We are very excited to share some great news: bitcrowd is joining forces with OpenProject.
From October, the experienced Berlin-based software team will work closely with us to strengthen OpenProject, support organizations on their path towards digital sovereignty and help us meet the growing demand we are seeing for open source alternatives to proprietary software.
For us, this is much more than adding development capacity. It brings together two teams with a shared belief: organizations should be able to stay in control of the software, infrastructure and data they depend on.
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- A shared commitment to open technology
- Meeting a growing demand together
- More experienced people building and extending OpenProject
A shared commitment to open technology
bitcrowd brings many years of experience in designing and developing complex software products. Their team combines expertise in software engineering, product development and consulting with a strong interest in open source and digital independence.
That commitment is already visible in their recent work. The team has built Wiblio, an open source community platform for Berlin’s public libraries, explored locally operated AI and RAG solutions that keep sensitive data under the organization’s control, and developed and recently open sourced a performant DataPlane proof of concept for the decentralized social network ecosystem around the AT Protocol.
There is another area where our paths have already started to converge: helping organizations move away from Jira Data Center.
Meeting a growing demand together
With Jira Data Center reaching end of life in March 2029, organizations across Europe and beyond are reconsidering the platforms on which some of their most important work depends. We see this very clearly at OpenProject. Interest in sovereign, open source project and product management is growing significantly, and organizations are coming to us with increasingly large and complex environments.
Moving from Jira to OpenProject is not simply a matter of importing data. Complex Jira environments have evolved over many years and often include custom workflows, integrations, extensions and organizational processes. Supporting these transitions requires both strong migration technology and people who understand how complex software environments work in practice.
This is where joining forces with bitcrowd is particularly exciting. The bitcrowd team has already been digging deeply into the challenges of Jira Data Center migrations, including the complexity created by widely used extensions such as ScriptRunner. Together, we can combine this experience with the OpenProject team’s product knowledge and our ongoing development of the OpenProject Jira Migrator.
More experienced people building and extending OpenProject
Going forward, the bitcrowd team will contribute directly to OpenProject while continuing to bring its consulting and software development expertise to customer projects. This includes supporting organizations migrating from Jira, developing custom extensions where organizations have specific requirements, and contributing directly to the OpenProject core product.
For our customers and Community, this means additional experienced engineers contributing to OpenProject, strengthening our migration capabilities and helping organizations address complex requirements without compromising on openness or sovereignty. For our teams, it means gaining colleagues who bring new perspectives and deep technical experience while sharing many of the principles that have shaped OpenProject from the beginning. And for us, that is the most exciting part of this announcement.
The demand for open, sovereign software continues to grow, and so does the scale and complexity of the environments organizations want to migrate. Building credible alternatives to established proprietary platforms requires strong products, migration technology and experienced teams that can support organizations through that transition.
We are very happy to welcome the bitcrowd team to this next chapter and look forward to everything we will build together.
