OpenProject cost of ownership and editions

The Community edition is free and covers core planning work: work packages, Gantt charts, agile boards, time tracking, dashboards and community support. For many teams that is enough to start. The decision to pay for Enterprise on-premises usually rests on three features: single sign-on through SAML, OIDC, CAS, Kerberos or Okta, LDAP group synchronization, and custom branding. If your identity provider or directory controls who can log in and which groups they belong to, those features belong on the requirements list before you compare editions. Without them, access management stays manual inside OpenProject.

Enterprise on-premises is licensed per named user per month. The published prices are 5.95 euros per user per month for Basic and 10.95 euros for Professional, both with a 25-user minimum. Premium is 15.95 euros per user per month with a 100-user minimum. Corporate is quoted on request for 250 or more users. Confirm current prices, currency, tax treatment and billing terms on the OpenProject pricing page before you budget, because list prices can change. Also ask whether invoices are monthly or annual and whether the subscription includes vendor support.

Illustrative calculation, not a quote: a team of 10 people that buys Basic pays for the 25-user minimum, so the bill is 25 multiplied by 5.95 euros, or 148.75 euros per month. That works out to about 14.88 euros for each person who actually uses the system. The same team on Professional would pay 25 multiplied by 10.95 euros, or 273.75 euros per month. The minimum matters most for small teams, because the gap between 10 real users and 25 billed seats is a recurring cost. If you expect to grow toward 25 within the contract term, the seats may be used. If not, ask whether the minimum can be adjusted at renewal.

The Nextcloud integration is part of the Community edition. It links Nextcloud files and folders to work packages and can manage project folders automatically. Single sign-on through an OpenID Connect provider for that integration is an Enterprise add-on. A team using Nextcloud can therefore start on Community and add the SSO add-on only if its identity policy requires it. Confirm with the vendor which account types count toward the per-user seat total, such as guests, read-only users or service accounts, because that changes the monthly figure more than the list price does.

The split between in-house work and outsourced work depends less on OpenProject itself than on the skills your team already has. A platform or IT team that runs Linux servers, operates PostgreSQL and administers identities can usually own most of the recurring work. A team without those skills will carry more cost in admin time, slower incidents and longer upgrades, and should price an external partner for the parts it cannot cover well. Decide the split by listing the skills you have, not by the tool's label. Tasks that most internal teams can own include license decisions, user administration, backup monitoring and routine minor upgrades. License decisions mean tracking which users need an Enterprise plan and whether the Community edition covers the rest, which requires someone who can read the published per-user prices and minimums and keep the named-user count current. User administration needs identity administration skills, plus a clear rule for who creates accounts and removes them when people leave. Backup monitoring requires checking that database and attachment backups complete and that a restore has been tested, which draws on PostgreSQL operations and Linux administration. Routine minor upgrades are repeatable when the team follows the release notes and tests in a non-production environment first. Tasks that teams often outsource are the ones where a mistake is expensive to reverse. Initial sizing needs an estimate of concurrent users and workload, mapped against the sizing guide's core and memory tiers. Identity integration design involves choosing between SAML, OIDC, LDAP group synchronization and Kerberos, and deciding which of these features need an Enterprise plan. The Jira migration cutover, if you move from Jira Data Center, is a one-time task that needs project management, data mapping and a rehearsed switch-over, and the Jira Migrator is in beta with documentation advising test use only. The first cost model itself benefits from an outside view, because it must combine license, infrastructure, implementation and admin time over several years. When you request quotes, ask each partner to separate one-time work (sizing, design, migration, first setup) from recurring work (support, upgrades, backups, user administration). Ask which named roles they would assign, such as a Linux administrator, a PostgreSQL specialist, an identity administrator and a project manager, and how many days each role is expected to spend. Then compare those roles with your own team's skills and identify the gaps you need to close, either by hiring, training or contracting. The result should be a written split that names who owns each task after go-live.

The inputs that move an OpenProject cost model most are named-user counts, the systems it must connect to, and the hosting limits it must respect. Ask for user counts split by group, not one total. Separate project managers, contributors, read-only executives, and external partners, because Enterprise on-premises is priced per named user per month, with Professional requiring a 25-user minimum, Premium a 100-user minimum, and Corporate offered on request for 250 or more users. A total of 180 can fall into different commercial positions depending on how many are external or view-only. Also ask for expected growth over the modeling period, with the month or quarter in which each step is expected to happen.

Next, list the existing tools that OpenProject will replace, sit beside, or connect to. For each, record the license type, the renewal date, the number of seats, and whether the tool is retired at cutover. Common examples include Jira Data Center, Confluence, Nextcloud, shared spreadsheets, and a separate time-tracking product. For any migration, supply data volumes: number of projects, issues, attachments with total size in gigabytes, custom fields, users, and groups. The OpenProject Jira Migrator reads from Jira Data Center 10.x and 11.x, not Jira Cloud, and is still in beta. If your source is Jira Cloud or another tool, say so early, because the import effort and the manual cleanup estimate change with the source.

Hosting constraints determine the infrastructure line and the operating burden. Confirm whether the system must run in a specific cloud region, a private data center, or an air-gapped network, and whether an existing PostgreSQL service, backup platform, and object or file storage can be reused. The OpenProject 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. Treat those figures as a starting point and provide expected concurrent use, since peak activity matters more than headcount alone. For identity, record the provider type (SAML, OIDC, LDAP, Okta, Kerberos, or CAS), how groups are structured, and whether group synchronization is required. These identity features are Enterprise items, so the answer can change the edition decision.

Finally, name the people who can make decisions. Budget, platform, and business owners should each be identified with their authority and their sign-off points. Without them, assumptions stay open, and every open assumption becomes a scenario in the model, which widens the range between low and high cost. Also state which compliance frameworks or internal policies apply and what evidence an assessor is likely to request, such as access reviews, audit logs, backup test records, and change history. Evidence needs affect hardening, logging, and retention work, which recur over time. When you request quotes, ask each provider to state its assumptions line by line. A quote built on assumed user counts cannot be compared with one built on a verified count until both rest on the same inputs.