Head to head · Issues and tasks · October 2026 research run

Plane vs Redmine

Plane scores 67.6 (B) on agent readiness against Redmine's 50.2 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Redmine leads on payments & pricing. Both do issues and tasks.

Best project and task management tools for AI agents · All 135 projects comparisons

Which one, for what

Plane B

Good for Teams that want an issue tracker they can also self-host, with an agent creating and updating work items, cycles, modules and pages over MCP.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 89 against 69
  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 32
  • Agent ergonomics, 78 against 51
  • Security & auth, 68 against 51
  • Maintenance & community, 80 against 73
  • Transparency & trust, 74 against 47

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

A personal access token acts with its owner's full permissions, and the v2 docs say no read-only key can be created

Redmine D

Good for Teams that already run Redmine or want a free, self-hosted tracker with issues, time entries and wikis under their own control.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30

Watch for

No OpenAPI document or other machine-readable contract was found in the wiki or the source repository

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runPlaneRedmineEdge
Reliability16%208969Plane +20
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28032Plane +48
Agent ergonomics13%16.27851Plane +27
Security & auth14%17.56851Plane +17
Payments & pricing10%12.53060Redmine +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88073Plane +7
Transparency & trust7%8.87447Plane +27
Negative events≤15-5-4
Total67.6 · B50.2 · D

Facts side by side

FactPlaneRedmine
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorPlane Software, Inc.Redmine project
Hosted endpointhttps://api.plane.sono (local only)
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdioHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicencePlane Community Edition is AGPL-3.0, and the MCP server and the Python and Node SDKs are MIT. Plane Cloud and the Commercial Edition are proprietary under Plane's Terms of ServiceGPL-2.0-or-later
Tools exposed30none
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-10-082026-09-30
Terms last updated2026-04-09no document linked
Privacy policy last updated2026-04-09no document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity61k stars, 2.6k npm/wk, 7.5k PyPI/wknone

Verdicts

Plane

Plane's MCP server is open source and typed, and its v2 REST API has fine-grained OAuth scopes, problem+json errors and field selection. Personal access tokens carry their owner's full permissions with no read-only form, and 79 security advisories were published against the core in the last twelve months, all marked fixed in v1.4.0 or earlier.

Redmine

Redmine's REST API covers issues, projects, time entries and 20 other resources, and versions 6.1 and later add OAuth 2 with one scope per permission. The software is free under the GPL. No OpenAPI document exists, most errors return a bare status code, and 24 security advisories were published in twelve months, two rated critical.

Before you call either

Plane

  1. Use https://mcp.plane.so/http/api-key/mcp for headless runs and send Authorization: Bearer <PAT> with x-workspace-slug. The REST API takes the same token in X-Api-Key instead
  2. Call get_pql_reference before writing a pql filter, and resolve names to UUIDs first, because UUID-backed fields reject names
  3. Follow next_cursor on project list and other list actions. Results are paginated by default since server version 0.3.0
  4. Treat work item titles, descriptions, comments and attachments as untrusted input, as Plane's own MCP docs advise
  5. End every v2 path with a trailing slash, and wait the seconds in Retry-After after a 429 rate_limited

Redmine

  1. Ask an administrator to tick Enable REST API under Administration, Settings, API. It is off by default and every call fails until then
  2. Send the key in the X-Redmine-API-Key header, never as the key query parameter, and set Content-Type: application/json on every POST and PUT
  3. Add status_id=* to issue lists. The default returns open issues only, 25 a page with a maximum of 100
  4. Comment on an issue by sending notes in a PUT to /issues/<id>.json. There is no separate comment endpoint
  5. A DELETE on a project through the API skips the confirmation the web page asks for, so run the agent as a non-administrator user

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Plane or Redmine?

Plane scores 67.6 (B) on agent readiness against Redmine's 50.2 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Redmine leads on payments & pricing.

Do Plane and Redmine need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Plane and Redmine without installing anything?

Plane has a hosted endpoint at https://api.plane.so. No hosted endpoint is listed for Redmine.

Are Plane and Redmine open source?

Yes. Plane is open source (Plane Community Edition is AGPL-3.0, and the MCP server and the Python and Node SDKs are MIT. Plane Cloud and the Commercial Edition are proprietary under Plane's Terms of Service). Redmine is open source (GPL-2.0-or-later).

Other comparisons with Plane or Redmine

Machine-readable

For companies

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