Is self-hosted OpenProject cheaper than monday.com for our team size?
The answer depends on three things: how many people need a named seat, whether you need Enterprise features such as single sign-on or LDAP group synchronization, and how much internal administration time you can commit to running the platform. A single license line will not settle it. Start by counting the users who will hold an active account, then decide whether the Community edition covers your requirements. OpenProject's Community edition is free and includes work packages, Gantt charts, agile boards, time tracking and dashboards, with community support. Enterprise on-premises is priced per named user per month: Basic at 5.95 euros, Professional at 10.95 euros with a 25-user minimum, Premium at 15.95 euros with a 100-user minimum, and Corporate on request for 250 or more users (OpenProject pricing).
Those figures are the OpenProject side only. monday.com prices are not stated on this page, because they depend on plan, seat count, billing period and any add-ons in your contract. Take them from your own order form or renewal quote, and check whether the minimum seat count applies to your team size. Then compare the two totals over the same period, with the same number of named users. Remember that the OpenProject total also includes the hosting you pay for (cloud accounts or your own servers), backups, and the staff time to patch, upgrade and support the platform. The internal effort is the line most often left out of the comparison.
Ask your team to write down these items before requesting a quote from any implementation partner: the user count at renewal and at 12 months, whether SSO or LDAP group synchronization is a hard requirement, the hosting location your data residency rule allows, and who owns upgrades and restores. Those answers determine which OpenProject tier you need and how the cost of ownership is split between licenses, infrastructure and people. If the answer is a Community edition with no Enterprise features, your recurring cost is mainly hosting and administration. If you need Enterprise features at a higher user count, request a quote that covers both the license tier and the infrastructure sizing.
Which cost components change when you move from monday.com to OpenProject
This table compares who is paid for each cost component on monday.com and on self-hosted OpenProject, and whether it is one-time or recurring. Read it as a checklist for a quote: the subscription line moves into seats and infrastructure, while migration, configuration and administration become work you must scope or staff. The main takeaway is that the Enterprise seat price is only one part of the self-hosted total.
| Cost component | Commercial side (monday.com) | Self-hosted side (OpenProject) | One-time or recurring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription or license | Per-seat monday.com plan, billed by the vendor under your contract | Community edition is free; Enterprise on-premises is priced per named user per month with minimum user counts by tier | Recurring |
| Infrastructure | Included in the vendor's hosting | Servers or cloud instances sized by user count; the sizing guide suggests 4 cores and 4 GB RAM for up to 200 users, 8 cores and 8 GB for about 500 users, and 16 cores and 16 GB for about 1,500 users | Recurring |
| Implementation and configuration | Board, automation and permission setup done by your admins | Installation (Docker recommended), PostgreSQL setup, SSO and LDAP wiring, and project templates, often through a fixed-scope partner | One-time |
| Data migration | Board exports and API extraction, with automations and dashboards rebuilt by hand | Mapping boards and items to work packages; the Jira migrator is beta and does not apply to monday.com | One-time |
| Support | Included in the vendor subscription at your plan level | Community support on the free edition; paid support depends on the Enterprise plan or a retainer you agree in writing | Recurring |
| Upgrades and patching | Handled by the vendor | Your team or partner applies releases, database changes and OS patches on your schedule | Recurring |
| Internal administration and skills | Light admin for workspaces and users | Dedicated time for backups, user lifecycle, monitoring and PostgreSQL maintenance; confirm who owns this | Recurring |
| Training | Vendor learning resources and in-app guidance | Admin and end-user onboarding on work packages, Gantt views and time tracking, plus internal runbooks | One-time, with refreshers |
What moves the monday.com versus OpenProject comparison
The cost gap between monday.com and self-hosted OpenProject depends on a few variables that you control: how many named users need paid features, which features you actually require, how much data and availability you need, and who will run the platform. Work through these six drivers with your own numbers before you compare quotes.
Named user count and tier thresholds
OpenProject Enterprise on-premises is priced per named user per month, and the Professional and Premium tiers carry minimum user counts of 25 and 100. Teams just above a threshold may pay for seats they do not use, while teams just below one may find the Community edition sufficient. Count active named users, not total accounts, and ask any vendor how it treats guests, viewers and inactive users.
