Redmine vs GitHub Issues & Projects

Free and open source

Free tier available

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.

Established

OSS community · since 2006

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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