GanttProject Review

On the public support forum, the people who build GanttProject answer threads under their own names, dated back through last year. A few still sit at zero replies, which is honest — it's a working queue, not a showroom.

What earns the decision is Baselines. You freeze the plan you committed to, then show today's schedule against it. That's the variance slide a board asks for, and it isn't behind an upgrade tier.

The catch is the paid half isn't finished — the vendor's own pricing page sets a credit at EUR 1 while GanttProject Cloud is in beta testing. Your rollout cost is a desktop install (the Windows installer alone is 130 MB) on every Windows, macOS and Linux machine that touches the plan, not licences. Put one team on Cloud, keep the rest on the desktop, and revisit when it leaves beta.

As COO I care about one thing: can I see status across every workstream without chasing people for updates. GanttProject's core scheduling — task hierarchy, dependencies with lag, resource load charts, cost calculation — is competent and free, with zero subscription cost for the desktop app. That's real value for a PM running a single construction or engineering project offline.

But the moment work spans teams, the model breaks. Collaboration is bolted on via WebDAV file locking or a separate GanttProject Cloud credit system at EUR 1 per active member per month (the owner and one credit per team are free) — not a native multi-project, multi-team dashboard. Baselines and PERT charts show planning depth, but there's no portfolio rollup, no resource leveling across projects, no approval workflows.

Three years in, this locks you into per-project file management rather than an operating system for the business. MS Project import/export keeps you interoperable, which is the redeeming feature. Fine for a PMO of one; a constraint the moment you're running six PMs and a board deck.

Math is simple here. Desktop: $0. No seat count, no term, nothing to model. Cloud add-on: 10 credits for EUR 10, one credit covers one active user for one month. Owner plus 5 active teammates, every month, 3 years: the owner is free and one credit per team per month is free, so 4 × 36 = 144 credits, roughly EUR 144 total. A two-person team pays nothing. No auto-renewal clock running underneath it.

Compare that to seat-based PM tools billing monthly whether people log in or not. Here idle users cost nothing — credits burn only on active accounts. That's a real TCO advantage for teams with seasonal or project-based staffing.

GPL3 licensing means source is yours if the vendor disappears — rare insurance in this category. Payment model is pay-what-you-wish for desktop support, prepaid credits for cloud. No invoicing infrastructure, no procurement cycle, no sales call. Downside: credit-pack pricing means finance has to track consumption instead of a flat line item, which some controllers dislike.

Status reporting is where this earns its keep. Export to PDF or PNG for a steering committee deck takes seconds, and the CSV field customization means I'm not dumping every column into a client-facing export. That's a real weekly time-save compared to screenshotting a web app's chart view.

The daily fight shows up around week two, once a schedule has real complexity. Task hierarchy and dependency lag are handled well, but there's no portfolio view — if I'm running three concurrent workstreams for one client, I'm juggling three files, not one rolled-up plan. That's fine for a single construction or media production schedule, less fine once you're a PM covering a book of work.

Docs read like they were written by someone who's actually built a resource load chart, not a marketer — the calendaring and lag-constraint explanations match how a scheduler actually thinks. Power-user depth is solid for critical-path work; discoverability of PERT chart generation is weaker since it's tucked away as a read-only derived view rather than a first-class screen.

First ten minutes: install, open a blank project, start dragging task bars. No login screen, no 'invite your team' nag wall. That's rare enough now that it's genuinely nice. The interface being one window instead of six panels means there's less to learn upfront than most tools in this category.

But here's the thing about desktop-first software in 2026: my brain has been trained by cloud apps to stop thinking about saving. GanttProject being local-first is a real strength for offline reliability, no spinner, no 'reconnecting' banner, your file is just there. The tradeoff is you're back to being the backup system. If you forget to hit save before your laptop dies, the fallback is Help > Recover, which rebuilds the project from the undo snapshots GanttProject keeps on disk, not a file that saved itself.

Mobile isn't really part of the story here since this is a desktop citizen through and through, so judging it by phone standards feels unfair, but it does mean status updates from a job site are a non-starter. Fine for a scheduler at a desk. Less fine if the project lives outside an office.

No 'best in class' language on the landing page. Just 'free project management app' and 'practical Gantt chart software for small and medium businesses.' That's an unusual amount of restraint for this category, and it matches what's actually shipped: Gantt scheduling, baselines, PERT charts, MS Project import/export. Grounded claims age well. I'd flag it if it started drifting toward platform language.

The EUR 1/credit cloud pricing sits next to a visible release trail: GitHub release notes run from the 2.8 series through 3.3 to the 3.4 Beta VI build of September 2026, and the project blog posted 3.4 beta notes this year. Stable feature releases are slow — 3.3 shipped in January 2024 and 3.4 is still in beta — which fits how GPL3 projects often run: quiet and long.

Competitive differentiation is the open question. Gantt-chart tools aren't scarce. What GanttProject has that a hosted SaaS competitor doesn't is the offline, no-lock-in desktop core. What it doesn't have is a visible reason to pick it today over anything newer, beyond price.