Timberline Project Management

10 Free Tools For Project Managers
www.timberlinepm.com

OpenProj

OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in the industry with Projects On Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more.

dotProject

dotProject is a web-based, multi-user, multi-language Project Management application. It is an open-source software and free for any uses and is maintained by an open community of volunteer programmers. Key features include:

Projects and Tasks
Companies, Departments and Contacts
ToDo lists
Resource Allocation
Forums
Gantt Charts
Reporting
Calendar

GanttProject

GanttProject is a free and easy to use Gantt chart based project scheduling and management tool. Major features include Task hierarchy and dependencies, Gantt chart, Resource load chart, Generation of PERT chart, PDF and HTML reports, MS Project import/export and WebDAV based groupwork management.

PHProjekt

PHProjekt is a free open source modular application for the coordination of group activities and to share informations and document via the web.
Components of PHProjekt include Group Calendar, Project Management, Time Card System, File Management, Contact Manager, Mail Client and many other.

ConsultComm

ConsultComm is a small, lightweight, platform-independent program written in Java that allows anyone managing multiple projects, clients or tasks to effectively keep track of exactly how long they’ve worked on each project. Key features include:

Easily integrated into your existing time management or billing system; JDBC support is included so you can instantly upload all your times and projects into most JDBC and ODBC compliant databases
Platform-independent, so you can unify all your OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris workstations with a single application
Released as open source, so you don’t have to worry about vendor lock-in or customization problems.
Quickly extensible by utilizing plugins created using the standard JavaBeans framework. Users and other developers can easily create their own plugins to quickly add custom functionality to ConsultComm
Customizeable to uniquely fit your own personal style preferences

TaskJuggler

TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Open Source project management tool. Its new approach to project planing and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks.

TaskJuggler is project management software for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planing, risk and communication management.

TaskJuggler provides an optimizing scheduler that computes your project time lines and resource assignments based on the project outline and the constraints that you have provided. The built-in resource balancer and consistency checker offload you from having to worry about irrelevant details and ring the alarm if the project gets out of hand. The flexible “as many details as necessary”-approach allows you to still plan your project as you go, making it also ideal for new management strategies such as Extreme Programming and Agile Project Management.

Collabtive

Collabtive is a modern Web application that allows teams to collaborate on projects, manage tasks, milestones, and files, and send instant messages to each other. It is multilanguage capable, supporting more than 20 languages. Collabtive integrates with other webservices via an XML API. It also provides importing functionality for data from other applications.

OpenGoo

It is a complete online solution focused on improving productivity, collaboration, communication and management of your teams. Key features include:

Mange tasks, documents, contacts, e-mail, calendar
Manage project progress, track time, and bill your customers.
Access all information from a single and elegant dashboard.
Communicate with co-workers, clients and vendors.

ProjectPier

ProjectPier is a Free, Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done. Its function is similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows the freedom and scalability of self-hosting.

Redmine

Redmine is a flexible open source project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database. Key features include:

Multiple projects support
Flexible role based access control
Flexible issue tracking system
Gantt chart and calendar
News, documents & files management
Feeds & email notifications
Per project wiki
Per project forums
Time tracking
Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users
SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
Issue creation via email
Multiple LDAP authentication support
User self-registration support
Multilanguage support
Multiple databases support

Conclusion

Project Management is one of the most important processes in designing and development of any project and selection of project management tool is sometimes critical. It entirely depends on your requirements as to whether you want to go for a web-based solution or a desktop one. Hence you need to consider the tool that is providing enough functionalities to cater your needs of project management.