Looking back: OpenProject in 2025 🌟

What a year of contrasts 2025 was! Full of growth, progress and meaningful impact. But at the same time, full of threats, uncertainties, and alarming announcements. How can we remain positive with all the challenges we face every day? We believe that this is precisely why optimism matters more than ever. It is a choice to see opportunity where others see obstacles, to focus on solutions rather than problems. We should roll up our sleeves and be the change we want to see in this world, not waiting for someone else to act. Every small effort, every thoughtful decision, and every collaboration contributes to a larger impact. By staying hopeful, committed, and proactive, we turn uncertainty into possibility and challenges into milestones for progress. And we are proud of everything we have achieved together over the past year.

As we close another chapter, we want to pause, look back, and celebrate together: with our team, our Community, our partners, and our users — with you! This year, OpenProject continued to live up to its mission: delivering open source, sovereign, and powerful project management to organizations of any kind: Empowering teams to achieve great things together for the good of society. And we did that not just by adding features but by thinking deeply about why open source matters today more than ever.

🚀 What we shipped in 2025

Continued regular releases, real improvements

In 2025, we shipped a total of 28 releases, each bringing meaningful, visible improvements to our users. Among the most important enhancements were:

• Major UI and accessibility upgrades, along with improved filtering, usability refinements, and new configuration options for dark and high contrast modes.
• Significant enhancements to the Meetings module, including meeting backlogs, recurring meetings, agenda item outcomes, PDF exports, and improved invitation flows.
• Improved scheduling with automatic “as soon as possible” scheduling mode, better progress calculations, and support for entering lags.
• Portfolio management improvements, incl. project life-cycle management and calculated values for project evaluation and scoring.
• Time-tracking improvements, including a dedicated calendar view and PDF exports for timesheets.
• Enhanced file-storage integrations for Nextcloud and SharePoint.
• Additional collaboration features such as internal comments (Enterprise add-on), automatically generated work package titles, work package reminders to notify users at a later point in time, and numerous refinements to support more flexible and efficient teamwork.

These updates reflect our commitment to continuous meaningful improvements instead of bells and whistles, but making the tool more helpful, more accessible, and more reliable for everyday work. Our release notes provide an overview of all updates. You can even view the fantastic new release videos we introduced in 2025.

Industry recognition: OpenProject as a top-rated PM solution

In March 2025, we were honored to be recognized by Gartner Digital Markets (via Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice) as one of the leading project management solutions 2025 worldwide. This recognition is not just a badge but a tribute to our users, our Community, and our persistent dedication to quality and open source values.

Reinforcing our strategic roadmap: our vision meets execution in 2026 and beyond

At the start of 2025, we published our roadmap, spotlighting key themes like portfolio management, team collaboration, integrations & API, usability & accessibility — and even a mobile app on the horizon. It’s inspiring for us to see so many of those planned items take shape throughout the year and not least because they align with real needs of organizations scaling sustainably.

In 2026 and beyond, OpenProject is expanding its capabilities across key strategic areas to empower organizations with even more robust, secure, and future-ready collaboration. The 2026 roadmap focuses on advancing the migration from Atlassian Jira, strengthening IT Service Management (ITSM), and deepening support for agile project management. It further enhances test management, portfolio management, and resource and capacity planning to improve cross-team efficiency and transparency.

In addition, OpenProject is investing in powerful AI integrations to automate workflows and provide actionable insights, while also extending real-time collaboration in text editors. Together, these focus areas shape a comprehensive strategy to support digital transformation and agile administration in the years ahead.

💙 Why 2025 mattered — beyond features

Because open source and digital sovereignty matter more than ever

We live in a world where digital infrastructure shapes power, autonomy, and trust. With rising geopolitical tensions, shifting regulations and increasing attention to data sovereignty, it’s no longer optional to ask where your data is stored, but it becomes fundamental.

OpenProject stands for a different path: open source, transparent, self-hostable, privacy-conscious. In 2025, we saw more organizations, especially in public administration and regulated environments, look for exactly that kind of sovereignty, control, and independence, rather than signing up for closed SaaS tools. This is not just about software, it’s about preserving freedom, democracy and trust in digital collaboration.