Enterprise-only features that drive the tier
SSO with SAML, OIDC, CAS, Kerberos or Okta, LDAP group synchronization and custom branding sit in the Enterprise plans, while the Community edition covers work packages, Gantt charts, agile boards and time tracking. If your identity provider requires SSO for every user, the Community edition is not enough regardless of seat count. Confirm which features your security policy requires before choosing a tier.
Data volume and sizing tiers
OpenProject's sizing guidance scales from 4 cores and 4 GB RAM for up to 200 users to 16 cores and 16 GB for about 1,500 users. Hardware is a recurring cost that grows with user count and activity, and it is separate from the license. Ask your infrastructure team to estimate the workload from your project history and attachment volume, then price the virtual machines or cluster nodes in your own cloud or data center.
Availability and Kubernetes requirements
Docker-based installation is the recommended route, and Kubernetes with Helm charts is the option for horizontal scaling. A single-host Docker deployment is simpler to run, but it carries a single point of failure. If you need high availability or formal uptime commitments, budget for a cluster, load balancing, backups and on-call coverage, and decide whether the platform team will absorb that operating load.
PostgreSQL 16 and required extensions
OpenProject officially supports PostgreSQL 16 or later and requires the pg_trgm, btree_gist and unaccent extensions. If you already run a managed PostgreSQL service, confirm that the provider allows these extensions and that its version meets the requirement. A new database service is an additional recurring cost, while using an existing one shifts work to your database team.
In-house administration skills
Someone must patch the platform, rotate secrets, run backups, test restores and apply upgrades on a regular release cycle. OpenProject, for example, shipped 17.7.0, 17.8.0 and 17.9.0 between August and September 2026, so upgrades are a recurring task. Where that skill is missing, the cost of a fixed-scope implementation or a retainer for upgrades and support should appear in your comparison next to the license fee.
What the OpenProject Enterprise license does and does not include
The Community edition of OpenProject is free and covers the core work most project teams run: work packages, Gantt charts, agile boards, time tracking and dashboards, with community support. The paid Enterprise plans add what larger or regulated organizations usually need from an identity and administration standpoint: single sign-on, LDAP synchronization, SCIM provisioning, and portfolio and resource management sit in Enterprise, and the Jira Migrator is listed from the Basic tier upward. Before you price anything, decide which of these you need on day one, because they determine the tier and therefore the per-user cost.
The licensing model is per named user per month on the on-premises plans, with minimum user counts on the Professional and Premium tiers, so the number of people who actually log in matters as much as the number of people on the project. Ask OpenProject to confirm in writing how named users are counted, whether guests or read-only stakeholders count, and how seat changes are handled mid-term. Confirm the current figures on the OpenProject pricing page, because tier prices and minimums change.
Next, list the monday.com features your teams depend on and check each one against OpenProject's edition comparison. Automations, custom integrations, board-level dashboards and the exact view types are the usual gaps. Some needs will be met by Community features, some by an Enterprise tier, and some by a workaround or a different tool. A feature that is missing from the comparison should be treated as unconfirmed until OpenProject answers it in writing, and should be tested in a pilot before the contract is signed.
How to build the cost comparison with your own numbers
This sequence turns your monday.com invoice and user list into a like-for-like comparison with self-hosted OpenProject, so the totals reflect your seats, features and server footprint rather than a generic estimate.
Pull the current monday.com plan and seat count
Finance or the account owner gathers the signed order form or latest invoice and records the plan tier, the billed seat count, the billing cycle and the renewal date. Confirm the minimum seat count in the contract, because billed seats can be higher than the people who actively work in the account. The step is complete when you have one row with the plan, billed seats, annual or monthly term and total annual spend as invoiced.
Count active users by role
Export the user list from monday.com admin settings and group people into roles such as administrators, members, guests and viewers, using your own role definitions. Remove inactive or duplicate accounts and note which users only view boards. The output is a count per role that shows how many people would need a named OpenProject account and whether any can be kept as read-only or external users.
