At OpenProject, transparency isn’t just a principle, it shapes how we work. Just like our source code, our strategic roadmap is public. It shows what we’ve recently released, what we’re currently building, and what we’re planning next, though plans may evolve along the way.
We know that enterprise project management is undergoing one of its biggest transformation in years. Organizations are moving away from proprietary software towards sovereign, open source platforms to keep control over their infrastructure and data. We at OpenProject are committed to building open source project management software that fits all your organizational needs and provides your teams with the ideal environment to work in. For us, digital sovereignty is not an add-on or an afterthought - it is a fundamental necessity.
Our roadmap is shaped in close collaboration with our customers, users and Community. Through continuous interviews, feedback sessions, and prototype testing, we gather insights from real-world use cases, from agile teams to organizations migrating from tools like Jira. We validate ideas early, share product vision openly, and refine our direction together with those who use OpenProject every day. This co-creation approach ensures that our roadmap reflects actual needs, not assumptions. It guides our focus on becoming a comprehensive, sovereign alternative to Jira, while also investing in areas like AI-powered workflows, collaboration, and enterprise-ready project management.
This article will guide you through the strategic topics that define our focus on specific features and functionalities in 2026.
Nota
This blog post provides only an overview of the topics and does not cover all the latest features. For that, please refer to the latest release notes.
Quick navigation:
- Jira Migrator and Jira fundamentals
- Agile & Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- IT Service Management (ITSM)
- Test Management
- Resources & Capacity Management
- AI use cases
- Portfolio and Program Management
- Document workflows and real-time collaboration
Jira Migrator and Jira fundamentals
With Jira Data Center reaching its end of life, many organizations are looking for a self-hosted, European alternative. But they are looking not just for another issue tracker. Organizations migrating from Jira to OpenProject are making the strategic decision to move to a sovereign work management platform that brings together product and project management, collaboration, resource management, AI, and much more. All in one single system, open source and scalable.
This topic plays a significant role in shaping our roadmap. We aim to facilitate a seamless and reliable transition, allowing teams to concentrate on their projects rather than the migration. Additionally, we intend to bridge feature gaps, strengthening OpenProject’s core capabilities and providing teams with everything they expect to find once they arrive. Let’s highlight two important achievements in this area that have already been published this year.
With version 17.4 we released the OpenProject Jira Migrator in Beta: a built-in, guided wizard that imports projects, issues, comments, attachments, basic custom fields, and more from Jira Data Center directly into OpenProject. The Jira Migrator thus fills a gap for organizations that want to move away from Jira but face major challenges with the migration, such as time constraints or technical complexity. It allows teams to migrate their data reliably and securely and, by importing all issue histories and contexts, to continue working as usual right away in the new OpenProject environment. For more detailed information about the OpenProject Jira Migrator, please see our documentation.
We are working continuously not only to improve the OpenProject Jira Migrator with every release, but also to close remaining feature gaps for a smooth transition from Jira to OpenProject. With version 17.5 we released Project-based (semantic) work package identifiers in order to facilitate Jira migration and to provide more context while referencing or searching for work packages.
OpenProject is evolving more and more from a usual project management application into a sovereign work management platform that combines project and product management, different project management approaches, collaboration, resource management, AI, governance, and more. With integrations for GitHub or Nextcloud, the OpenProject ecosystem becomes connected to other open source tools without switching tools. And with the XWiki integration, OpenProject can provide a fully functional alternative to Jira, including replacing Confluence for knowledge management with an open source solution.
If you’re already considering switching to OpenProject, we also recommend our newest blog article “From Jira to OpenProject: choosing the right migration strategy for your organization” from our CPO Rosanna Sibora.
Agile & Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
We want teams to scale agile collaboration beyond a single team: with improved sprint planning, automated sprint boards, flexible Kanban boards, and support for Agile Release Trains (ARTs) that coordinate multiple teams working toward shared objectives. Just as important is transparency, which means visibility into progress, dependencies, and delivery performance. But also the ability to combine SAFe practices with classic project management methods.
A lot of this has already reached the product: we introduced backlogs and sprints with a new UI, implemented sprint goals and a sprint overview, backlog buckets, sprint sharing and much more. If you want to know what’s coming next, you can track our planned features here on our Community instance. For those interested in agile updates, see this article written by our CPO Rosanna Sibora: The future of agile work in OpenProject.
IT Service Management (ITSM)
With ITSM, we are opening up a new area: tracking and following up incidents and service requests across teams, with clear workflows and full traceability. All while maintaining the high standard of data sovereignty you expect from OpenProject: your service data stays in your own environment, whether self-hosted or in our EU cloud.
We want to enable teams to track and manage IT services efficiently with OpenProject:
- Incident and request tracking – Capture, assign, and resolve issues across teams.
- Create and maintain an inventory for your organization.
- Change and Release Management – Control changes and deployments with structured workflows.
- Service transparency – Ensure accountability and visibility across the full service lifecycle.
