*Correspondence to: a21190319@alunos.isec.pt, flpires@gmail.com, jorge@isec.pt Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 1:3 (2016), 177-186 Copyright © 2016 by Lectito BV, Netherlands ISSN: 2468-4376 eISSN: 2468-4376 Open Source and Proprietary Project Management Tools for SMEs Veronika Abramova 1* , Francisco Pires 2 , Jorge Bernardino 1,3 1 ISEC – Superior Institute of Engineering of Coimbra, PORTUGAL 2 Bettertech – Business Software, PORTUGAL 3 CISUC – Centre of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, PORTUGAL ABSTRACT The dimensional growth and increasing difficulty in project management promoted the development of different tools that serve to facilitate project management and track project schedule, resources and overall progress. These tools offer a variety of features, from task and time management, up to integrated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) modules. Currently, a large number of project management software is available, to assist project team during the entire project lifecycle. We present the main differences between open source and proprietary project management tools and how those could be important for SMEs, describing the key features and how those can assist the project manager and the development team. In this paper, we analyse four open- source project management tools: OpenProject, ProjectLibre, Redmine, LibrePlan and four proprietary tools: Bitrix24, JIRA, Microsoft Project and Asana. Keywords ------------------------------ open source software (OSS), project management, PMBOK, 2016 --------------------------------- DOI: 10.20897/lectito.201633 1. INTRODUCTION Project Management consists of a set of tasks and processes that are focused on creating a product or providing a service. The PMBOK Guide defines a project as a temporary group activity that produces a unique product, service or result. In this context project management is “the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently” (Project Management Institute, 2013). Project Management refers to the planning, monitoring and controlling of all aspects of a project, with the people involved in the project aiming to achieve the objectives on time and on budget to a specific quality standard. One of the earliest perspectives defines tools and techniques applied to diverse resources in order to accomplishment a unique, complex, one-time task within time, cost and quality constraints (Oliveira, Tereso & Machado, 2014). Today, there is a large amount of available project management tools that try to improve project management by organizing all the necessary information. Not only there are available proprietary solutions, but also a large number of open source tools (Ferreira & Tereso, 2014). Open source software (OSS) has generated much excitement in the software market. There are different solutions that try to satisfy user requirements and provide better functionalities (Bernardino, 2013), (Tereso & Bernardino, 2011), (Sampaio & Bernardino, 2015). Those tools have been widely used for long time and are continued being developed and improved to be able to compete with proprietary solutions. In this paper, we extend on previous work (Abramova, Pires & Bernardino, 2016), analyzing and describing more tools. We get a closer look at the project management tools while considering open source as well as proprietary software. For functionalities description and comparison, we choose open source tools: OpenProject, ProjectLibre, Redmine and LibrePlan while proprietary tools chosen are: Bitrix24, JIRA, Microsoft Project and Asana. This choice was