Readit Newsviharkurama commented on 2 years of building a Jira alternative in open source plane.so/blog/lessons-in-... · Posted by u/viharkurama
Hey HN,
Vihar from Plane here. For the last two years, we've been on a journey building Plane, an AI-native alternative to Jira. Our goal has always been to create a project management tool that is both powerful and flexible, which is why we offer a cloud version and a self-hosted option designed to work even in air-gapped environments.
When we started, we were just trying to build a tool we wanted to use. We launched here on HN and, thanks to this community, the project took off, eventually hitting ~39.3k GitHub stars.
Along the way, we've had to face the really tough questions about how to build a sustainable business around an open-source project without compromising our principles. This post is our attempt to share what we've learned about our framework for balancing community needs with commercial realities.
We cover our biggest mistakes, the things that worked, and how we think about the future of OSS sustainability.
Happy to answer any questions you have about our journey, the tech stack, or the challenges of building in this space!
This also makes it infinitely more useful for healthcare. Not healthcare software specifically. Lots of use cases in logistics, irl maintenance, etc. Patient data creates hipaa challenges and tends to overflow into any system.
+1. We already work with a few healthcare teams, and self-hosted is almost always their go-to. Our air-gapped edition has been in beta for a bit, and we’re seeing more use cases pop up—especially in places where HIPAA and data isolation matter a lot.
Now do an air-gapped Confluence killer, please.
We already support this. We pack all our products in one single offering.
This includes Projects + Wiki. More here: https://docs.plane.so/core-concepts/pages/wiki
Here's a blog on how you can switch between products within Plane, https://plane.so/blog/introducing-apprail-plane-new-navigati...
Any more details about the offline patch/upgrade process? When I looked at gitlab years ago, it handled that fine but the documentation seemed "nervous" about it.
You'll find all the docs here: https://developers.plane.so/self-hosting/methods/airgapped-e...
There is no price anywhere. I would be interested to use that for either my job or for private projects, but where and how much do I pay?
Edit: I looked again and even your pricing pages have no price. I understand that you may want to restrict yourself to rich companies, but I don't understand the point of posting on HN if that's the case.
If you want air-gapped it's on Business tier, please look at our pricing page.
That being said, we don't recommend the air-gapped version for personal use. Instead, you can use our open-source Community Edition here: https://github.com/makeplane/plane — you can self-host it and disable telemetry entirely.
How do you handle compliance in confirming that the product is only used for the license duration? (Or is it more of a one time purchase plus recurring fee for updates?)
It's a subscription license. We offer air-gapped deployments under the Business plan. As part of compliance, we request customers to share license logs quarterly-no PII involved. Also, the license enforces seat limits, so you can't exceed the number of users you've purchased. https://plane.so/pricing
They've removed it from their pricing page now, but when they announced the discontinuation of the regular on-prem server the minimum for datacenter was like 500 licensed users or something along those lines.
In any case it was clear it's not for small shops like us.
That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps those customers are predominantly large?
We took a different approach with Plane's air-gapped offering. No minimum user requirements at all. We evaluate based on your use case and domain requirements, not team size.
This post is our honest take on what Atlassian’s move really means for self‑hosting, what happens to Jira+Confluence heavy installs, and how to treat this as a rare opportunity to clean up workflows and possibly move to a lighter, more modern stack (including, but not only, Plane).
I have an obvious conflict of interest, so feedback/pushback is very welcome.