LibrePlan

Galician consultancy Igalia and regional industrial sponsors created the project as NavalPlan in 2009 to coordinate shipyard manufacturing and contractor schedules. Rebranded to LibrePlan as a general-purpose platform, it brought Work Breakdown Structures, worker-and-machine capacity leveling, and Earned Value Management to the browser. That industrial background means it treats scheduling as an operational constraint problem rather than a lightweight task list.

Why LibrePlan instead of Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project remains the benchmark for critical-path scheduling, but operating it across an organization introduces persistent friction. Desktop licenses trap schedules in local files shared over email, while Microsoft Project Server and cloud Planner tiers require expensive per-seat subscriptions, Windows server dependencies, and complex directory integration. LibrePlan eliminates desktop silos by running as a centralized web application backed by PostgreSQL and Apache Tomcat. Project managers and contractors collaborate on a shared database, exposing cross-project resource bottlenecks in real time.

The operational trade-off shifts from recurring license fees to internal infrastructure maintenance. Running LibrePlan in-house gives operations leads complete ownership of schedule history, database backups, and LDAP authentication. However, administrators must manage a Java servlet stack and allocate JVM heap space, whereas Microsoft Project offloads server operations to Microsoft 365. For technical teams equipped to run Java services, self-hosting LibrePlan delivers multi-project capacity planning at bare-metal cost.

What it does well

• Multi-project resource leveling: balances workers and machinery against shared calendars to expose staffing bottlenecks across simultaneous client projects.
• Skill-based generic allocation: reserves time against required roles before assigning individuals, preventing early over-allocation during pipeline planning.
• Earned Value Management: tracks cost and schedule variances alongside actual expenditures to give agency leads objective health metrics.
• Subcontractor coordination: routes tasks to external LibrePlan installations and synchronizes progress updates back into the master timeline.
• Monte Carlo forecasting: simulates task duration variance to estimate the probability of meeting delivery milestones.