The B4 Index · Sample Scorecard
One complete scorecard.
On the house.
The rest of the site shows you how to think about building versus buying, then asks you to pay for the answer. This page is different. Here's one category, scored in full — the verdict, all five dimensions with the reasoning, and exactly where it lands. No paywall, no email gate.
It's the whole thing you'd otherwise unlock in Pro, on a single category, so you can see what you'd be buying across all 1,850.
How a scorecard is built
Two axes decide the call. Five dimensions, scored 1 to 5, do the deciding. The full framework goes deeper — this is the short version.
X-Axis
Strategic Differentiation
How much does owning this matter to your business? The blend of how specific it is to you and how much competitive edge it carries.
Y-Axis
AI Feasibility
Buildability: could a competent team build and run a good-enough alternative with today's AI and mature open source? Scored only on documented production self-builds — never on vendor demos.
Keep buying
Low differentiation, hard to build. This may be commodity infrastructure or a category with significant compliance and operating demands. SaaS exists for many good reasons. Choose the best fit at a sensible total cost, and check that those reasons still apply to you.
Buy and extend
The category differentiates you, but the evidence doesn't support building the whole capability for your needs. Buy the platform and build the parts that make your business different. Buy and extend can be the right long-term answer.
Test the alternatives
Beware is a warning that you may be overpaying for something that already exists. A focused build or a capability inside a tool you already pay for could replace what you use. Test the replacement, its full cost, and the migration before canceling anything. What's the difference between Beware and Build? It's differentiation.
Consider owning it
The category differentiates you competitively, and the evidence makes building a scoped capability realistic. Test the business case and your capacity to run it. Teams should build the software that gives them competitive advantages.
The Project Management scorecard
Collaboration · People & Workplace. Everything below is the complete Pro record for this one category.
At low AI maturity, keep buying. Teams with more capacity can test the replacement scope and economics.
2026 evidence: OpenProject is a mature self-hosted PM platform with named public-sector deployments, though its Jira migration remains a beta for test setups and does not support Jira Cloud. Plane documents production-grade Kubernetes and air-gapped deployment and offers Jira Cloud and Server/Data Center importers in its commercial self-hosted edition. Redmine remains a proven, configurable tracker without a first-party Jira importer; Huly documents self-hosting but needs a careful pilot. AI coding makes small purpose-built workflow tools feasible, but identity, audit, notifications and backups become the builder's responsibility. Utilization evidence is indirect: Forrester/Tempo (2024) found strategic portfolio capabilities underused, and Zylo (2024) found 49% average license utilization across SaaS estates and 11 PM tools per company. Current list prices: Jira Standard $7.91, Premium $14.54; Asana Starter $10.99, Advanced $24.99 per user/month annual.
Lean PM tools and custom automations can cover narrower workflows. Compare that scope with your coordination needs before replacing a premium suite.
X · Strategic Differentiation
2 / 5
Low. Not where you win.
Y · AI Feasibility
4 / 5
High. A team could build a good-enough alternative.
An axis counts as high only above the line, so in practice at 4 or above. That puts the leading scenario share at BEWARE, a lean call. The shaded band above is the rest of where it could sit.
The five-dimension scorecard
Tasks, milestones, dependencies and boards are mostly the same work everywhere, and vendor defaults cover most teams. Custom workflows and fields are configuration on a standardized core.
Multiple independent teams run self-hosted PM in production: OpenProject is the mature choice with named public-sector deployments (City of Chemnitz, City of Cologne), Plane ships production-grade Kubernetes and air-gapped deployment with Jira Cloud and Data Center importers and named customers who replaced Jira and Asana, and Redmine remains a long-proven, extensible tracker. Self-hosting covers 80%+ of the core and is a documented mainstream choice even though most of the market buys.
Mixed fit. Boards and task tracking are used daily, but a Forrester study commissioned by Tempo (2024, 528 portfolio-management decision-makers) found organizations mostly use project-level features while strategic capabilities such as roadmapping and scenario planning go underused, and Zylo's 2024 index counted an average of 11 PM tools per company. No product-level utilization rate exists, so this is a qualitative mixed reading rather than the weak-fit level.
Minor advantage from customization at most. How a team tracks work affects execution, and velocity data can feed planning, but competitors running the same tools are not disadvantaged; PM is table-stakes coordination, sitting with Agile Planning (2) rather than above it.
SaaS list prices are moderate (Jira Standard $7.91 and Premium $14.54, Asana Starter $10.99 and Advanced $24.99 per user/month annual) while mature OSS bases make the build path deploy-and-extend. The advantage is real at seat volume but depends on material assumptions: OpenProject's Jira importer is still beta, and identity, audit, backups and upgrades become the buyer's work.
The read
Self-hosting a platform like Plane or OpenProject is worth testing when your measured usage is narrower than the platform you pay for and the alternative covers the features that matter. Include migration, integrations, permissions, backups, and an operating owner. Low feature utilization alone does not show that replacement will save money.
Buying earns its keep when coordination across many teams — not just task tracking — is the real problem. Jira's integration depth with CI/CD systems, Linear's developer-friendly sprint workflows, and Asana's cross-functional project visibility are all genuinely hard to replicate in a lightweight alternative. Shared visibility across non-technical stakeholders, mobile clients that actually work, and native integrations with Slack, GitHub, Confluence, and Salesforce are real value that takes months to build. Commercial PM tools have also gotten meaningfully cheaper: most now bundle AI features at $7-20/user/month, which reduces the cost gap that once justified building. Buying is the right call when coordination across many stakeholders is the bottleneck and not just task management for one team.
Representative vendors & pricing
- acteamo
- Acunote
- Advension
- Asana $11-25/user/month
- Blossom
- Casual
- factro
- Flytime
The full vendor field for every category, with pricing and positioning, is part of a B4 subscription.
That scorecard, on every category
You just read one complete record. A B4 subscription gives you the same depth across all 1,850 categories — the verdict, the five-dimension scorecard, the full vendor field, the Continuum, and a live MCP your own AI can query.
The Verdict
Build, Buy, Bridge, or Beware on every one of the 1,850 categories. The call the public Index holds back.
The 5-Dimension Scorecard
Specificity, AI feasibility, vendor value, strategic control, and cost trajectory, each scored 1 to 5 with the reasoning behind it.
11,031 Vendor Files, With Pricing
The full vendor field for each category, with pricing and positioning, well past the two names everyone else sees.
The Continuum
A live, longitudinal read on how far AI has come in each part of the software market. Where the ground is moving, how fast, and why.
A Live MCP Server
Query the Index from Claude or your own tools. Re-scores flow straight in, so your agents always get the current call.
API, SDK, and Export
Pipe B4 into your stack, or pull the whole index to CSV and JSON whenever you need it.
Get the call on every category
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Bi-weekly analysis of software categories through the B4 Framework. What to build, what to buy, and how to use AI to make better decisions for your company.