Redmine

Hey Chris,

I've also reviewed OpenProject a while ago as it looked like the more beautiful brother of Redmine and had problems with convincing my colleagues to try a ticket based project management instead of the "over the air" approach they where used to.

In my opinion the OpenProject guys have created a quite nice user interface although it can not negate its roots and there are some rough edges, too. ;-) The same is true for Redmine spins like plan.io though. They all share the same gene so in every case you get most of the basic Redmine concepts and modules. I don't see much differences.
There is more pace in the development of OpenProject because they pay developers to write code and have concrete plans in which direction OpenProject should sail. If this is the same direction in which you would like to go it can be definitely worth a try.

Redmine with all its plugins seemed to me more friendly to extend and customize so I decided to go along with it.

Nowadays the internet is full of fancy SaaS project management tools with lots of eye candy and innovative work flows. Many people are OK with having a crappy standard workflow/functionality if they don't have and create their own. So I don't see increasing numbers of users in either project.

Ok, Redmine is an ugly slow moving turtle but hey...
Turtles can get very old. ;-)

And why not make a crazy Ninja Turtle out of it. xD

After so many years working with it, do you have any thoughts on how to improve Redmine?

Hi Bernhard,

thanks for the reply!
Yes, if it comes to the basics, they share the same roots.
I am still not sure which way to go, but i am personally in doubt that OpenProject will share all the stuff to the open source community - i am just not sure about there "way".
Redmine has great stabilty aside from framework issues that sometimes com from ruby or rails - but we never lost anything and had not downtime that could be traced back to redmine in the last 7 years.
The only thing is UX/UI. At the core, there is everything you need and it still has one the most finest database schema you can find.
Just to give you some hint on how we constantly try to improve things for ourselfs i attached a short screenshot.
It would be great to have more UX at the core like in-place editing and more asynchronous page interactions instead of all those page reloads - OpenProject also made the differences quite clear on their page (due to marketing i guess ;-) )
But it also shows what you would exepect out of the box.
We currently have a dev version running that uses webpack and bootstrap 4. But it is very much a proof of concept right now.
The Screenshot shows the current theme with some ui improvements and Bootstrap 3:

Best,
Chris

Wow this looks really amazing!

I could imagine that if the Redmine core would be more modular and accessible from the outside there would be many great applications using it as a backend.

THX!

Yes, i totally agree. A more Modular approach would be helpful. I guess i'll check out OpenProjects code in more detail. Let's see :-)

i reviewed openproject and redmine.. openproject has some improvements like agile (but must paid) BUT REDMINE TOO, like inter-share beetween projects or subprojects... the wiki/content inter-share system too, using macros (i cannot see easyle that in openproject)

i have two point of views:

administrators: it will prefer redmine, more basic, more simple and easy to mantain.. that's all

large-chefs: will opt to openproject due has build in agile (but seems must paid), also openproject are focused to large deploys... but carefully due seems are not multipurpose!

mid-chefs: those very busy leaders will prefers redmine, in mid-to-little enterprices.. not so many thing to learn and easy to enhanched with plguins, if pay to some developers.. can improve it so far

end-users: due ignorant vision .. maybe will prefer openproject.. but later will discover that redmine are easy and fast of usage..

from my point of view.. openproject it's just/only redmine with eye-candy buttons and speaking technically openproject it's just for very very large deployments... and those large deployments will prefers gitlab-enterprise ...

Random person's comment here - I just LOVE Redmine. I hear people talk about the UI and so on - but it depends what you want it for. If you are looking at it as a help desk with end users, I get that, but if you're an IT team with power users, I actually prefer the fairly basic redmine UI over the javascript heavy ones - it's much, much faster.

I use a circle theme from the Redmineup people, but you can get a commercial one that is more react/java based from people like https://bestredminetheme.com/boostmine/

In terms of functionality I prefer Redmine also because you can add in as many plugins as you like, and even write your own to customize core functionality if you like. I have 20+ plugins and also have some back end database tasks running to do some more complex stuff (because I'm not very good at ruby).

In the end if you want a fully functional, nice looking redmine, I agree that the plan.io folks are good for a redmine-like UI, and if you really want a fully javascript/web look the easyredmine people have done that for you.