Companies looking for comprehensive project management and issue tracking tools aren’t exactly spoiled for choice, with companies like Atlassian’s Jira serving software development teams for more than two decades.
Many other players have entered the fray in the intervening years, from Basecamp, Asana, and Linear, to Monday.com and Jira’s sibling, Trello. But they all share one drawback — they’re proprietary platforms that lack the flexibility and code transparency required for many modern enterprise setups.
And here is where Level wants to differentiate itself from the incumbents, with an open-source development and product management platform to manage “issues, sprints and product roadmaps with peace of mind,” the company proclaims.
Co-founder and CEO Vamsi Kurama says the number one benefit of open source is privacy and security — companies can have full control over their data, with full visibility into the inner workings of the Plane platform.
“That our software can be hosted by our customers on their own infrastructure, with all the security from the public Internet, is a key driver of Plane adoption,” Kurama told TechCrunch. “Then there’s the transparency of our code, our auditability, and our fairly open discussions about what we’re building, how and why — that assures customers of our attitude and longevity.”
In Plane sight: Dashboard themes in both light and dark theme. Image Credits: Level
Airplane sailing
Founded last November by brothers Vamsi and Vihar Kurama, the original Plane GitHub repository predated the official launch by several months, though it was primarily an internal tool to help developers deal with various pain points they experienced when managing clients in the past IT consulting company they were working for.
Through various iterations, Plane launched 12 months ago and today offers features such as issue planning and tracking, with the option to customize the project layout for list, Kanban and calendar views. It also supports sprint planning with “cycles” filled with insights about progress and the ability to break larger projects into modular chunks that can be assigned to specific teams or staff.
The company has continued to iterate on the product since its launch, recently introducing a new “quick add” option to allow developers to add an issue from almost anywhere on the platform.
Airplane “quick add” issue mode. Image Credits: Level
Under the hood, Plane also supports two-way sync with GitHub Issueswith added integration with Slack so users can easily take issues to Plane.
There’s no doubt that it’s still early days in terms of being able to match the incumbents in space, which is why Plane has now raised $4 million in a seed round funded entirely by OSS Capitala venture capital (VC) firm that invests in startups creating commercial open source alternatives to established proprietary products such as Notion, Airtable, CalendlyUnit and even in the Bloomberg terminal.
The new cash injection will help Plane supercharge its product development next year, including a new feature called Vault for engineering teams to store and share authentication “secrets” securely.
And while Plane is currently online-only for cloud users, the company is working to bring Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS clients to market by the middle of next year.
In terms of monetization, Plane is currently iterating on various pricing plans, which will include managed services in its hosted cloud plan, as well as enterprise-level features for those who choose to self-host.
“We’re already talking to businesses that are in the community version about a managed cloud version, which, depending on demand, should be released in the second half of next year,” Kurama said.
Plane co-founders Vamsi Kurama (CEO) and Vihar Kurama (CEO). Image Credits: Level
Under license
It is worth noting that Plane has made its product available under a GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.0, which is known as “copyleft”. While this is largely a recognized open source license, it has some restrictions that may not appeal to some commercial companies — the main issue being that any derivative works must be released under the same terms as the original AGPL license.
This all ties into another trend lately, whereby commercial open source companies have had to move from “permissive” licenses like Apache or MIT to copyleft licenses to protect themselves from others building businesses on the back of their software without contribute nothing back. Indeed, just this month Element ported its Matrix decentralized communication protocol from an Apache to an AGPL license, similar to Grafana did two years ago.
“While some businesses have a strict no-AGPL policy, we predict that more business prospects will adopt Plane for its community contributions, compared to a more ‘closed’ license,” said Kurama. “We’re a community-driven project and invest heavily in facilitating contributions, which, in my experience, ensures businesses have a more secure and supported project.”
So in many ways, Plane is simply protecting the future of its business – it wants to encourage community involvement while protecting its value. And in its defense, the company is doing it from scratch instead of doing a “bait and switch” by changing its license further down.
“For those who want a more closed license, we will offer dual or custom license options in the future,” added Kurama.
