Moved from Jira to OpenProject – Built an Open-Source Migration Tool

11 points

a year ago

A few weeks ago, I decided to move away from JIRA to cut costs and self-host my project management tool. After evaluating open-source alternatives, I initially tried Plane, but its community edition was too limited, and the paid version cost as much (if not more) than JIRA.

I then switched to OpenProject—not the best UI/UX, but feature-rich and usable in its free edition. I deployed it in my Kubernetes cluster, and it met most of our needs.

The Migration Problem Migrating thousands of JIRA tasks (projects, comments, attachments, etc.) was a challenge. OpenProject provided an Excel Macro written in Visual Basic, which didn’t work for me. So, I wrote a Python script to automate the migration. In a few hours, I had all our data moved over, and we’ve been happily using OpenProject ever since.

Open-Sourcing the Tool Since others might face the same problem, I open-sourced the migration script - https://github.com/dotnetfactory/openproject-jira-importer and shared it with OpenProject. They responded with gratitude—and even gave me a free professional license as a thank-you.

Turning It Into a Service? A few days later, a bug report led to a conversation with another OpenProject user. He suggested turning this into a paid migration service, as many companies might need help moving from JIRA.

Would this be useful to others? If so, I put together a quick MVP/landing page to gauge interest (link in the repo)

Feedback welcome!

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