Leantime

Leantime is an open-source project management platform designed from the ground up for people who struggle with traditional tools — specifically those with ADHD, autism, or dyslexia. Rather than tacking on accessibility as an afterthought, Leantime rethinks the entire workflow experience: visual task views, emotional prioritization via emoji ratings, dopamine-friendly progress indicators, and a reduced-clutter interface that surfaces what matters without cognitive overload.

The platform covers the full project lifecycle: task management across Kanban boards, Gantt timelines, calendars, and tables; sprint and milestone planning; time tracking and exportable timesheets; goal and metric tracking; built-in wikis and idea boards; retrospectives; and screen recording. Everything is accessible from a personal “My Work” dashboard that consolidates tasks across all projects with AI-assisted prioritization.

Leantime is Docker-ready and supports self-hosting on any PHP/MySQL stack. It integrates with LDAP, OIDC, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, AWS S3, and Google/Microsoft Drive for file storage. A growing plugin ecosystem and a JSON-RPC API enable extensibility, while Crowdin-driven translations cover 20+ languages. With version 3.9, the project introduced a native fail-closed permission engine, a unified Blueprints domain replacing 16 separate canvas variants, mobile push notifications, and PostgreSQL support alongside MySQL.

What You Get

• Multi-View Task Management - Organize tickets across Kanban boards, Gantt timelines, table views, calendar views, and list views with unlimited subtasks, dependencies, and milestone assignments.
• My Work Dashboard - A personal hub aggregating tasks from all projects with emoji-based motivation ratings (angry face to unicorn), AI-driven prioritization, time-blocked scheduling, and progress donuts to surface high-impact work.
• Sprint & Milestone Planning - Run agile sprints with board views, manage milestones with drag-and-drop timeline sorting, and visualize cross-project dependencies in a unified Gantt chart.
• Goal & Metric Tracking - Define strategic goals, link tasks to them, and track progress via dashboards including KPI-style progress donuts and the Lean Canvas, Business Model Canvas, and SWOT analysis boards.
• Built-in Wikis & Docs - Create project documentation with Tiptap rich-text editing, slash commands, @mentions, math formulas, column layouts, and file embedding from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
• Time Tracking & Timesheets - Log hours directly from the dashboard or within tickets, filter by ticket or invoiced status, and export timesheets for billing and reporting.
• Retrospectives & Idea Boards - Capture team feedback after sprints on structured retrospective boards and store ideas in context-linked idea boards tied to active projects.
• Whiteboards & Screen Recording - Create visual mind maps and wireframes with an integrated whiteboard, and record screen or webcam sessions directly within the app without external tools.
• Plugin Marketplace - Extend functionality through an official plugin system with a marketplace, license-gated premium plugins, and a documented API for building custom integrations.
• Enterprise Authentication - LDAP and OIDC/SSO integration for secure team onboarding, two-factor authentication, and per-project permission roles with a centralized fail-closed authorization engine.
• Multi-Database & Storage Support - Run on MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL (experimental) with file storage via AWS S3 or local filesystem, and optional S3-compatible object stores.
• 20+ Language Support - Fully translated interface maintained via Crowdin with community contributions in Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Polish, German, Czech, and more.

Common Use Cases

• Neurodivergent solo freelancer managing client work - A developer with ADHD uses the My Work Dashboard to see all deadlines in one place, rates tasks by emotional energy with emoji scores, and relies on the time-blocking calendar to avoid context-switching overload.
• Small agency replacing multiple SaaS subscriptions - A creative team self-hosts Leantime via Docker to consolidate Trello boards, Notion wikis, Toggl timesheets, and Miro whiteboards into one tool, with data remaining entirely on their own servers.
• Open-source project team running lean agile - A distributed team uses sprints, the Kanban board, retrospective boards, and goal tracking to manage their development cycle without paying for Jira or Linear.
• Educational research group tracking milestones - A university lab uses the Gantt timeline, wikis, and idea boards to track multi-semester research projects, keeping meeting notes, hypotheses, and task assignments in one place.
• Enterprise team evaluating self-hosted alternatives - An IT department deploys Leantime behind their existing SSO via OIDC, assigns project-level roles through LDAP groups, and uses the JSON-RPC API to sync data with internal reporting systems.

