.
- Once everyone gets into the flow of things, Redmine quickly becomes a huge factor in ensuring proper communication and quality in projects. Having everything centrally located reduces the time and effort needed to gather necessary information to proceed forward.
- JIRA Software and Gitlab
JIRA is currently the gold standard here, but it has a pretty substantial subscription price based on the number of accounts you need to create. JIRA gets pricey, very quickly.
Gitlab has built-in issue and documentation management, however it's still primitive in its current iteration. Gitlab recently received $100M in funding with which they are planning on extensively updating these tools and targeting JIRA directly. Definitely a product worth keeping an eye on.
In the end, deploying Redmine was a low-cost, simple entry into the project management arena and allowed us to focus on the products we wanted to build, versus spending a lot of time and money on an application to support our focus.