Hyderabad-built open-source Jira / Linear alternative — founded November 2022 by brothers Vamsi Kurama (CEO) and Vihar Kurama (COO), 40,000+ GitHub stars, $4M seed led by OSS Capital in April 2024, now repositioned as AI-native PM (Projects + Wiki + AI in one workspace)
Plane is the most credible open-source project-management product to come out of India and one of the few Indian-built developer tools competing seriously with US-funded category leaders. The company was founded in November 2022 in Hyderabad by brothers Vamsi Kurama (CEO) and Vihar Kurama (COO), with a dual-headquarters structure (Delaware Inc. + India operations) typical of Indian open-source startups going after the global developer market. In April 2024 Plane closed a $4 million seed round led by OSS Capital — the dedicated commercial open-source fund founded by Joseph Jacks — which remains the company's only disclosed institutional funding to date. The product has grown to 40,000+ GitHub stars (≈46K on the makeplane/plane repo at peak in 2025) and is consistently ranked the top open-source PM tool on GitHub by stars-growth velocity. Across 2024–2025 Plane shipped 89+ releases and repositioned the product from "open-source Jira alternative" to "AI-native project management platform" — three products in one workspace (Projects, Wiki, AI), with pooled AI credits per workspace seat. For Indian product and engineering teams the right framing is: Plane is the right call for teams that genuinely value open-source self-hostability, data-residency control (often a procurement requirement at Indian banks / fintechs / government contractors), and want India-time-zone support without the Jira tax. For teams that don't actually need self-hosting, the choice usually comes down to Plane Cloud vs Linear on UX and price, and Plane Cloud comes out ahead on price while Linear is still ahead on raw polish.
Plane is a commercial open-source project management platform built for product and engineering teams that want the workflow ergonomics of Jira, Linear, and ClickUp without the proprietary lock-in. The product has three pillars in a single workspace: Projects (work items, sprints called "cycles", modules, views, custom workflows), Pages / Wiki (block-based documents with embedded work items, similar to Notion + Confluence), and AI (workspace-pooled credits powering AI writing, summaries, duplicate detection, and natural-language work-item creation). The whole platform ships as both a hosted SaaS at plane.so and as a self-hostable open-source Community Edition, with a paid Commercial Edition and an air-gapped Enterprise / Plane One edition for regulated environments.
The company was founded in November 2022 in Hyderabad by brothers Vamsi Kurama and Vihar Kurama — Vamsi as CEO and Vihar as COO. The original pitch was "open-source Jira alternative for engineering teams that hate Jira's complexity"; the early product won developer traction through the makeplane/plane GitHub repo, which has grown to 40,000+ stars and remains one of the most-starred open-source PM tools globally. Plane's legal entity is Delaware-incorporated (standard for Indian open-source startups raising USD capital) but the engineering, product, and growth teams are based in Hyderabad. This is one of the rare reviewable cases of an Indian-built developer tool with global ambition and visible Indian engineering depth.
In April 2024 the company closed a $4 million seed round led by OSS Capital, the commercial open-source-focused venture fund founded by Joseph Jacks (formerly of KubeCon). The round was used to accelerate product, engineering and go-to-market, and was announced alongside the unveiling of Plane One — a self-managed instance plan that lets teams run a fully-supported Plane installation on their own infrastructure with vendor SLAs (positioning it against GitLab Self-Managed and Atlassian Data Center, both of which are still very much Indian-enterprise procurement defaults).
Through 2024 and 2025 Plane made the strategic pivot most open-source SaaS companies are making right now: repositioning from "alternative to X" to "AI-native". The home page now leads with "AI-native project management" rather than "Jira alternative", and the product ships per-seat AI credits (1,000 per seat per month, pooled across the workspace, with one-month rollover) powering features like natural-language work-item creation, AI summaries, duplicate detection, and assistive writing in Pages.
Unlike most SaaS PM tools, Plane is meaningful at three deployment surfaces simultaneously — pick the one that matches your team's compliance posture and procurement preferences:
Open-source, AGPL-licensed, free forever. Run on your own infrastructure (Docker / Kubernetes). Includes Projects, Cycles, Modules, Views, basic Pages. No commercial support, no SSO, no advanced admin. Best for: solo developers, small open-source projects, and teams that just want to try Plane on their own hardware.
Plane's managed Cloud product at plane.so. Free tier supports up to 12 seats with core features — one of the more generous free tiers in the category. Paid tiers (Pro, Business) layer on advanced workflows, custom fields, time tracking, RBAC, AI credits, and SSO. Best for: teams that don't care about self-hosting and want zero-maintenance Plane.
The recommended self-hosted production deployment. Adds SSO, advanced admin, RBAC, audit logs and commercial support on top of the Community Edition codebase. Per-seat licensing. Best for: Indian banks / fintechs / government contractors with strict data-residency requirements where Plane Cloud isn't acceptable.
Launched alongside the April 2024 seed round. A vendor-supported self-managed instance plan — Plane runs the instance for you on infrastructure you control, with SLAs. Closest comparison is Atlassian Data Center or GitLab Dedicated. Best for: regulated enterprises that want Plane Cloud's ergonomics but need an on-prem or VPC-deployed instance with vendor accountability.
Dedicated edition for fully air-gapped environments — defence, government, regulated infrastructure. No external network dependencies. Mostly a procurement-conversation product but exists in a way few SaaS PM tools can match.
Each seat gets 1,000 AI credits per month, pooled across the workspace, with one-month rollover for unused credits. Credits power AI writing in Pages, work-item summaries, duplicate-issue detection, and natural-language work-item creation. The pooled-credit model is friendlier to mixed-usage teams than per-seat hard caps.
Plane Cloud pricing is in USD, with 18% IGST applicable for Indian buyers. Indicative live rates from plane.so/pricing:
The previous version of this page listed only "Free / Free cloud / Pro ₹588/user/month" — that's roughly directionally right on the Pro tier but missed the Free tier seat cap, the Business and Enterprise tiers entirely, and the existence of Plane One / Airgapped editions. For a typical Indian 8-PM-plus-engineering team buying Pro, the all-in annual cost is roughly 8 × $6 × 12 × 1.18 ≈ $680 / ₹56,000 per year, which is meaningfully cheaper than Linear Standard ($8/seat) or Jira Standard ($7.16/seat after RBI-side IGST loading), and dramatically cheaper than ClickUp Business ($12/seat).
Plane is the wrong call when: you need the deep enterprise governance / Jira-style workflow customisation that comes with twenty years of product maturity (use Jira or Aha!); you're an engineering-only team that values Linear's UX above all else and can afford the price premium (use Linear); you need very tight Notion-style document-first workflows (use Notion); or you're a non-engineering ops team that wants ClickUp-style "everything" surfaces (use ClickUp).