GitHub Issues & Projects vs Redmine

Free tier available

Free and open source

Effectively free — you are already paying for GitHub, and Issues adds nothing.

Free software. You pay for hosting, upgrades and the plugin maintenance that comes with them.

Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009

Established

OSS community · since 2006

• Zero additional cost and zero additional integration to maintain.
• Automatic linking between commits, pull requests and issues.
• Issue forms enforce the reproduction detail that makes bugs actionable.

• No licence cost at any user count.
• Full data control, which matters for defence, public sector and regulated work.
• Very stable and well understood.

• No native severity/priority model — you build it from labels.
• Reporting is weak; there is no real analytics layer.
• Poor fit for non-technical reporters who do not have GitHub accounts.

• Dated interface that new team members find unpleasant.
• Plugin quality varies and upgrades frequently break them.
• You own hosting, backups, security patching and upgrades.

Engineering-led teams already on GitHub who want one fewer tool.

Organisations that must self-host and cannot spend on licences.