April 2019, “Staff Pick” Project of the Month – ProjectLibre

For our April 2019 “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected ProjectLibre, a project management software that is an alternative to Microsoft Project. The small team behind the project has worked very hard for years, and they’re very proud to have ProjectLibre be in over 200 countries and used by many Fortune 500 companies and Universities worldwide.

ProjectLibre was previously selected “Staff Pick” Project of the Month in February 2016 where project co-founder Marc O’Brien spoke about the project’s developments and direction. Recently we caught up with Marc to find out how the project has been doing since then.

SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were chosen Project of the Month in February 2016?
Marc O’Brien (MO): ProjectLibre has updated the user interface, rewritten the core code, laid the foundation for both desktop and SaaS versions.

SF: Have any of your project goals changed since then?
MO: Yes, the team has a broader focus now. ProjectLibre desktop is a sophisticated project management software. It will model different scheduling requirements with Tasks (constraints, cost accrual etc.); Resources (rates, overtime rates, accrual, calendars etc.); and Projects had significant updates in preparation for future releases. We have added Project Types, Net Present Value, Risk, Expense Type, Risk and a number of other significant tracking capabilities.

SF: What project goals have you achieved so far?
MO: The ProjectLibre team’s goal was to provide full featured project management software to global project managers on a free and open source solution. Microsoft Project exceeds $1,000 a user and even with international pricing it causes the project managers around the world the dilemma of an enormous expenditure for software or morally challenged pirating. In countries around the world it is the difference between construction and other companies that either play legally or are priced out of business. They may have competitors pirating and thus both beating them on price but also profitability. There are countries like the Philippines with average monthly salary of $286 or Indonesia $351 where we have for example with 30,000 and 44,000. This has been a huge impact on these countries, project managers and most importantly “people”. We are proud to have achieved this with the 3,800,000 downloads in over 200 countries. We are achieving our goals and have more to come!!!

SF: What can we look forward to with ProjectLibre?
MO: ProjectLibre is rewriting our solution to be completely modular. Our goal is to make ProjectLibre integrated into other ecosystems. This is very important in many markets such as construction, pharma, finance etc. We are also still in development of our SaaS version. The ProjectLibre team is small and self funded so it has taken time but we are pleased and will have a clear announcement of Alpha and Beta schedules in the coming months.

SF: Is there anything else we should know?
MO: ProjectLibre strives to provide a free and open source alternative to Microsoft Project (standard). Our data model can open MS Project files on Linux, Mac or Windows. You can make changes and round trip the results. It is important to note we have the data model so you are not losing things like time distributed data when opening… make changes and when storing back you lose all the granularity and it is not possible to work back in Microsoft Project. We continue to update and ultimately it does not matter if you are running Microsoft Project or ProjectLibre within your organization.

[ Download ProjectLibre ]