An open-source Jira alternative built for teams that ship

Why teams look for a Jira alternative

Most teams do not leave Jira because it lacks features. They leave because the features they need keep turning out to live somewhere else — behind a plan upgrade, inside a marketplace add-on, or in a second product entirely. What starts as an issue tracker becomes a procurement exercise.

SPIREX takes the opposite position. The workflow engineering teams actually run — plan a sprint, work a board, log time against issues, report on what happened — is one product with one price. Time tracking and workflow editing are part of the tool, not paid extras bolted on afterwards.

What SPIREX includes out of the box

The feature set covers the full delivery loop, from the first idea in the backlog to the burndown at the end of the sprint:

• Drag-and-drop sprint boards with custom workflow columns and manual rank ordering.
• Backlog grooming and sprint planning, including starting, completing and carrying over sprints.
• A full work hierarchy — epics, stories and subtasks — with story points, labels and linked issues.
• A visual custom-workflow editor: design your own statuses, and a rename reflects on the board, in the backlog and in history at once.
• Built-in time tracking with worklogs grouped by author and per-author subtotals.
• Reporting across overview, time-tracking and sprint-health tabs, summing time that was actually logged rather than estimated.
• A rich TipTap editor with images, video, @mentions and #issue links.
• Full-fidelity Jira import — issues, comments, epic links, attachments and inline images — with progress streamed live.
• AI ticket drafting powered by Claude, from a sentence, an image or a document.
• A REST API with scoped API keys for reading and writing your data programmatically.

Open source at the core, under AGPL-3.0

The SPIREX core is licensed AGPL-3.0 and the code is public at github.com/Rit-Services/Spirex. That is not a source-available marketing label — it is a copyleft license you can read, fork and self-host, which means the project cannot quietly close the parts you depend on.

The model is open-core and we would rather say so plainly than let you discover it later. Enterprise capabilities — Microsoft SSO, multi-organization support, the superadmin console and audit controls — are commercial. Everything in the core delivery loop is not.

A free plan with no countdown

The hosted free plan covers up to 10 seats, 10 projects and 2 GB of file storage, with 90 days of activity history and 25 AI actions per month. There is no credit card and no trial timer — it does not expire into a paywall after two weeks.

Self-hosting is the other free path, and it is unlimited on seats: run the AGPL core on your own infrastructure with Docker Compose and S3 or MinIO storage, and point it at your own Anthropic API key or any OpenAI-compatible model through a LiteLLM proxy.

Where SPIREX is not the right answer

An honest comparison has to include the cases where you should stay put. SPIREX is scrum-oriented today: sprint-based planning is the supported methodology, and dedicated kanban project creation is not enabled. If your team runs continuous flow with WIP limits and cycle-time metrics as the primary model, this is not yet the tool for you.

Nor does SPIREX have an add-on marketplace, a service-desk product, or portfolio-level roadmap planning across dozens of teams. Those are real reasons organisations stay on Jira, and pretending otherwise would waste your evaluation time.