Project management · cost comparison
Jira vs self-hosted OpenProject: what each actually costs
Jira on the Standard tier against OpenProject running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
There is no bill to beat here. Jira costs nothing at 10 people, so running OpenProject yourself costs you $237 a month more, not less. The reason to do it is who holds the data, not what it costs.
- Jira
- $0.00per month, Standard
- Self-hosted
- $237server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $12.07CX33 (cost-optimized), 8 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $9,735 extra to self-host
- Break-even
- neverafter $1,200 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Jira | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $0.00 | $237 | $12.07 | CX33 (cost-optimized) (8 GB) | -$9,735 |
| 5 people | $0.00 | $237 | $12.07 | CX33 (cost-optimized) (8 GB) | -$9,735 |
| 10 people | $0.00 | $237 | $12.07 | CX33 (cost-optimized) (8 GB) | -$9,735 |
| 25 people | $226 | $237 | $12.07 | CX33 (cost-optimized) (8 GB) | -$1,590 |
| 50 people | $452 | $237 | $12.07 | CX33 (cost-optimized) (8 GB) | +$6,555 |
| 100 people | $905 | $247 | $22.15 | CX43 (cost-optimized) (16 GB) | +$22,483 |
| 250 people | $2,052 | $247 | $22.15 | CX43 (cost-optimized) (16 GB) | +$63,793 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around 50 people.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $10.06 | CX33 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB disk |
| Backups | $2.01 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $225 | 3 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $237 | Plus $1,200 once, for roughly 16 hours of first-time setup |
Jira at this size costs $0.00 a month. Jira's own free plan covers teams of up to 10 users, so a team of 10 pays nothing for the licence.
Read this before you price anything
Jira's Free plan covers teams of up to 10 users. Inside that limit there is no licence cost, so self-hosting a replacement saves nothing.
What OpenProject needs to run at 10 people
Rails monolith with PostgreSQL and Memcached. Carries classical project management, including baselines and earned value, which the newer tools omit.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 5.3 GB | 4 GB for the stack at rest, plus 25 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 27 GB | 25 GB base, plus 0.2 GB per user |
| vCPU | 2 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Jira has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $2.01 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- OpenProject is operationally heavy: several stateful services and an upgrade path that can lose data if you rush it. That is why the maintenance line is 3 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. OpenProject covers the core of what teams use Jira for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put OpenProject
5.3 GB of memory and 27 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the CX33 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud for $10.06 a month.
Go to Hetzner Cloud Compare hosts
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and may well undercut it. Price them yourself before you commit.
OpenProject at a glance
| Licence | GNU General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | Ruby |
| GitHub stars | 16,084, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | v17.8.0 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | www.openproject.org · opf/openproject |
Get the migration checklist for this tool
A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.
Questions people actually ask
How much does Jira cost?
Jira Standard costs $0.00 a month at 10 people: USD 9.05 per seat up to 100 users, USD 8.21 per seat above that, per month; free for up to 10 users. That figure was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-14.
What does it cost to self-host OpenProject?
$237 a month at 10 people: $10.06 for the CX33 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud, $2.01 of backups, and $225 for the 3 hours a month it takes to look after.
Is OpenProject cheaper than Jira?
Not at 10 people, where self-hosting costs $9,735 more over three years, but it becomes cheaper from 50 people upwards.
What server does OpenProject need?
At 10 people, 5.3 GB of memory and 27 GB of disk. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read, is the CX33 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud for $10.06 a month.
How much work is OpenProject to run?
It is rated hard: about 16 hours to set up and 3 hours a month afterwards, priced at $75.00 an hour in the figures above.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jira Standard | USD 9.05 per seat up to 100 users, USD 8.21 per seat above that, per month; free for up to 10 users | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-14 |
| Hetzner Cloud CX33 (cost-optimized) | $10.06 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-10-25 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| OpenProject sizing | 4 GB base, 25 MB per user | project documentation | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-14, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.