Map required features to OpenProject editions
List the features your teams rely on, such as single sign-on, LDAP group synchronization, custom branding, the Jira Migrator or portfolio and resource management. Check each item against the OpenProject pricing page, since the Community edition is free but SSO, LDAP synchronization and portfolio features sit in paid Enterprise plans. Confirm current entitlements with OpenProject before you commit. The output is the lowest edition that covers every required feature.
Price Enterprise per named user per month
Apply the supplied OpenProject Enterprise on-premises tiers to your user count: Basic at 5.95 euros, Professional at 10.95 euros with a 25-user minimum, Premium at 15.95 euros with a 100-user minimum, and Corporate on request for 250 or more users. Multiply the per-user rate by the named users for each tier, then multiply by 12 for an annual figure. For Corporate, request a written quote. The output is a monthly and annual license line for each candidate tier, shown in euros.
Estimate the server footprint from the sizing guide
Use the OpenProject sizing guide, which suggests 4 cores and 4 GB RAM for up to 200 users, 8 cores and 8 GB for about 500 users, and 16 cores and 16 GB for about 1,500 users. Add the database (PostgreSQL 16 or later with the required extensions), storage and backup capacity, and any high availability design. Ask your infrastructure team to price these resources in your own cloud account or data center. The output is a resource list that your team can cost at its own rates.
Add one-time migration and recurring administration
Separate one-time costs (data extraction through the monday.com GraphQL API, mapping, test loads, user onboarding and training) from recurring costs (hosting, backups, upgrades, patching, on-call support and any retainer). Note that the OpenProject Jira Migrator does not cover monday.com, so monday.com boards need custom extraction and loading. Ask any implementation partner for a fixed-scope written quote that lists deliverables and exclusions. The output is two labelled cost lists, one-time and recurring, each with an owner.
Compare totals over a period you set
Choose the comparison period yourself, based on your contract term, budget cycle or planning horizon. Place monday.com subscription spend beside the OpenProject license, hosting, administration and one-time migration totals in the same currency, and show the one-time costs in the year they occur. Mark items you cannot yet quantify, such as features that would be rebuilt rather than migrated. The output is a single table, reviewed by finance and IT, that shows the cumulative cost of each option across the chosen period.
Questions buyers ask before comparing monday.com and OpenProject costs
How do I estimate the cost of self-hosting OpenProject?
Start by separating the cost into components: the OpenProject license tier, the servers and database, storage and backups, and the staff time to install, patch and administer the platform. The Community edition has no license fee, so the recurring cost is mostly infrastructure and people. If you need SSO, LDAP group synchronization or SCIM provisioning, you must add Enterprise on-premises fees, which OpenProject prices per named user per month with minimum user counts by tier. Ask your team to size users, then compare the per-user numbers against your current monday.com seat count, including the seats you pay for but do not use.
How long does a migration from monday.com to OpenProject take?
No fixed duration can be given here, because the effort depends on how much data you move and how much you rebuild. The main drivers are the number of boards and items, how many column types you map to OpenProject work package fields, how many automations and dashboards you recreate by hand, and how clean your existing board structure is. monday.com's GraphQL platform API is the documented route for extracting boards, items, column values, users and workspaces, so the scripted extraction is usually the smaller part of the work. Ask any provider to break the timeline into extraction, mapping, load, validation and user acceptance.
What does a migration need from our internal staff?
Your staff remain essential because they know which boards matter, who owns them and which reports people actually use. Typically you need a board owner for each area who can confirm field mappings, an administrator who can provision the server and identity integration, and someone who can test imported work packages against real projects. Automations, integrations and dashboards do not transfer automatically, so business owners must describe what those workflows did before anyone rebuilds them. Confirm the time commitment of each role in writing before the work starts.
Can our team run OpenProject without outside help?
Yes, many teams run OpenProject themselves, provided they have Linux administration skills, a database operator who understands PostgreSQL 16 or later with the required extensions, and a process for upgrades and backups. OpenProject supports Docker-based installation, .deb and .rpm packages, and Kubernetes with Helm charts. The harder question is whether you have capacity for ongoing patching and upgrades. Outside help is most often used for the initial build, the migration, hardening and backup testing, or as a retainer for continuing support and upgrades. Decide which parts you will own before you start.
Is Plane a cheaper option than OpenProject?
