Alterion Open Project
A better free way to schedule projects
A better free project scheduler. A real critical path engine behind a Microsoft Project style ribbon, reading Project's own files.
It schedules, rather than draws bars
Most free planners let you drag a bar and call it a date. This one runs the same arithmetic Project does: a topological sort, a forward pass, a backward pass, then slack and the critical path. Summary rows are derived by rolling their children up, never typed in.
- All four link types, with lag and lead
- Eight constraint types, deadlines, manual and auto scheduling
- Milestones, baselines with variance, resource booking with work and cost
- Overallocation detection, and circular dependencies reported rather than hung on
- Resource levelling, and undoing it
- Earned value: timephasing, then PV, EV, AC and the measures from them
A ribbon, because that is what people already know
Seven tabs laid out the way Project lays them out, a custom title bar, a Quick Access Toolbar you can rearrange, and a File menu with the dashboard, templates, print, export and reports behind it. Nobody has to relearn where anything is.
It opens the files you already have
Microsoft Project plans import two ways. Project XML is read in full: outline, links with lag, constraints, deadlines, calendars with their holidays, resources and assignments. Binary .mpp is read by a separate Apache-2.0 crate written from the on-disk format, covering Project 2010 and later.
Eight starter plans ship with it, and they double as the test fixtures, so the templates are exercised by the suite rather than left to rot.
Plans save as .aprj: a four byte magic, a container version, then MessagePack run through deflate. Field names are kept, so a file written today still opens after the model grows. Excel round-trips, and CSV exports.
What it does not do yet
Apache-2.0. Written in Rust, drawn with Dioxus, and rendered natively rather than in a webview.
Kept current, in the README as well as here. Macros record and replay but have no editor and no key binding. Earned value computes every measure and exposes them as columns, but there is no Earned Value report page and no Cash Flow yet. Live collaboration streams over a websocket and recovers a dropped connection, but the server keeps its room in memory, so two instances behind a load balancer each reach only their own clients. Sharing a plan with somebody has a table and a role model and no endpoint to grant with, so for now only whoever created a plan can open it.
Alterion Open Project
A better free way to schedule projects
A better free project scheduler. A real critical path engine behind a Microsoft Project style ribbon, reading Project's own files.
It schedules, rather than draws bars
Most free planners let you drag a bar and call it a date. This one runs the same arithmetic Project does: a topological sort, a forward pass, a backward pass, then slack and the critical path. Summary rows are derived by rolling their children up, never typed in.
- All four link types, with lag and lead
- Eight constraint types, deadlines, manual and auto scheduling
- Milestones, baselines with variance, resource booking with work and cost
- Overallocation detection, and circular dependencies reported rather than hung on
- Resource levelling, and undoing it
- Earned value: timephasing, then PV, EV, AC and the measures from them
A ribbon, because that is what people already know
Seven tabs laid out the way Project lays them out, a custom title bar, a Quick Access Toolbar you can rearrange, and a File menu with the dashboard, templates, print, export and reports behind it. Nobody has to relearn where anything is.
It opens the files you already have
Microsoft Project plans import two ways. Project XML is read in full: outline, links with lag, constraints, deadlines, calendars with their holidays, resources and assignments. Binary .mpp is read by a separate Apache-2.0 crate written from the on-disk format, covering Project 2010 and later.
Eight starter plans ship with it, and they double as the test fixtures, so the templates are exercised by the suite rather than left to rot.
Plans save as .aprj: a four byte magic, a container version, then MessagePack run through deflate. Field names are kept, so a file written today still opens after the model grows. Excel round-trips, and CSV exports.
What it does not do yet
Apache-2.0. Written in Rust, drawn with Dioxus, and rendered natively rather than in a webview.
Kept current, in the README as well as here. Macros record and replay but have no editor and no key binding. Earned value computes every measure and exposes them as columns, but there is no Earned Value report page and no Cash Flow yet. Live collaboration streams over a websocket and recovers a dropped connection, but the server keeps its room in memory, so two instances behind a load balancer each reach only their own clients. Sharing a plan with somebody has a table and a role model and no endpoint to grant with, so for now only whoever created a plan can open it.