Redmine

You can get the bare bones redmine up and running in minutes using a bitnami stack. Out of the box it's built for speed and simplicity, but if you are prepared to put some minimal effort in to add plugins, you can add many features, all free, that take it to the next level.

The barebones version leads many (reviewers on this site included) to think that's all there is. It's built to be modular and extensible, so if you don't like the UI, you can simply add themes, if you want it to do additional stuff like tight email integration, agile (yes there are multiple free versions), helpdesk, Work Breakdown Structures, Charts, fully customized menu bar, repositories, Vault, Excellent Wiki, integrations to Slack and other ticket systems etc - you can do all of that. But because people see versions of Jira or Service Now running with more features (both of which require much more knowledge and effort), they think that redmine is underpowered. So imho that would be my main issue - it's reputation regarding functionality and security - both unfounded.

ya, it's free. And we can optimize it as our own way. Becasue sometime you need to make it suitable for your organization. But for the Commercial software, you can only request them and wait for them. With Redmine, you can do everything you want to make it fit to your people.

End-user always complain me about the software is hard to use. For me, a tech, I fell it's OK. But End-user they might need something pretty, beautiful and more visualization.

It was easy to use the software; most of it was intuitive and it had an impressive link-back and drill-down system. I liked that we could customize dashboards and pull some basic metrics out of the funnels. Since we were a smaller team that used it, we didn't have large amounts of issues/data problems, so it was nice to have everything loading in context and faster.

Open source setup, so lots of bugs. Some things like email notifications never worked properly. Was hard to integrate other things with it (though this may have gotten better). Sometimes we would lose access to tickets and issues, and sometimes they disappeared out of the system, or we'd see duplications.

Redmine is easy to use and great for onboarding clients and staff. It is able to prioritize our work and helps clients to see the project roadmap and development cycle at a glance.

It was a little difficult to get it up and running, but once you do, you don't have to ever touch it again.

Redmine has a great number of features that are extremely useful for any team working on a project. You can store important files in its Wiki, allowing information both from the project and the company itself to be stored in a unique and well-organized place. Tasks are easily created and assigned to one more person and tracking the task's progression is extremely easy. Besides that, the Gantt chart and a couple of other tools allow for easy visualization of the project's progress and how each person working on it is doing.

Redmine's User Interface is, honestly, not that pleasing to look at. It really feels like software coming from the 90s that is old and clunky. That assessment is incorrect and Redmine actually works really well, but it's still not beautiful at all.