Moved from Jira to OpenProject – Built an Open-Source Migration Tool | Hacker News Reader

Moved from Jira to OpenProject – Built an Open-Source Migration Tool

11 pointseibrahim12 comments

A few weeks ago, I decided to move away from JIRA to cut costs and self-host my project management tool. After evaluating open-source alternatives, I initially tried Plane, but its community edition was too limited, and the paid version cost as much (if not more) than JIRA.

I then switched to OpenProject—not the best UI/UX, but feature-rich and usable in its free edition. I deployed it in my Kubernetes cluster, and it met most of our needs.

The Migration Problem Migrating thousands of JIRA tasks (projects, comments, attachments, etc.) was a challenge. OpenProject provided an Excel Macro written in Visual Basic, which didn’t work for me. So, I wrote a Python script to automate the migration. In a few hours, I had all our data moved over, and we’ve been happily using OpenProject ever since.

Open-Sourcing the Tool Since others might face the same problem, I open-sourced the migration script - https://github.com/dotnetfactory/openproject-jira-importer and shared it with OpenProject. They responded with gratitude—and even gave me a free professional license as a thank-you.

Turning It Into a Service? A few days later, a bug report led to a conversation with another OpenProject user. He suggested turning this into a paid migration service, as many companies might need help moving from JIRA.

Would this be useful to others? If so, I put together a quick MVP/landing page to gauge interest (link in the repo)

Feedback welcome!

(Disclaimer: OpenProject developer/maintainer)

Thanks for your work and making it available open-source! How about we set up a project over at https://community.openproject.org so we can align on how to best help your project and learn from your experiences?

If you have any further questions, need help with the API, or any feedback on the tool itself, please reach out any time!

that would be great. I couldn't login/signup to the community website. My email eibrahim at gm ail do com

thanks.

actually i do have a question about the API. Who do I contact?

Please address your question to our support team - they will provide you with the answer.

I did and they responded. thanks.

This is awesome. JIRA migrations are a massive headache, and the fact that you open-sourced a working solution is solid. OpenProject isn’t the prettiest, but it gets the job done, and cutting out Atlassian’s costs is a win.

Turning this into a paid service makes total sense—plenty of teams don’t have the time or patience to deal with migration. You could probably gauge demand by reaching out to OpenProject users directly or posting in places where people rant about JIRA (which is… a lot of places).

I already posted it in reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/1ihgps1/switching_fro...

do you know other places that I could post at?

thanks for the feeback btw.

r/selfhosted – Perfect for people ditching proprietary tools. OpenProject forums/GitHub discussions – You already got their attention, but engaging with their community directly could bring in more users. Indie Hackers – If you’re thinking of monetizing, good place for insights.

Good luck! Hope it takes off

awesome. THANK YOU.

> Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/jira.

Good to know they value this kind of information /s

They didn't like that I tried to promote it as a service. It's ok, i reposted it and only mentioned the open source script. new link at https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/1ihmk1b/jira_to_openp...

Awesome, It's a Big headache to start over from scratch when migrating from a PM tool to another. I have been contemplating for so long whether to start using a different tool other than Jira, but since you've already shared your experience, I might leverage your script and shift to OpenProject.

Thank you so much eibrahim and keep the good work up.

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