All the happier we are that also openDesk, the sovereign workplace by Zentrum Digitale Souveränität (ZenDiS), is gaining traction and organizations such as German State Premiers and the International Criminal Court chose openDesk in 2025. We are happy that we are part of this, contributing Portfolio and Project Management as well as collaboration functionalities.

Because our team and Community outshine everything

Our success this year would not have been possible without the vibrant and engaged team. In May this year, we gathered for our company offsite in Brandenburg. Spinning new ideas, fostering team spirit and spending fun time together. Watch our team video to get an impression. We want to thank our team, who showed up with passion, patience and persistence throughout the year. You make it happen!

“When the wind turns wild, set your sails with intention. Storms reveal the strongest navigators. In these times of uncertainty, it is more important than ever to collaborate with our friends. Digital sovereignty is a joint task for Europe in order to stand up for our values and thus for our democracy.” – Birthe Lindenthal, CMO and Co-founder

And all of this would not have been possible without the Community around OpenProject. From bug reports and feature requests to translations, documentation contributions, testing, feedback and support: every single contribution matters. The 2025 Gartner recognition, the smooth releases, the roadmap follow-through, all of it stands on the shoulders of our Community.

And finally, we thank our close partners and sponsors once again. i.e. City of Cologne, Deutsche Bahn, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, and ZenDiS. Of course, it’s great to release software for free. But developers want to be paid, open source or not. That’s why we would like to express our heartfelt thank you to our loyal partners who support us with feature sponsorship. All these upstream contributions benefit other users.

Because we stand up as a serious alternative to proprietary PM stacks

With the announced discontinuation of Atlassian Data Center, 2025 has become a crucial year for companies evaluating their future tools. We were aware of this and worked to position OpenProject not just as “another project management tool”, but as a standalone, mature alternative and a reliable partner for an immediate switch. In doing so, we have made a small but important contribution to digital independence on a large scale.

Because we build a strong ecosystem with our partners

2025 also marked an important year for strengthening the open source ecosystem around OpenProject. We know that digital sovereignty cannot be achieved alone. It is a team effort — in Germany, across Europe, and with strong partners who share our vision. In 2025, we were proud to strengthen international collaboration, from our participation in the DINUM Hackathon in Paris, where we explored cross-border solutions for open, privacy-first collaboration, to participating in the Franco-German Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin, reaffirming the importance of sovereign solutions for public administration.

Together with our partners, we deepened a network of powerful, privacy-respecting alternatives to proprietary platforms. Our long-standing partnership with Nextcloud continued to grow, enabling seamless content collaboration through our Nextcloud integration and offering organizations a secure, sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365. We were excited to participate as sponsors in many Nextcloud Enterprise Days, such as in Copenhagen, The Hague, and Paris, as well as at the Nextcloud Summit in Munich. At the same time, we intensified our collaboration with XWiki to build an open, extensible alternative to Atlassian Confluence — and we are already working on the first integration. This is where open source truly shows its strength: when independent projects unite their communities, their knowledge, and their innovations. Because in this ecosystem, 1+1 becomes 3 — and organizations gain real freedom of choice.

🧱 The challenges and what still needs attention

Of course, not everything is done. As we grow and evolve, we see areas where improvement is still needed:

• Ensuring smooth migration paths for larger organizations switching from legacy tools, especially for those coming from proprietary stacks.
• Continuing to build integrations and interoperability because tools don’t live in isolation.
• Enhancing UX and accessibility further, especially with more diverse users, platforms, and needs.
• Preparing for global uncertainties: security, data protection, and sovereignty, and ensuring OpenProject remains a safe, stable and trustworthy place for organizations to collaborate.

We accept these challenges, and we are committed to working on them together with you.

❤️ Thank you to our Community, our users, our team

We started 2025 with a lot of energy. Today, at the end of 2025, we look back with pride, gratitude and optimism. Thank you for your trust, your feedback, your engagement and your contributions.

Whether you are a long-time user, a newcomer, a contributor, a supporter, or just someone curious: you make OpenProject what it is. Let’s carry this spirit into 2026!

• Let’s continue building software that empowers teams — not locks them in.
• Let’s continue our support for digital sovereignty, open collaboration and transparent infrastructure.
• Let’s stay open, inclusive, quality-driven and always ready to listen to our Community.

Together, we make OpenProject not just a any tool, but a shared foundation for collaboration, trust and freedom.

Here’s to 2026. 🌟 The OpenProject team