- Mailboxes & incoming emails – Automatically create and update tickets from shared inboxes.
See more details on the current development process regarding ITSM.
Test Management
Software quality should not require a separate tool. We are working toward test management directly within OpenProject with an integration to the open source test management system SquashTM. Working closely together, we want to integrate our systems to create a seamless ecosystem of open source software.
Setting up data synchronization should allow work packages from OpenProject to be displayed as requirements in SquashTM while keeping them up to date in OpenProject. Additionally, test cases, executions, and results should be visible in a structured manner in OpenProject. This will allow users to link tests directly to requirements or defects, organizing them in a clear and structured way in one place while ensuring complete coverage. It should also be possible to create bugs as work packages in OpenProject from within SquashTM. Then, they are linked back to the failing test case and its related requirements.
More details on the current development process regarding test management.
Resources & Capacity Management
Good project management relies on fair and well-considered capacity management, and the success of projects is often determined by a realistic distribution of tasks tailored to individual needs.
As resource management is so central for project management, OpenProject introduces resource management with version 17.7 to help teams plan ahead, even as projects grow. This includes new possibilities to reflect an organizational structure and organize users by departments. It is also possible to track user attributes and define their working hours including future schedule changes, and time off. This helps identify bottlenecks early and makes it possible to adjust assignments dynamically while preventing overload.
We are also introducing a dedicated Resource management module (Enterprise add-on). In this module, you can add Resource planners to plan and allocate work in different views that brings together timelines, work packages, and availability all in one place directly within OpenProject. New features also include the ability to allocate tasks only on specific skills and roles, as well as staffing, which matches open resource requests with suitable project members. A detailed overview of the planned features, including screenshots from the application and hands-on examples, can be found in our new blog post about integrated resource management in OpenProject.
These features offer teams the full functionality needed to plan and allocate workloads and project timelines directly where the work actually happens. With its high level of customization in organizational structure and user attributes, OpenProject can provide the right environment for all sizes of organizations, even those with many projects and numerous employees with individual schedules. These features also lay the foundation for cross-project resource planning.
More details on the current development process regarding Resources & Capacity Management.
AI use cases
AI is only useful in project management if you can trust where your data goes. That is why our approach starts with sovereignty: all processing takes place within your own secure OpenProject environment with no external data sharing, whether self-hosted or in our EU cloud. On that basis, we are integrating AI to automate routine tasks, generate insights, and support project planning and decision-making. The topic consists of three building blocks:
MCP Server: the AI integration layer
The MCP Server, released with OpenProject 17.2, can act as a central gateway between OpenProject and AI: it can connect multiple AI models and tools through one standardized interface, to enable AI-supported workflows from task creation to project insights. And it can be extended with custom or third-party AI services tailored to your organization. All AI interactions stay under your control, and every AI capability we build next rests on this layer.
AI text assistance
Much of project work is writing: descriptions, comments, documentation. AI text assistance will let you rewrite, correct, or refine selected text directly where you work without switching tools. It improves readability, tone, and consistency across your project communication, and translates or adapts content instantly for international teams.
Semantic search
Finding information should not depend on remembering the right keyword. Semantic search will let you search by meaning and intent instead, retrieving results from work packages, documents, and project data in one place so your team spends less time searching and more time deciding and delivering. The models evolve with your project data and usage patterns, and they run entirely within your own OpenProject environment.
More details on the current development process regarding AI use cases.
Portfolio and Program Management
Portfolio management means more than keeping a list of projects: it means prioritizing initiatives, tracking progress, risks, and budgets, and keeping everything aligned with your strategic goals. To support this, we are implementing PM² and PMflex best practices for transparent portfolio governance in OpenProject.
It starts with the intake: new initiatives are collected through a structured process using templates, then assessed objectively based on strategic contribution, benefits, risks, and resource impact - supported by structured artifacts such as a complexity assessment or a business case. Once projects are running, the focus shifts to the portfolio as a whole: tracking progress, benefits, and interdependencies, with governance boards and standardized, AI-supported reports that make decisions transparent.
More details on the current development process regarding Portfolio and Program Management.
Document workflows and real-time collaboration
Text-based content deserves the same structure as the rest of your project work. With this topic, we are enabling real-time collaboration and structured document workflows in OpenProject.
The basis is our BlockNote integration: a modern text editor that lets your team create, edit, and collaborate on texts in real time, directly within OpenProject. Around it, we are building the collaboration layer you expect from a modern writing tool including inline comments, replies in context, and feedback that gets resolved collaboratively, as well as diffing and track changes to compare versions, highlight edits, and maintain a full revision history. The final step turns collaborative writing into a managed process: request documents, define approval steps and review cycles, and keep your documentation as traceable as your work packages.
Your feedback, ideas, and wishes for our roadmap
Your opinion matters: Are these planned features useful to you? Is anything missing that you really wish for? We would love to hear from you. Feel free to contact us.
To stay up to date, you can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn, Fosstodon, Reddit or other social media channels. You can also contribute actively to our Community.
