Plane

Details

The core “Community Edition” project is provided under an AGPLv3 license, with all other versions & variations appearing to be under non-FOSS terms. While the mobile application code was once provided as AGPLv3, the repository for this is now archived and has not received updates since early 2024.

It can be tricky to understand what the “Community Edition” is composed of relative to other versions. The labelling of “Community Edition” is used in the documentation, but does not appear in the top-level GitHub repo details or readme file, instead it’s just labelled generally as “Plane”. The pricing page offers a comparison of versions, but does not mention a “Community Edition” or licensing, nor mention which versions are provided as open-source or FOSS. Only when going through the self-hosting documentation did we find the following:

The Community Edition is at par with the Free tier of the Cloud edition in its feature availability.

There is quite a large amount of feature disparity between the free tier of the platform relative to the other offerings.

When following the guidance from the website, and from the AGPLv3 GitHub repository, selecting the main docker installation method provides guidance to install a non-FOSS version by default. You have to expand a “Install Community Edition” dropdown towards the bottom of the page to specifically install the FOSS “Community Edition”. When questioned via Reddit, project members did confirm that the containers used following the “Community Edition” are indeed provided under the AGPLv3 license.

The project advertises itself as Open Source, without the “Community Edition” distinction made clear, on the GitHub project. A quick look at their recent blog and Reddit marketing shows a good effort in ensuring that “open source” is used specifically used to reference the “Community Edition”, although some parts of their website like their pricing page do generally state “Plane is open-source” without the “Community Edition” distinction.

The project has raised at least $4m in funding from investors which include OSS Capital. The project also appears to gain revenue from providing its software as a service, and from selling non-FOSS variations of the software.