It depends on which features you need and how many people use the tool. Plane's Community Edition is AGPL-3.0 and matches the feature set of its Cloud Free tier, so it has no license fee for the core features. Plane's pricing page lists Pro at 6 to 8 US dollars and Business at 13 to 15 US dollars per user per month, with Enterprise Grid on request. On self-hosted Plane, SAML and OIDC are available from Pro upward, while LDAP and API-enabled audit logs are listed as Enterprise features. Compare the features your team needs in each tier, not just the headline price, and remember that a paid Plane plan requires moving from Community to the Commercial Edition.
What should we ask for in a fixed-scope quote?
Ask for a written scope that names every board or project in the migration, the target platform and edition, the data fields you expect to map, and what is excluded, such as automations or dashboards. The quote should list deliverables including the installation, identity integration, migration runs, validation reports, documentation and handover, along with the timelines agreed for each. Ask how acceptance is tested, who signs it off, and what happens if the source data is messier than expected. DeployOpen plans and implements self-hosted platforms in your own infrastructure and works under fixed-scope agreements, so ask for the same level of detail from any provider you compare.
What hosting and infrastructure costs should we expect for OpenProject?
Infrastructure cost follows the number of users and your availability needs. OpenProject's sizing guide suggests 4 cores and 4 GB RAM for up to 200 users, 8 cores and 8 GB RAM for about 500 users, and 16 cores and 16 GB RAM for about 1,500 users. Add PostgreSQL, storage for attachments, backups, monitoring and a staging environment for upgrades. Packaged installs support Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, CentOS or RHEL 9.x and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15. Price these resources in your own cloud or data center, since the cost of compute and storage varies widely by provider.
What a monday.com to OpenProject migration adds to the cost
The migration effort is a one-time cost that sits on top of the license and hosting figures, and its size depends on what you have built inside monday.com. The main drivers are the number of boards, the total item volume, the mix of column types and how many automations and dashboards your teams rely on. A workspace with a few boards and plain status columns is a small task. A workspace with years of boards, linked items, formula columns and cross-board dependencies is a project in its own right, and the work is usually split between data extraction, mapping to OpenProject work packages and custom fields, and checking the result with the people who use the boards every day.
monday.com's GraphQL platform API is the documented route for extracting boards, items, column values, users and workspaces, as described in monday.com's API basics. Plan for this extraction to be scripted and repeated, because you will run it more than once for test loads and a final cutover. Automations, integrations and dashboards do not carry over as data. Each automation trigger and each dashboard widget has to be rebuilt by hand in OpenProject, or dropped by a deliberate decision, so ask your team to list them before you estimate. Confirm with the internal owner of each board which columns are used in reporting, since those mappings are the ones most likely to break silently.
Whoever runs the migration will be paid for the scripting, mapping, test loads, user acceptance and rework, and that cost is either internal staff time or a fixed-scope services quote. Ask any implementation partner to price the extraction, the mapping of each column type, the rebuild of each automation and dashboard, and the cutover window as separate line items, so you can see which parts scale with board count. Ask the vendor or your own administrators to confirm which OpenProject Enterprise features you need before cutover, because SSO and LDAP group synchronization sit in paid plans, and those licenses are a recurring cost that the migration budget should not hide.
Decision path for choosing Community, Enterprise or a different tool
This sequence turns a general wish to leave monday.com into a written decision on which OpenProject edition, if any, fits your requirements, users and migration source, with a pilot result to support it.
Write down the hard requirements first
Before comparing prices, the project owner and the security or identity lead list the must-have items: single sign-on protocols, LDAP group synchronization, custom branding, SCIM provisioning, portfolio and resource management, and whether any historical data must come from Jira. Each item is marked as required, preferred or not needed. The output is a one-page requirements list signed off by both owners. Note that OpenProject lists SSO, LDAP group synchronization and custom branding among its Enterprise features, so any of these marked as required moves you away from the Community edition. Confirm each item against the current OpenProject pricing page and your identity provider, because feature lists change between releases.
Count active named users and check the thresholds
The finance lead and an administrator count people who would hold a work package account, separating active users from occasional stakeholders and guests. OpenProject prices Enterprise on-premises per named user per month, with Professional and Premium carrying minimum user counts and Corporate offered on request for larger groups. The output is a user count by role and a note on which edition tiers the count reaches. Ask the vendor how read-only or stakeholder accounts are counted before you assume they are free, and confirm whether the minimums apply to your contract type.
