Redmine

Redmine is the least fashionable and most durable project tracker in existence. Released in 2006, written in Rails, and still running the institutional memory of a great many engineering organisations.

Why we still choose it

Because a tracker accumulates the most valuable and least portable asset a company has — the record of why things were decided — and that record should not live in a database somebody else can reprice. Redmine has no seat licence, so the hundredth user costs what the tenth did, and the whole archive sits in PostgreSQL on a disk you own.

It also bends. Custom trackers, custom fields and per-role workflow transitions mean it can match a regulated process rather than fight it, which is why it survives in industries where the fashionable tools do not.

How we run it

As a NixOS module in your repository: Ruby version, gems, plugins, PostgreSQL, nginx, TLS and backup schedule in one file. Migrations from Jira, Trello or Asana preserve issue numbers, attachments, authors and relations. Backups run nightly to a second European region and are restore-tested monthly, with the evidence sent to you.

The honest limit

It looks like 2009, because it largely is. A design-led team that will judge your company by its tracker will judge this one harshly, and that is a real cost. It is also not a suite — it tracks issues and time, and the plugins that pretend otherwise are usually a mistake.