Under The Hood

Architecture Leantime is built as a domain-driven monolith layered on top of the Laravel framework. Each business capability — Tickets, Projects, Wiki, Timesheets, Calendar, Blueprints, and others — lives in an isolated domain namespace under app/Domain, with controllers, services, repositories, models, and templates colocated per domain. The application core in app/Core provides cross-cutting infrastructure: an IoC container (Laravel’s), a custom event dispatcher with cached pattern matching, middleware pipeline, session management, and a base service class that wires a lazily-resolved permission engine to every domain service without constructor boilerplate. Version 3.9 introduced a centralized, fail-closed permission engine applied domain by domain across the entire codebase, closing a family of cross-user IDORs. A notable structural milestone in 3.9 is the consolidation of 16 separate canvas variant domains into a single Blueprints domain with legacy adapters, dramatically reducing duplicated code.

Tech Stack The backend runs on PHP 8.2+ with Laravel 11.44 as the application framework, using Laravel’s routing, service container, Eloquent ORM, and query builder alongside custom repository classes for complex queries. MySQL and MariaDB are the primary databases, with experimental PostgreSQL support added in recent versions via a cross-database SchemaBuilder and helper abstractions. The frontend uses HTMX for partial-page updates without a full SPA framework, Tiptap for rich text editing (replacing TinyMCE in v3.7), FullCalendar for calendar views, and Tailwind CSS for styling — all bundled via Webpack 5 and Laravel Mix. Tests run under Codeception with both unit and acceptance suites, and PHPStan provides static analysis at level 1. CI runs code style (PSR-12 via PHP_CodeSniffer), static analysis, unit tests, acceptance tests, and a Bearer API contract test suite.

Code Quality The codebase demonstrates consistent domain-level conventions — thin controllers delegating to services, services coordinating repositories, and constructor injection throughout. PHPStan is configured and enforced in CI at level 1 with plans evident for further raises; PSR-12 is enforced via phpcs with documented exclusions. Test coverage is meaningful but uneven: the Core layer has solid unit tests for routing, middleware, authentication, and date helpers, while many domain services lack dedicated unit tests and rely on acceptance tests. Comment density varies across modules — the core event dispatcher and base service have excellent inline documentation, while some domain repositories are largely uncommented. Overall maintainability is high given the domain isolation, but the codebase reflects the natural evolution of a project that began before Laravel adoption.

What Makes It Unique Leantime’s most distinctive quality is its neurodivergent-first design philosophy encoded directly into product decisions: the emoji-based emotional motivation rating system (from angry face to unicorn) that surfaces high-motivation tasks, the dopamine-loop goal progress donuts, and accessibility-first CSS that natively respects OS-level preferences for high contrast and reduced motion without third-party libraries. The plugin event system uses a Laravel-extended dispatcher with cached regex pattern matching that allows deep non-invasive customization: plugins hook into any controller or template event without modifying core code. Version 3.9 introduced a JSON-RPC API layer replacing legacy REST endpoints, with a @api annotation gate that prevents non-explicitly-marked service methods from being callable externally — a deliberate surface-reduction security design. The WorkStructure meta-model introduced in 3.9 provides infrastructure for structured work hierarchies that underpin canvas and blueprint types in a way that generic project tools do not attempt.

Self-Hosting

Leantime is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL-3.0). This is a copyleft license that permits commercial use, modification, and distribution, but requires that any modified version you run as a network service must also be released under AGPL-3.0. For most self-hosters — teams deploying Leantime internally for their own project management without offering it as a service to third parties — this imposes no practical obligations. If you are a software vendor planning to build a commercial SaaS product on top of Leantime, you would need to either release your modifications or negotiate a commercial license with the maintainers.

Running Leantime yourself requires a PHP 8.2+ server with around 20 PHP extensions (including GD, LDAP, PCNTL, and PDO), MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+, and either Apache or Nginx. The officially maintained Docker image simplifies this significantly: a docker run command with your database credentials is enough to start, and a Docker Compose file includes MySQL, a mail server, and an S3-compatible object store for a complete local stack. Operational responsibility falls entirely on you: database backups, PHP/OS security patches, SSL certificate renewal, and capacity planning are your concern. Plugin storage requires a mounted volume that persists across container restarts, which is easy to miss on first deploy. The plugin license-check system makes daily outbound calls to the Leantime marketplace, which requires network egress from your server.

Leantime does not currently offer a public managed cloud service — it is purely self-hosted. A Leantime Cloud offering appears in the roadmap and product messaging, but as of the current release all hosting is self-managed. The premium plugin marketplace provides paid extensions (strategy tools, advanced reporting, and others) that require a license key but run on your own infrastructure. This means there is no SLA, no managed backup, no high-availability topology, and no customer support included — the community Discord and GitHub issues are the primary support channels. Organizations that need formal SLAs, managed upgrades, or guaranteed uptime should factor in the cost of a managed hosting provider or dedicated devops resources before choosing the self-hosted path.