Compare Plane against the same requirements
The product owner and the platform engineer run the same requirements list against Plane. Plane's Community Edition is AGPL-3.0 and matches the Free tier of Plane Cloud, while SAML, OIDC and LDAP on self-hosted Plane sit in paid tiers, and paid plans require switching from Community to the Commercial Edition with a license key. Record which requirements each tool meets in the Community edition, which need a paid plan and which are missing. The output is a comparison table that shows where the two products differ, without choosing a winner at this stage. Confirm the current feature split on Plane's pricing page before you rely on it.
Confirm the migration source and data scope
The migration lead checks where your monday.com data would come from and what must move. OpenProject's Jira Migrator is in beta and supports only Jira Data Center 10.x and 11.x, not Jira Cloud, so a team with Jira history will need a separate route. Plane has importers for several tools, but for monday.com data the documented route is the GraphQL platform API. The output is a list of boards, items, column values, users and workspaces to move, plus a list of automations, integrations and dashboards that will be rebuilt by hand. Ask the candidate partner how each item will be exported and loaded.
Run a pilot in a test setup
The platform engineer installs the chosen candidate in a non-production environment, using the Docker-based installation that OpenProject recommends or the Docker Compose or Helm method that Plane documents. One representative board or project is loaded through the staged data, and the security lead tests sign-in, user provisioning and permissions against the requirements list. The output is a short pilot report recording what worked, what needed manual work and the resources the instance used, checked against OpenProject's sizing guide for your user count. OpenProject's documentation advises using the Jira Migrator only in test setups, so keep the pilot separate from production data.
Review the pilot against the requirements list
The steering group reviews the pilot report against the signed requirements list and the user count. Each requirement is marked as met in the chosen edition, met only in a paid tier, or unmet. Any unmet requirement is either accepted as a known gap, closed by a paid tier, or used to rule out that product. The output is a one-page decision record naming the edition or product, the open risks and the owners for each risk. This review is where the Community edition, an Enterprise tier or a different tool is selected.
Request a fixed-scope written quote
The project owner sends the decision record and the pilot findings to one or more implementation partners and asks for a fixed-scope written quote. The quote should list the platform setup, identity integration, data migration, rebuilt automations, hardening, backup, documentation and training as separate line items. Ask each party to state which items are one-time and which recur, such as license renewals, support retainers and upgrade work. The output is a comparable set of written scopes, deliverables and timelines, and the decision is confirmed only after the scope is agreed in writing.
How DeployOpen scopes a fixed-price OpenProject implementation
DeployOpen plans, implements, integrates, hardens, backs up and documents self-hosted open-source platforms inside your own infrastructure. For a monday.com move to OpenProject, we start with a written scope that compares your current seat count and workflows with the Enterprise tier you need, then build, test and hand over the environment with documentation your team can run.
How we scope
- Inventory your monday.com boards, seat count, automations, integrations and dashboards before any tier is chosen.
- Map which features need OpenProject Enterprise, such as SSO, LDAP group synchronization and branding, against the Community edition.
- Agree deliverables, timelines and exclusions in writing, including what stays out of scope such as rebuilt automations.
How we build
- Deploy OpenProject with Docker in your own cloud account, data center or air-gapped network, following the system requirements.
- Provision PostgreSQL 16 or later with the pg_trgm, btree_gist and unaccent extensions, and size cores and memory to your user count.
- Test a sample data extract through the monday.com API and a test import before any production load.
How we hand over
- Deliver runbooks for installation, upgrades, backups and restores, and the configuration of identity and access.
- Document which monday.com features were not carried over, so stakeholders know what to rebuild by hand.
- Train administrators on user, project and permission management, and confirm handover acceptance against the written scope.
How we support
- Offer ongoing support, upgrades and continuous testing as a retainer after handover.
- Schedule OpenProject upgrades against its published release notes and test them in a staging environment first.
- Ask any implementation partner to confirm current licensing, tier pricing and minimum seat counts directly with OpenProject.
