Leantime review covering open-source, ADHD-friendly project management features, free self-hosted and Cloud Pro pricing, pros, cons, and alternatives.
Leantime is an open-source project management platform built specifically for people who are not trained project managers, with a design philosophy grounded in motivational and behavioral science rather than rigid task hierarchies. It is explicitly marketed as friendly to neurodivergent users, including people with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, and it centers workflows around goals and strategy rather than pure task-checking.
The open-source codebase started in 2019, and the company was founded in 2022 by CEO Gloria Folaron, who built the tool to manage her own ADHD while working as a product manager, and CTO Marcel Folaron, a former Google and Twilio technical program manager. The company is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and joined Techstars in 2023; the open-source project has surpassed 50,000 downloads with an active community.
Leantime's core feature set is shared across its free self-hosted edition and paid Cloud edition: Kanban boards, task lists, and calendar views for task management; Gantt/timeline views for milestones; a built-in Lean Canvas and SWOT analysis tool for strategic planning; a project wiki; timesheets and time tracking; retrospectives; and goal and idea management, alongside notification integrations for Slack, Mattermost, and Discord.
The paid Cloud Pro tier adds AI-powered task management backed by a monthly AI credit allowance, while Enterprise plans layer on single sign-on, audit logging, data residency controls, and custom integrations for organizations with compliance requirements. Self-hosted deployments support SSO via LDAP and OIDC as well.
Leantime's Community Edition is free and fully open source under the AGPLv3 license, letting anyone self-host it with no user limits and no feature paywall on the core toolset. This makes it a genuinely free alternative for developers, freelancers, and small teams comfortable managing their own server.
For teams that want a managed option, Leantime Cloud Pro costs 10 dollars per user per month billed monthly, or 8 dollars per user per month billed annually, and includes unlimited projects, AI-powered task management, and 500 AI credits per user each month, with a 14-day free trial. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes installation support, custom plugins, and white-labeling.
Yes, the self-hosted Community Edition of Leantime is completely free and open source under the AGPLv3 license. A paid Cloud edition is also available starting at $8-$10 per user per month.
Leantime is designed around goal- and motivation-based workflows rather than pure task lists, and it is explicitly built with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia in mind, aiming to reduce cognitive overload for non-project-managers.
Leantime was founded in 2022 by CEO Gloria Folaron and CTO Marcel Folaron; the open-source project itself began in 2019. The company is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and went through Techstars in 2023.
Yes, Leantime's Community Edition can be self-hosted for free, typically via Docker, and includes the full core feature set under an open-source license.
AI-powered task management is available on the paid Cloud Pro plan, which includes a monthly pool of AI credits; it is not part of the free open-source edition.
Yes, Leantime Cloud offers a 14-day free trial on its paid plans.