Redmine Software Review

Redmine is a free and open-source web-based project management solution whose simple interface enables teams to organize projects, plan schedules, and track activities in a centralized, collaborative space. Redmine offers teams an extremely cost-effective way to access sophisticated issue tracking, time tracking, and project schedule scheduling, with multiple customization options, allowing teams to tweak the application to best fit their needs.

Table of Contents

• Redmine Features and Strengths
• Redmine Pricing
• Who Uses Redmine?
• Redmine Supported Languages
• Case Studies
• Why Choose Redmine?
• Company Info
• Featured Partners: Project Management Software

Redmine Features and Strengths

Project and Portfolio Management

Redmine’s cross-platform software supports the management of multiple projects, enabling users to manage programs and project portfolios. Users can see all active projects in a list, with the option to also display archived projects. The software includes a Gantt chart view that display tasks or issues with by duration, start/end dates and dependencies. The calendar view provides an overview of the current project on a monthly calendar.

The project management tool also includes a News area where users can publish any information and collaborate about the project. Users can give a News item a title, a summary, and a detailed description. Also, every project includes a wiki page for managing project information. The project wiki’s page allows co-editing, locking, and keeping a history of changes. Each project also has a forum to allow team members to communicate with each other. The forums page displays the different topics, the number of messages, and links to the latest message.

Issue and Time Tracking

Redmine functionality centers around issues. Every issue belongs to a project, has an owner, and can be related to a version. Issues are usually connected to a software project, but can also be any actionable task, bug, or request. Users can see the status of an issue and messages related to it. They can also link related issues to the one in question, update the subject or description, and create subtasks to break the issue into more manageable tasks.

Time tracking allows users to log the hours spent on an issue or project. However, time in a specific format is manually entered in a web form. Users can categorize their time entries by activity and further explain by typing comments manually. They can also log time at the project level or via commit messages when integrated to a software configuration management (SCM) system.

Administration, Documents, and Files Management

Redmine includes the administration of projects, users, groups, and issue statuses. It also allows granular control of roles and permissions, so admins can adjust a user’s privileges in using projects, forums, documents, files, and issue tracking.

Authorized team members can create new documents for projects within the software. By default, user documents and technical documents are the categories of documents. But users with the right permissions can change this and add new categories. The files management feature is a sortable table that shows details of all uploaded files. When uploading a new file, users can select a version from the list to link the file to a specific version. Adding multiple files at once is also possible.

Read our Buyers’ Guide to Open-Source Project Management Software

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Redmine Pricing

Because it is free and open-source software, Redmine is free for users to download and run on their servers. Customers can also opt to subscribe to providers that offer hosting services of Redmine.

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Who Uses Redmine?

Redmine is for businesses of all sizes across industries in need of a web-based project management and issue-tracking tool. Many small to midsize organizations in the open source community, education and research, and the public sector prefer it. Companies that use Redmine include alaTest, Altic, in2code, AlphaNodes, Covivo, Planio, Askia, and GROUPIMO.

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Redmine Supported Languages

Redmine is available in 49 languages, including Arabic, English (UK), English (US), French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Panama), Turkish, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional).

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Case Studies

Annesh M. is the CEO of a small business with a team of 20 people. The company works with over 25 projects simultaneously so it needed a flexible project management tool to help track features and bugs. After evaluating several tools, they chose Redmine. Aneesh and the team find the software easy to use and accessible online. Now, they have a central view that shows all information to help each team member to be in sync with the rest of the team.

Neelam A. is a software engineer for a midsize company. Working in QA, she and her team needed a tool for the daily tasks that include testing and logging/reporting of bugs. When the company implemented Redmine issue tracking and project management software, Neelam saw that it was easy for her to build projects and create different kinds of tickets. She and her team is able to structure a project and customize fields to add details, set categories, attach docs, and maintain the history of changes.

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Why Choose Redmine?

Redmine’s simple interface and available customization enable users to configure their project management solution to meet their exact needs. They can track issues and projects with the right information to monitor progress, optimize workflows, and manage resources effectively. With its support for multiple projects, road mapping, and complex issue management, Redmine gives users a flexible yet affordable tool for software development and product or service management.

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Company Info

Redmine was launched in June 2006. Its source code is available at a Subversion repository, released under GNU General Public License v2, and maintained by Jean-Philippe Lang, Redmine’s developer.

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Featured Partners: Project Management Software